Advancing Women Faculty at the New Jersey Institute of Technology through Collaborative Research Networks: an Analysis of Preliminary Results and Methodology

By stimulating and supporting interdisciplinary research synergies, NJIT ADVANCE endeavors to expand women’s social and professional networks, improve information flow, and stimulate social capital formation. In this paper, we report the initial results of our efforts—and, discuss the distinctive assessment strategy we have designed to measure faculty advancement: mapping networks in research oriented social space over time. We present an overview of our datacollection methodologies and a preliminary analysis of the data we have obtained thus far. “If one could get far enough away from it, human life would become pure pattern.” Introduction: The Problem of Small Numbers Thirty-five years ago when I first came to teach at the New Jersey Institute of Technology, the most popular show on television was “M*A*S*H*.” All the doctors were male. Off-screen, too. Less than 10% of US physicians were female, and only 4% of US lawyers. Ally McBeal and Shirley Schmidt were nowhere in sight. The signs of change were already there, however; and over the next three decades, women made dramatic progress in virtually every field. Today, nearly a third of all lawyers and doctors are women (WEPAN 2006). So are more than half of the nation's corporate managers. Women now own and run over nine million US companies (Catalyst 2004). There is one startling exception to this trend, however: engineering. During the 1980’s and 1990’s there was a small but steady increase in the percentage of women in the US engineering workforce; however, the ascent peaked in 1998 at 11.2% (n = 240,000). During the last decade, both the percentage and actual number of female engineers have drifted downward. Today, only 10.1% of practicing engineers are women (WEPAN 2006). Female undergraduate engineering enrollments have followed the same parabolic course, rising modestly from 15.7% in 1984 to 19.8% in 1999, and then declining (WEPAN 2006). In recent years, the percentage of US women earning doctoral degrees in engineering has increased; however, this is largely an artifact of the steady decline in the numbers of male engineering doctoral students (WEPAN 2006). Although there have been slight increases in the proportion of female junior faculty in several engineering disciplines, some of this apparent growth is really a function of male attrition as well. The absolute number of women engineering academics at all ranks remains dauntingly small. In 2004, there were only 2260 tenured or tenure track female