UC San Diego admits to short-changing women on lab space at Scripps Oceanography

In an unusually blunt and public confession, UC San Diego acknowledges in a new report that female scientists at its Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla have been systematically given much less research and office space than male researchers, violating the university’s commitment to fairness, diversity and inclusion.

It also is the sort of practice that can hurt a scientist’s career, especially in the key areas of publishing papers and getting grants, according to Victor Ferreira, the UCSD psychology professor who chaired the campus task force that produced the report.

The study says women make up 26 percent of the faculty but occupy only 17 percent of the institute’s space. The data indicate that male scientists, on average, have more than twice as much research space as women and much bigger offices and more storage space.

“The report concluded that women currently hold disproportionately less space than men regardless of group size, funding, discipline or research section, particularly at the full professor and researcher levels,” UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla stated in the study’s cover letter.

The report also says that none of the 16 scientists who each occupy more than 3,000 square feet of space at Scripps are female. Reviewers further noted that 23 percent of the institute’s space is held by emeritus, or retired, faculty. They represent nearly a third of all space holders. Nearly 90 percent of the retirees are men.

The study cites concern that faculty members have been able to inherit space from colleagues at an institution that has been dominated by men throughout its 120-year history.

The task force largely attributed the disparities to the institute’s lack of a sufficiently clear, fair, transparent, thorough and closely monitored system for assigning space. A management committee will address the problems.

The report says “these findings are consistent with multiple reports of gender disparities in STEM [science, technology, engineering and math] academic institutions in the U.S. and elsewhere in a range of quantifiable parameters such as salary, access to resources, attrition rates, time to promotion.”

Margaret Leinen, vice chancellor for marine sciences at UC San Diego and director of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, is pictured with UCSD Chancellor Pradeep Khosla in 2021.

(Ashley Mackin-Solomon)

The task force focused on Scripps, whose oceanography program was named the best in the world last year by the Shanghai Ranking Consultancy in China.

“Women view Scripps space policies, procedures and practices as less fair, equitable and transparent than men do, and alarmingly, 42 percent of surveyed women report that they do not have enough space to meet their research needs, whereas only 6 percent of men do,” according to the report.

The study emphasized that “the space disparity cannot be explained away on the basis of time at the institution, funding expenditures or group size. ... The disparity also cannot be attributed to differences in the kind of research carried out by women vs. men.”

Ferreira said this kind of problem can have devastating effects, noting that “without sufficient space, a scientist won’t have a place to put the equipment they need to do the day-to-day work, nor the elbow room for the members of that group to do that work.”

He added that space shortages can lead funding agencies to turn down grant requests, which can cripple a person’s work.

“So that’s less day-to-day work, fewer published papers, less grant dollars, less influence on and visibility in the field, and ultimately a slower upward trajectory to someone’s career,” he concluded.

It is not unusual for male and female scientists to privately complain that they don’t have enough space to conduct their research. But UCSD’s decision to publicly admit it has been short-changing women is the kind of thing rarely done in academia.

When it does occur, it can cause a sensation, and change.

In the 1990s, Nancy Hopkins, a tenured biologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, was repeatedly turned down when she asked for more space to study zebrafish, a proxy for exploring human disease. Hopkins responded by quietly measuring the space in her lab and that of many of her colleagues. She determined that she had less space than junior male professors.

That sparked a movement by female scientists at MIT to pressure the administration to deal with what they called wide-ranging gender discrimination. That eventually led MIT to publicly acknowledge in a report that the women were right. The school promised to deal with the problems and in many cases did so, which led to similar introspection by other universities.

The situation at Scripps Oceanography unfolded in a different way.

Over the past decade, Scripps Director Margaret Leinen has hired 49 faculty members, more than half of whom are women. She was praised for her commitment to diversity. But there were still long-standing complaints by women that they could not get all the space they needed, an issue magnified by the fact that Scripps was adding people to an institute that’s largely built out.

Last year, Leinen and her colleagues used new space management tools to examine research space by gender.

“It looked to me as though women had substantially less space than men in some of our research groups,” Leinen said. “But it didn’t account for the number of people in various labs or whether people were doing research that required a lot of space and equipment vs. research that only used computers.”

She took the data to the campus administration, which commissioned the task force to look deeper. Khosla decided to make the report public.

Ferreira said that was the right decision:

“I think that when universities trust the public ... to help all of us understand what we’re going through, it proceeds much better than if you tried to do what happens too often, which is to take something and either manage it entirely internally or worse yet, take something and sweep it under the rug and hope it all just goes away.” ◆