julie

Some of the points I'm going to make have already been touched on, but I wanted to post (in fact, I registered so that I could post!) here because your question actually got me thinking about my own motivations. At first I thought the answer to your question was obvious, but it took me a while to be able to put it in words, which I guess means it wasn't quite as obvious as I thought! Background: I'm a woman in a highly male-dominated field (CSE/EE). I'm also a slightly older incoming grad student (I'm 27 and have been out of college for 5 years now), and I'm married with a toddler. I've always been good at math/science/etc., and when I was younger I didn't feel any need for extra support because of my gender, and I laughed at any sort of efforts I saw to "encourage girls in math" and such. My undergraduate program was at a tiny liberal arts college where two out of four tenure-track faculty in the CS department were women, but there were only 3 or 4 women in my graduating class (out of around 35, I think). My undergrad advisor was male and from the engineering department, and I adored working with him, am still in touch with him, and have gotten a tremendous amount of support from him in my application process. That said, I've ended up choosing my grad program in no small part because of the mentoring network and women profs in the program that I'm going to. In fact, I'm switching from a CS background as an undergrad to an EE program just so that I can work in the lab I'll be in. There are three advantages in my mind to a program with women faculty. In no particular order: 1) As I think someone mentioned above, with women in positions of authority you can get past gender and on to actually doing your work more quickly. I've been the only technical employee in my group at another university, so I know that I can do that and I'm not intimidated by it. But it's nice to know that I don't have to be some sort of ambassador for the female gender for a while. 2) This was also touched on above, but there are very real challenges that face women in academia that don't exist for men. These mostly, but not exclusively, pertain to balancing career and family choices. I already have one child, and I'll very likely want a second before I finish my Ph.D. Mothers in other programs I visited have told me very bluntly that there are some advisors you just don't want to work with if that's the path you want. And those professors are predominately young, single and male. Which is not to say that all young/single/male professors would be bad advisors, just that advisors who are women and/or who have families of their own tend to be more understanding of the balance that a student like me is trying to deal with. 3) In a field that's as male-dominated as mine, any school with a substantial number of women in professor positions has made a concerted effort to get them. That tells me a couple of things about the priorities of the school/department/program: first, that they're committed to seeing women *not* drop out of the academic pipeline for the reasons discussed in the study linked above, which means that they're committed to seeing me succeed, which is pretty nice considering how scary this whole back-to-school and change-of-fields thing is. And second, that they're committed to the sorts of things that NSF puts in their "broader impact" category. This could very well be an over-generalization and completely off-base, but my gut sense has been that programs that are actively trying to recruit female professors are also actively trying to get underrepresented groups interested in science/engineering at the undergraduate level. And, in turn (and this may where my logic is less than sound), those departments tend to be more interested in a balance between research and teaching than others. I visited schools where everyone talked about teaching as an annoyance that kept them from the research they really wanted to spend their time on. I'm not sure if I want to end up teaching or not, but I was really turned off by university departments full of professors who didn't want to be teaching. All of that said, I would certainly not pass on an advisor just because he was a man. I don't particularly care if my own advisor is a man or a woman. But it is important to me that the department have women in leadership positions around. It's just one less thing for me to have to worry about, and finishing a grad program is hard enough without any extra sources of stress!