Much of the discussion on lab space stems from the 1999 MIT report, Report of the School of Science, which found an “unequal distribution” of resources, including lab space, allocated to women.[65] This focused attention on the issue, and a number of other gender equity assessments at other universities have taken it up.[66]
Stanford’s report, for example, found no disparity in lab space: “The Provost’s Advisory Committee on the Status of Women Faculty on Thursday issued a variety of recommendations to strengthen the recruitment and retention of women faculty and, in a first-ever comprehensive analysis, has preliminarily found ‘insignificant’ differences between men and women in benefits and support such as laboratory space, equipment, start-up funds, research funds, and summer salaries” (James Robinson, Report: ‘No Pattern ’ of Disparity Between Men, Women Faculty, Stanford Report, May 20, 2003).[67] The University of Pennsylvania found mixed results: “With respect to the professional status of women faculty, the committee determined that at the more junior ranks women had more research space per grant dollar than men, but women full professors averaged somewhat less space per grant dollar[68] than their male colleagues; in both SAS science departments and the School of Medicine, senior women faculty had about 85 percent of the space assigned to males.”[69] Case Western Reserve found women had less lab space: “Despite these heavier workloads, participants believe that women often receive fewer benefits and support resources. Women tend to enter the university with more limited start-up packages. . . . They receive less space, have less access to graduate student assistance, and get fewer services from support staff.”[70]
However, quantitative data on lab space are hard to find. It is critical that it be measured, because, as Purdue’s report noted, it may be a perceptual or an actual discrepancy:
Females responded differently than males on a number of these issues. However, most differences appear to simply reflect perceptual differences across the schools and the varying distribution of women in the schools (e. g., women are less satisfied than men with library resources, but this largely reflects the fact that Education and Liberal Arts schools, where faculty are the least satisfied with library resources, are also schools with relatively high proportions of women faculty).
Taking into account these differences in gender representation across the schools, females are still less likely to believe that they have adequate laboratory space (48 percent) than are males (60 percent). In particular, women in agriculture, health sciences, and science are substantially less likely than their male counterparts to feel that they have adequate lab space.[71]
The committee’s survey asked faculty to identify how much lab space they have. It should be noted that lab space may mean different things to different people and in different disciplines. One problem, for example, is how to count shared lab space. Overall, lab square footage ranged from zero to 100,000 square feet. The two largest figures—47,000 and 100,000—both occurred in civil engineering and appear to be outliers.[72] Both observations were changed to missing. Estimated lab space was reported by 769 respondents. Overall, men reported significantly more lab space, with an average of about 1,550 square feet, than women, with an average of about 1,160 square feet. Disaggregated by field (see Figure 4-2), men had significantly more lab space in civil engineering and physics and marginally more in biology.[73]
One concern about studying lab space is that some faculty are theoretical while others are experimental, and the former might not need a lot of lab space.
As the Report of the Task Force on the Status of Women Faculty in the Natural Sciences and Engineering at Princeton (2003:24) noted:
Experimental science is heavily resource dependent. Consequently, in many departments, an individual’s success is highly dependent on his/her access to space, equipment, supplies, students, postdoctoral fellows, and other laboratory personnel. At the time faculty members are hired, experimentalists are given laboratory space and start-up funds, which are used to purchase equipment and supplies as well as to support personnel. Funds for future support of the lab usually come from research grants, which are obtained from external, not University, funding. For faculty hired at the assistant professor level, additional laboratory space is usually needed to allow growth of research programs. Most experimentalists also require expensive equipment (e. g., electron microscopes, mass spectrometers, multi-node parallel processors) or services (animal care facilities, instrument specialists, technicians for common facilities and analytical labs) that are beyond the means of individual faculty members and that are purchased and/or maintained on a departmental basis.
This suggested a modified comparison conducted only on faculty who labeled themselves “experimental” or “both theoretical and experimental faculty” in the faculty survey. This comparison was conducted on 663 faculty and found that men who did experimental research reported a mean of 1,670 square feet of lab space, which was larger than the mean of 1,250 square feet reported by women who did experimental research. There are some interesting disciplinary differences. For example, in physics, men reported a median of 1,079 square feet of lab space and women report 800 square feet of lab space (see Appendix 4-12).
The committee’s survey also asked faculty who were hired after 1996 to report whether they had more, the same, or less lab space than they had when they were first hired. The analysis focused on comparing respondents who reported they had the same amount of lab space now compared to those who reported having more lab space now compared to when they were first hired. (Only 15 respondents noted that they had less lab space today.) A majority of both men and women reported no change in the size of their lab space (men, 72 percent; women, 70 percent). (See Appendix 4-13 for a multivariate treatment of this issue.)