Beate Schmittmann

The National Academies recently issued a report saying women face bias in hiring and promotion in science and engineering fields at research universities.

The report was yet another example of ongoing concern over the position of women in those fields, a subject that got tremendous attention last year when then-Harvard President Lawrence Summers said "innate" deficiencies in women might be a factor. Summers is no longer Harvard's president, but higher education is still wrestling with the gender disparity in science, engineering and math.

Beate Schmittmann in August became the first woman to head a department in Virginia Tech's College of Science. A physics professor who attended the University of Aachen in Germany and the University of Edinburg in Scotland, she arrived at Tech in 1990.

Q: What drew you to physics?

A: Beate Schmittmann: You can take observations of, whatever, the way the planets revolve around the sun, then you can cast it into mathematical language, work with this mathematical language and come back to the real world and make a prediction. ... The connection that this very formal abstract language, mathematics, can actually have with the real world to this day I find absolutely mind boggling.

Q: How has your experience been as a female physics professor?

A: BS: This particular department is really very friendly and has a very positive climate. I was the only woman here for some time and really felt heard and respected. Now we're four women, which puts us way above the national average, so I'm quite proud of that. We're sitting at 18 percent, and I think the national average is like 12 or 13 percent women faculty in physics.

Q: How can the academic environment for women in physics be improved?

A: BS: Raising awareness about self confidence questions. ... I think men tend to be a little bit more self-confident. When something doesn't go well, they tend to take it less personally, whereas women tend to question their competence a lot more than men do. And that, of course, has an impact when you're studying in a situation that is challenging and you have to decide, "Do I continue or do I not continue?" ... Other things which in many ways are more practical [to address are]:

> Making sure that women are evaluated fairly. There's actually a lot of research out there that shows that if you take a resume and take resumes that are identical, with the exception of the name ... these resumes will be evaluated differently ... and generally the women will be evaluated more critically. ... I think it's really important that everyone, promotion and tenure committees, recruitment committees, hiring committees, are aware of these issues.

> Make sure the workload is distributed fairly. Women tend to see themselves on a lot of committees, partly because every committee wants to have a woman represented. ... I tend to tell my female colleagues [to] feel free to say no.

> Work-life balance at this point, I think, hits women much harder than it hits men. Combining your career with a personal life -- this could be friends, a partner, spouses, children -- I think women still face much harder choices there.

Q: What steps has Virginia Tech taken to improve the environment for female faculty?

A: BS: We already had a stop-the-[tenure]-clock policy. ... What has recently changed is that we have made this automatic for childbirth. Both male and female faculty members, as soon as they inform the department head that they want to take an extra year that's it, they will get it. We also have at the university level introduced a modified duty policy for any faculty member who needs to take time out -- because of a health issue, because of aging parents, because of child-care issues -- and need to have an accommodation of their schedule or their duties. This is now a policy, where before you used to have to have an accommodating department head or dean.

Q: What is your take on Lawrence Summers' comments?

A: BS: We're a long ways from having a really equitable playing field for women and other underrepresented minorities in the sciences and engineering, so I think the attention [to that issue] is good. The statement that he made? Well, once we have an equitable playing field, then we can discuss [the substance of] it. At this point I think that there is so much that still makes it more difficult for women that I'd rather focus on those issues.