Fox says the program aims to make sure participants see science as a long-term option.

“The numbers of women do decline after the undergraduate years,” Fox says. “They’re always looking for women to attract to the faculty ranks and if you don’t retain them, you’re not going to have them in the faculty ranks.”

Female undergraduates who do not seek the advice of a graduate student can also turn to WISHR’s Big/Little Sibling program, which matches female first-years with female upperclass students based on their area of interest in science

“Freshman year I was matched up with a big sib who was a huge help to me picking my classes and my path and whether I wanted to go into science,” says Maria van Wagenberg ’04, a WISHR officer. “It made me much more confident to do it because I’d seen this girl do it.”

WISHR is the most established network for women in science at Harvard.

Mallika L. Mundkur ’04, a biochemistry concentrator and a WISHR officer, says the group began in response to sexism women used to face in the sciences—but she says that discrimination no longer exists.

“Now you might be able to say we don’t need a certain support network,” Mundkur says. “Now that it’s established we can use it.”

One way that the officers have used the group was to hold a conference this spring on issues related to gender and science, such as balancing career and family and wage disparity between genders.

Aliya Z. Jiwani ’04, a chemistry concentrator and a WISHR officer, says WISHR is necessary because women still have not reached parity with men in the sciences.

“As a chemistry concentrator, I feel like at grad schools women are just not represented,” Jiwani says. “It’s really a rising concern to get more women into scientific careers.”

The best way to present science as a viable career option to female undergraduates, however, is unclear.

Sonnert and Holton found counter-intuitive results on the question of whether women serve as better mentors. In their observations, for men, having a female adviser made roughly no difference. And for some women, having a female adviser actually had a negative impact.

They speculate that these female mentors—the pioneers of their day—might have presented an image of what it was like to be a woman in the sciences that was not appealing to the younger generation.

Richards Professor of Chemistry Cynthia M. Friend, who is the only tenured woman in the chemistry department, says she feels she may be an example of a female role model in science who does not immediately inspire women to pursue her career.

She says that she chooses to maintain an extremely busy professional life, fulfilling many administrative roles within the Faculty of Arts and Sciences in addition to her teaching and research obligations.