"The chemistry department has one female professor, and all the rest [are] males," Cho says. "I think it would be very encouraging for women entering college to have more role models."

The chemistry department currently has 16 tenured professors, and only one of them is female, according to Carol C. Gonzaga, a department administrator.

The biology department isn't much different.

According to Jay L. Taft, director of administration for the Department of Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, the department currently has 19 tenured professors and only two are women.

Working Mothers

The biggest obstacle that women in science face after school is the "juggling act" of balancing a family and a career, Arnott says.

Undergraduates say they are already worried about this upcoming challenge.

"I had been thinking about [being a working mother] all summer," Ariane Park '98 says. "It makes you realize it won't be easy. You can't do both things full time."

Jones, the mother of two young children, says life as a working mother is difficult, but not impossible.

"Right now I feel terribly torn," she says. "I'm not as productive scientifically as someone who is not caring for a family."

Women in academia who choose to take a leave of absence face additional problems, Tseng says.

"If you go into academia from graduate school, you have to do a lot of work before you get to be a professor," she says. "Even though schools say there is no disadvantage to taking time off, we were told that at MIT, no woman who has taken time off has ever been tenured. I think in academia there is definitely a problem."

Robert Birgeneau, dean of science at MIT, says that there is no concrete evidence about the effect of leaves-of-absence upon the careers of female junior faculty.

"We have no meaningful data on whether or not taking a leave-of-absence helps or hurts a junior faculty member's chances for tenure," he says.

However, there is evidence that workplaces are slowly becoming more receptive to the needs of working mothers.