Earlier this year, while I was sequestered in the bat-cave studying for my qualifying exam, I came across something very distressing. Widely reported from the New York Times to the feminist blog Jezebel, the study has been done and the verdict is in—only 13% of the people editing Wikipedia articles are women. Though there are endless articles debating the causes, my interest in the issue lies elsewhere: what can be done to change this?

I believe that more women would be involved in editing Wikipedia if it were a social activity, rather than an insular one, so I hosted a WikiWomen party at my house to make the experience collaborative. In attendance were five female chemists: myself, Anna Goldstein (your favorite blogger on BSR), Rebecca Murphy, Chelsea Gordon, and Helen Yu. We started the night with a dinner, over which we discussed the experience of being a graduate student, and how writing for Wikipedia compares to teaching undergraduates.

Two weeks ago, BSR blog contributor Liz Boatman wrote a heartfelt and eye-opening post (you can read it here) about the regrettable treatment faced by many female grad students in STEM fields. If you haven’t read it yet, you’re missing out.

One of the more shocking facts I stumbled upon in her post was that the Faculty Club at UC Berkeley once posted a sign that said “For Men Only”. I was well aware that women were not hired as faculty for a good part of the university’s history, but specifically banning women from even entering the Great Hall just adds insult to injury. I searched for a picture of the sign –  mainly to prove to myself that it really happened – and thanks to Susan Snyder and the helpful staff at the Bancroft Library, which houses the University Archives, I was granted access to a photo collection of the Faculty Club over the years. There was no picture of the offending sign (please let me know if you come across one), but I did find this gem. Click to see it full size:

I’ll present this photo without much comment, because I think it speaks for itself. You’ll note that this was in 1932, thirteen years after the founding of the Women’s Faculty Club. I also checked out the WFC’s historical photograph collection, but it was mostly photos of the furnishings inside (not a joke).

The following post is a response to the NY Times article by Kate Zernike: “Gains, and Drawbacks, for Female Professors.”

The University of California, Berkeley was founded in 1868. At that time, female faculty and students were virtually non-existent in all of higher education, not just in physical science and engineering disciplines. Here at UC Berkeley, women were not allowed to enter the Faculty Club unescorted by a male until 1915. Female faculty were still restricted from certain areas of the facility for another 40 years; at the entrance to the Great Hall, a large sign was hung that read “For Men Only”. (No wonder the females established their own social parlor next door, the Women’s Faculty Club!) Nowhere on campus, however, is the ongoing battle for equal opportunity as visible today as it is in the north-east corner. Our College of Engineering (COE) is ranked 3rd in the world, but the first female professor was not granted tenure in mechanical engineering until the 1990s.

I recently spoke with that professor, Lisa Pruitt, and she mentioned that the success in retention of women faculty in engineering disciplines goes up dramatically when women are hired in bunches. At the time, this was a radical concept to me, but later I thought about why I chose UC Berkeley for graduate school after doing my B.S. in physics: more women. I am still here now, many trials and tribulations later, and it is my female peers upon whom I rely regularly for support. Apparently, I have been unknowingly participating in this same sociological experiment, and the results are not surprising: like the female faculty, the female graduate students do better in bunches.

These days, there are female faculty serving as department chairs and in dean positions; clearly, science and engineering career paths for women in academia have improved. We can be thankful that there are now laws preventing gender discrimination in the form of unequal pay or lab space allocation. So, yes, the situation is better than it was in the 1800s (and it only took 140 years, give or take). The unfortunate consequence of “better,” however, is that female faculty in science and engineering now face an entirely new type of gender bias.

As Zernike points out in the NY Times article, the newly established collective successes and the rising numbers of women at MIT are now hurting their career trajectories and their credibility. The new-age face of gender inequity in science and engineering is the idea that women have been rewarded solely based on their gender. What makes this comical is the fact that the increased number of women in science and engineering is a very relative phenomenon: UC Berkeley’s mechanical engineering department boasts nearly 50 faculty and lecturers but only four are female. There are seven dean positions in the COE and only one is occupied by a woman. Are these numbers really sensational enough to call into question whether these women deserve their titles?