Susan Gardner quoted in Science Mag article
When you’re the only woman: The challenges for female Ph.D. students in male-dominated cohorts
“…As for the underlying reasons, there is no definitive answer—although the researchers did not find any evidence that academic performance or grant funding played a substantive role. Senior author Bruce Weinberg, a professor of economics at The Ohio State University (OSU) in Columbus, thinks that social climate is the most likely explanation. “We’re not suggesting necessarily that this takes the form of harassment or abuse, but even more subtly that gender composition may influence the friendliness of the environment,” he says.
That makes sense to Susan Gardner, director of the Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies program at the University of Maine in Orono, who has interviewed Ph.D. students about their experiences in graduate school. Students usually drop out because of some other factor besides intellectual ability, such as poor advising, a toxic climate, or because they want to pursue other options, Gardner says. “Very few people drop out of doctoral education because they got bad grades.”
Regardless of the reason, Gardner says, the study makes it clear that “there’s something systemic going on. And systemic problems have to be dealt with at the institutional level.” In a lot of disciplines, especially in STEM, there’s an attitude that “we’re here to separate the wheat from the chaff, and we’re proud of our attrition rates,” she says. Instead, faculty members should do more to think about how to make “our students feel like they belong.” The study’s lead author, Valerie Bostwick, a postdoc at OSU, hopes that the findings will spur universities to develop policies that are more sensitive about creating an inclusive environment…”