Research universities can play a proactive role in reducing the discrimination female professors confront in commercial science activities from starting new firms to serving on corporate scientific advisory boards, a forthcoming study on female underrepresentation on corporate scientific advisory boards (SABs) contends.
In the study, From Bench to Board: Gender Differences in University Scientists’ Participation in Corporate Scientific Advisory Boards, co-authors Dr. Waverly Ding of the University of Maryland-College Park, Dr. Fiona Murray of MIT and Dr. Toby E. Stuart of the University of California Berkeley write that there are “specific areas in which university administrators may have some leverage to remediate the gender gap” that are documented by the co-authors in their analysis. The co-authors assert that universities can boost the visibility and experience of female professors by facilitating their involvement with the school’s technology transfer office.
“Every woman we interviewed who had held a senior administrative role believed that the visibility of the office led to consulting and SAB opportunities and bolstered their legitimacy in the commercial sector. … Therefore, for women faculty who are willing to take on senior administrative assignments, such as deanships, we believe that active university policies to match women to these positions will help to create opportunities for women in commercial science,” according to the study, which is to be published in the Academy of Management Journal.
Ding, an assistant professor of management at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, says the study documents compelling evidence of discrimination, estimating that female professors are nearly 50 percent less likely than their male counterparts to be invited to join corporate SABs and to start new companies, based on their research. The study’s research is drawn from survey data about the biotech industry and 6,000 U.S. scientists whose careers spanned more than three decades.
By 2002, the data sample’s final year, women made up 30 percent of roughly 6,000 Ph.D.s from U.S. universities, but only 7 percent (49 of 720) of those scientists served on the SABs of 511 U.S. biotech firms. Ding notes that the representation did not exceed 10.2 percent during the study’s 1972-2002 window.
“The data says that women are miserably underrepresented on these corporate scientific advisory boards. And the implication here is that this might not be a good thing for these tech companies,” she explains.
What the co-authors are “trying to argue in the paper is that the reason we don’t see many women scientists being represented in the high-tech scientific advisory boards is because the process of vetting has something wrong with it,” Ding says. The research team did not uncover “evidence that points to women lacking intention or lack of qualifications for scientific advisory board membership,” which led them to conclude the explanation rested with the vetting process.
