Encouraging and Mentoring Women Scientists: Four Rutgers Women Get Down to Work with RU-FAIR

NEW BRUNSWICK, N.J. – Four Rutgers University women scientists have agreed to promote gender equity among science, engineering and mathematics faculty on Rutgers’ three campuses. The four, designated RU-FAIR (Rutgers University for Faculty Advancement and Institutional Re-Imagination) professors, have been selected by the Rutgers Office for Promotion of Women in Science, Engineering and Mathematics based on proposals they submitted for their campuses or academic units.

The four professors are Georgia Arbuckle-Keil, professor of chemistry at Rutgers-Camden; Helen M. Buettner, professor of biomedical engineering and chemical and biochemical engineering on the New Brunswick campus; Judith Weis, professor of biology at Rutgers-Newark; and Maggie Shiffrar, professor of psychology at Rutgers-Newark. Weis and Shiffrar submitted a joint proposal.

The three proposals concern issues specific to each campus. All three seek to increase opportunities for women scientists and engineers to communicate among themselves, to improve mentoring of junior by senior faculty and help women direct their career paths.

“Each Rutgers campus has its distinct flavor and culture,” said Joan Bennett, vice president for academic affairs and professor of plant biology.  “Our RU FAIR professors are drawn from each of the three campuses and understand the different needs and histories of their respective units.”

For Weis, a veteran of the faculty at Rutgers-Newark, the history of women faculty in general and scientists in particular is important. Part of her proposal is to document the history of the struggle for gender equity for women faculty on her campus. “I was a junior faculty member back in the early 1970s when a famous case was brought on behalf of the faculty women in Newark, led by two of the eight tenured women on campus – Helen Strausser and Dorothy Dinnerstein,” Weis remembered. “They gathered the data and showed that, no matter how you sliced it, women were discriminated against here.”

Mentoring is another key part of the Newark proposal. Mentors can help junior faculty avoid common missteps, such as taking on too much administrative work – what Shiffrar calls “administrivia.” Weis and Shiffrar intend to give every woman assistant professor in the sciences a mentor.

Buettner’s plans call for a workshop on promotion and tenure to distil the university-wide promotion and tenure instructions to information especially relevant to scientists and engineers. She also wants to create an appointments and promotions panel, which would bring together senior and junior faculty in the School of Engineering to talk about how the promotion process works. Her plans also call for professional development workshops and increased opportunities for communication between female scientists, something she thinks may have been lacking during the early part of her career. “When I came here (in 1990), I was the only woman in chemical engineering,” she said. “There were other women in the School of Engineering, but we didn’t interact much. It was a wave-hello-across-the-parking-lot kind of thing.”

Arbuckle-Keil, who graduated from Rutgers-Camden in 1983 and returned as an assistant professor in 1989, also wants to enhance communication among women scientists by establishing “informal research seminars” that would include women from all three campuses. Arbuckle-Keil intends to survey all Camden’s current science, engineering and mathematics faculty, male and female, about how they spend time. “Do women spend more time assisting students than their male colleagues, for example?” she asked.

Ultimately, Arbuckle-Keil said, she hopes to make academic life at Camden better for all faculty. “I don’t just want to make it more welcoming for women,” she said. “If we make it better for women, I believe that will make it better for everybody.”