Science and engineering faculties have become more welcoming
The number of women in science and engineering faculty positions at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology has been on the rise. An internal report, released earlier this week, found that there are 112 women in science and engineering, or 17 per cent of all faculty. That is up from 46, or seven per cent of all professors, during the mid 1990s. A pair of reports released in 1998 and 2002 revealed that women felt marginalized at the university, suggesting that MIT has greatly improved supports for female professors in the decade since. “I chaired the study 10 years ago for engineering, and if you had asked me then how much better I thought it could get for women faculty, I never would have thought that we would get this far in 10 years,” engineering professor, Lorna Gibson said.