Progress,and Yet So Much Further to Go

T his is the first issue that includes articles submitted and reviewed under the auspices of the new Editorial team at DNA and Cell Biology. The Table of Contents reflects a new format that we intend to maintain. This new presentation should readily direct readers to the articles they are most interested in reading.

I would especially like to draw readers to one of the reviews in this issue, written by Drs. Leboy* and Madden. More than 30 years ago, when I started as a junior faculty member at Harvard Medical School, that institution was a hostile environment for women faculty, especially for PhDs. At the Instructor level, there were 30% women, but the fraction of the faculty dropped by half at each promotion, with only 3% at the Full Professor level.

A study done then found that Harvard was less likely to recruit, retain, and promote women faculty than peer institutions. In response, a small effort was made by department chairmen to try to communicate to women faculty annually what was necessary to succeed in that environment.

At one informal lunch meeting of the Women's Faculty Network, Dr. David Nathan, who was then the chief at The Children's Hospital, reflected that he had a mother, a wife, and a staff supporting and assisting him, but he just realized that most of us in the room were wives and mothers, as well as faculty members, juggling all the responsibilities as well as meetings that extended outside the normal working day. He resolved to at least try to keep meetings in the working day.

Without the newly established and very expensive Longwood Medical Area Childcare Center, which was open every day 8 A.M. to 6 P.M., I never would have survived and let alone succeeded in my research (and administrative) career at the Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. However, confronted with a glass ceiling, I would not be tenured and promoted to a Full Professor, so I left for a much more secure and nonhostile environment at New York University (NYU).

Today, more than half of undergraduates, graduate students, and medical students are women, but the pipeline, especially in STEM fields, is leaky.

In addition, in the U.S. Congress, on June 5, 2012, Republicans blocked President Obama's Paycheck Fairness Act. That bill would have required employers to pay all employees at the same rate for the same job qualifications, not the $0.77 that women average on the dollar, according to the unimpeachable statistics. In some institutions such as NYU, gender equity in compensation and many other criteria are routinely examined and adjusted for fairness when disparities are found.

Leboy and Madden compare the current state of diversity in the Basic Science faculties at U.S. medical schools with science faculties in universities. They found that both women and minority faculty members are disadvantaged at medical schools. There is both explicit and implicit bias impacting decisions to hire, retain, and promote women and minority faculty members.

We have come very far, but there remains a long path until equity and diversity are achieved.