Grant helps close faculty gender gap

LINCOLN — Nine hours, 500 miles and too few faculty positions separated 11-year-old Yuzhao Shen's parents for more than a year.

When the University of Nebraska-Lincoln hired his father to teach construction management courses in 2007, no position existed in Lincoln for his mother, Linxia Gu, a mechanical engineering professor. Instead, she moved to Rapid City, S.D., after accepting a teaching spot at the South Dakota School of Mines and Technology.

“He was always trying to find a job for me,” Gu said recently. “He said, ‘Mommy, why is it so difficult for you to find a position?' ”

A year and a half passed before Gu landed an assistant professorship at UNL, partly with the help of a National Science Foundation grant aimed at recruiting more women mathematicians and scientists to the UNL faculty.

“We almost gave up,” Gu said in her Lincoln office, where a picture of her smiling 11-year-old rests on the windowsill.

Advance-Nebraska is a five-year, $3.8 million grant-funded program that began in 2008. The program is helping the university's science- and math-related departments attract qualified spouses like Gu by covering the costs incurred during the interview process, among other initiatives.

Ultimately, the Advance grant seeks to close gender gaps in so-called STEM departments: science, technology, engineering and mathematics.

“There are very few women faculty in those fields, and they are at a premium to get across the nation,” said Jill Hochstein, Advance-Nebraska's project manager.

Compared to the national average, the number of women teaching in those disciplines at UNL is “very low,” said Mary Anne Holmes, director of Advance-Nebraska. Only 20 of the 247 fully promoted STEM professors were women, Holmes said.

In all, 163 women were fully promoted professors at UNL in 2008, compared to 536 men, according to the university.

Among lower-ranking positions in the STEM departments, 20 women are assistant professors, whereas 67 men hold the same post.

“The hiring rate is going up, but it was pretty bad 10 years ago,” Holmes said.

Gu became one of the first hires under Advance-Nebraska. She is one of three spouses who have been hired through the dual career assistance program. In one of those cases, a husband was hired to help retain his wife in UNL's mathematics department.

That's just one of the grant program's initiatives. Advance-Nebraska also provides professional development workshops for both male and female faculty and pays for UNL's participation in recruiting events.

“The grant renews our enthusiasm for doing the best job possible in making sure we get the best faculty at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln,” said Barbara Couture, UNL's senior vice chancellor for academic affairs.

Couture and a group of faculty members first wrote the grant proposal after discovering that few women apply for positions in science, technology, engineering and mathematics at UNL.

As a result, the gender diversity among faculty didn't reflect that of the student population, Couture said.

Not all UNL faculty members agree that the grant advances UNL. Gerard Harbison, a UNL chemistry professor, said the university should hire the best candidates to fill open positions, regardless of gender.

Initiative 424, the 2008 ban against state-funded preferential hiring practices, does not affect Advance-Nebraska because it paid through a federal grant.

The multimillion-dollar grant, Harbison said, would be put to better use funding research.

“When I think of what real science could do with that money — and in the meantime we're bringing in these luncheon seminars — it's a real travesty,” Harbison said, referring to the program's professional development initiative, which includes periodic workshops covering topics like developing presentations and recruiting new hires.

But Couture said recruiting is vital to academic success.

“If you increase the people power, you encourage discovery,” she said.

UNL's Advance grant is one of more than 100 similar grants awarded to academic institutions by the National Science Foundation. Iowa State University received one of the grants in 2006.

Gu credits the grant program for speeding up her interview process and reuniting her family: herself, her husband, Zhigang Shen, and their son, Yuzhao.

Today Gu teaches mechanical engineering courses and conducts vascular mechanics research at UNL. Working with the NU Medical Center and the Nebraska Heart Institute, she is using computer simulation to test the mechanical properties of surgical equipment.

And in her classroom and research labs, Gu said, she encourages female students “to stick to engineering.”

“To think that women aren't good at engineering, I think that's totally not right,” Gu said.

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