Teachers and Students at Brown agree that the University has done an excellent job of supporting and promoting women in science within and beyond Brown’s walls. Here are the two main methods Brown teachers and organizations use to champion women, and here’s how and why they work.
Thumbnail from Wikipedia
The Valdez Lab at Brown University, photo by author, 2023
by Calliope Speredakos
“Before medicine, it was research,” says Gabriella Lui with a smile, looking back over the journey that led her here, thousands of miles from home, a freshman in Brown’s graduating class of 2026.
Before Lui fell in love with research, she was an 8th grader in Chicago presenting a science fair project on Radio Frequency and Identification Technology. A humanities girl throughout middle school, Lui found her first experience of methodological thinking–of approaching an issue, testing a hypothesis, and coming to a conclusion–fascinating. After this eye-opening project, like many other students drawn into the mystical world of science research, Lui discovered her passion.
In 2019, Lui moved cross-country to Seattle. Fueled by her science fair project, she participated in science research at the University of Washington throughout high school. On March 31st, 2022, Lui learned she was admitted to Brown University, an Ivy-League research institution in Providence, Rhode Island, and her top choice for college. Not only was she accepted, but she also got into Brown’s Program in Liberal Medical Education (PLME), an eight-year joint Bachelor of Science and Doctor of Medicine (BSMD) program with Brown’s Warren Alpert Medical School. What started as a middle school science fair project had–with the click of an “accept offer” button–become the start of the rest of her life.
With plans to pursue medicine and graduate Brown in eight years with an M.D., Lui is among the hundreds of female students at Brown who hope to concentrate in a scientific field. The number of women in science at Brown has greatly increased in the past few decades. Yet, higher enrollment numbers do not necessarily correlate with higher rates of professional success for women, especially because, according to an article published in March of 2023 by Nature, science is still a male-dominated field. In fact, increased enrollment does not even mean the female students are met with equitable guidance during their time at Brown.
In recent years, though, according to teachers and students, Brown has worked to both set up its female students well for future success and support them while here. “[Brown] support[s] me in all my classes … I really do feel like I am treated as an equal here,” notes Lui, who says she’s thrilled to dive into her second year as a PLME.
There are two main ways the university goes about doing so, professors and students say. One, Brown works to open classroom collaboration, getting students to work with each other instead of against. Two, it provides role models and mentors for female science students, helping them to see what a future in science could look like. Through these two tactics, professors and students at Brown say the university works to engage and excite female students in the classroom, and effectively prepare them for a balanced and successful future. They say Brown works hard to be an institution that is not only a leader of scientific discovery but also one that is diverse, accepting, and supportive.
A History Lesson
Since its founding in 1764, Brown has been at the forefront of demographic diversity. For one, it was the first Ivy League institution to admit students from different religious affiliations, and that fact is written into its original charter. In 1891, it first allowed women to sit for exams, though they received separate instruction at the Women’s College, later named Pembroke College in 1928. It was decades later, in 1971, that Pembroke and Brown merged, and Brown finally accepted female and male students into one institution.
After Brown first accepted women in the 1970s, the female presence there has grown in leaps and bounds. In the fall of 1994, the number of women studying at the university surpassed the number of men for the first time. Since 1994, there have always been more women than men pursuing degrees at Brown, which again speaks to the school’s efforts of inclusion and diversity.
Brown student in Chemistry lab, photo by Gabriella Lui, 2023
Collaboration
Teachers and students alike applaud Brown’s focus on collaboration for women’s science education. Some even cite collaboration as a result of the increased number of women at Brown.
“Over the years… as more women have entered my field of geophysics, there has been a greater emphasis on collaboration versus competition,” says Karen Fischer, a seismologist and professor in the Department of Earth, Environmental, and Planetary Sciences at Brown (EEPS). Not only that, but, “Faculty at Brown are putting in marked effort to increase collaboration among their female science students,” she says. The women themselves value
collaboration, and the teachers, ever attentive to their students, then emphasize it within their classrooms.
Senior Youngbin Yoon, co-lead coordinator of Brown’s Women in Science and Engineering (WiSE) group, agrees. “I think that’s one of the strengths of the school,” she says. “People here are so receptive of working together.” She believes that not just teachers but organizations like WiSE encourage students to work together to better understand material, feel supported, and find a community that works for them.
“Even CS labs are pretty collaborative,” says Lui, who took a Computer Science class this semester. There are partner projects, group projects, and office hours where peer work is encouraged.
Collaboration as a tactic to benefit women is supported by numerous studies. A 2012 article from Northwestern Medicine cites it as a key tactic to advance women’s leadership roles and help them develop their networks. Even recently, a 2021 study from the Royal Society Publishing argues that collaboration helps to promote women’s career progression and general success.
Diane Pimentel, director of Brown’s Master of Arts and Teaching program with a focus on science education, also speaks to the benefits of collaboration, specifically in conjunction with women’s altruistic tendencies.
“As women, we’re enculturated to want to give,” she argues. “Research has shown women typically enter fields because they want to contribute to the community more broadly, [they] want to make the world a better place.” She continues that because of these desires to gain fulfilling and impactful jobs after college, women naturally gravitate and benefit more from classroom activities that emphasize working together and creating connections with peers. Often, jobs with the potential to help many have a social or humanitarian aspect to them. Therefore, she believes the connections that women entering science careers are encouraged to build, and the collaboration in which they are pushed to partake at Brown often benefit them tremendously in their professional careers.
Mentorship
Mentorship is the second key area where sources say the university most succeeds when educating women in science.
Pimentel, a Brown alumna, has memories of her own experience as a woman in science in the late 90s. Coming from a first-generation college family, Pimentel recounts one class where she felt like an outsider.
“I remember my first physics class,” she says. “In the lab, there’s all this equipment, and the professor was like, ‘Okay, you’re going to design your own lab and choose the equipment you want to use.’ Everyone else in the room had used all this advanced stuff, and I hadn’t. I was like, ‘Oh my god, do I even
Brown student and mentor, photo from Brown's website, 2023
belong here?’” She says felt an acute sense of alienation from this event, and it still sticks with her decades later.
Pimentel did not allude to anyone supporting her during her struggles with physics, and luckily, according to current students, Brown has improved in this regard.
“Mentorship is vital,” says Yoon. “You believe in yourself a little more if you see someone similar to you in that role. It’s hard to imagine yourself in a role otherwise.” Yoon also spoke of WiSE’s mentorship program, which, according to her, is “the biggest thing we run.” In the program, mentors and mentees with similar experiences are paired together, and they schedule meetings a few times a semester. The meetings are a time for the mentees and mentors to catch up, get coffee, and connect. “It’s all about giving [other students] a student perspective,” Yoon says. “We don’t want students scrambling to find opportunities or missing out on anything. We don’t want students to be afraid to look for help.”
Teacher mentors are crucial for women, too, not just other student mentors. The National Institute of Health published a 2022 study on the importance of professional mentors in science. The article said mentors are a communication channel and a way to address the underrepresentation of women in science. Lui agrees with the article and believes Brown succeeds in providing adult mentors to herself and her female peers as well.
“My advisor is a woman,” she says. “I’m around women a lot, and it’s a nice feeling. In these types of environments, it’s easy to feel like you’re the only woman in the room, but I’m always around a bunch of brilliant women physicians.”
Lui acknowledges that women have additional expectations put on them in medicine. “Women need to give birth, to raise children, people feel less inclined to invest in [them] because they think in the long term they’ll leave,” she says. But, at the same time, “I think it’s really interesting having so many mentors who also become mothers and wives and can give you more personal advice on how to balance life.” If you cannot outrun the expectations, she says, you may as well learn how to balance and cope with them successfully.
As part of the PLME program, Lui also mentioned Whole Patient dinners, where a doctor brings in a patient, talks about the doctor-patient relationship, and how important it is for doctors to create strong bonds with those they help. During one particular dinner, Lui remembers that a Latina doctor brought in her patient, who only spoke Spanish. “They were both minority women,” says Lui, who herself is an Asian-American. “A big takeaway for me was how important it is to understand the unique struggles of women,” she continues, and adds later, “I really admired her.”
With so many powerful women to look up to, Lui says she is
assured of her future and confident that the women she has met through Brown will continue to be role models to her throughout her time as an undergraduate and in medical school and beyond.
Lui and Yoon’s experiences as students at Brown may not be representative of the university’s entire population of women in science. But they believe Brown has helped and will continue to help them build the community and access the mentors necessary to guide and support them in future endeavors. Whether they have seven years left, like Lui, or seven days left, like Yoon, collaboration and mentorship have been at the forefront of their Brown experiences.
“I’m so privileged and grateful [for my experience],” says Lui. “I’m really excited for the time I have left.”
Calliope Speredakos, a freshman at Brown University, is a native New Yorker who loves paleontology and reading.
Commentary:
Objectively speaking, this is the piece I am the proudest of, as it was the one for which I was able to interview the most people. I thought it was important to do a piece very focused on college and the professional world to properly balance the high school and elementary school pieces, and I think this piece adequately illustrates the differences in education for the different age groups. It was actually surprisingly easy to contact people for this interview–the faculty with whom I spoke were so receptive to my emails and were more than happy to speak with me. This was also the only story I could do an in-person interview for (two of these are in-person), and I think that really added to the quality of these interviews and my research. Overall, this piece really helped me better understand the resources Brown has at its disposal, and why women are so pleased with Brown’s science support system.
Source List:
Zoom interview with Karen Fischer (3/20)
In-person interview with Diane Silva Pimentel (4/3)
Interview with Gabriella Lui (4/5)
Interview with Youngbin Yoon (4/16)
https://www.brown.edu/about/history/timeline/
https://www.brown.edu/web/documents/charter-of-brown-university.pdf
https://250.brown.edu/browns-history.html
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/doi/10.1098/rspb.2021.0219