Surprising opportunities: Gender and the structure of work in biotechnology firms

Annals of the New York Academy of Sciences

Volumn 869, Issue , 1999, Pages 175-188

  Eaton, Susan C ^a  

^a Radcliffe Public Policy Institute   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

ACADEMIC ACHIEVEMENT; BIOTECHNOLOGY; CONFERENCE PAPER; EDUCATION; EMPLOYMENT; FAMILY; FEMALE; FEMALE WORKER; GENDER; HUMAN; INDUSTRY; LABORATORY; MINORITY GROUP; PERSONNEL; RESEARCH; SCIENCE; SEX DIFFERENCE;

EID: 0033045347     PISSN: 00778923     EISSN: None     Source Type: Book Series    
DOI: 10.1111/j.1749-6632.1999.tb08371.x     Document Type: Conference Paper

References (32)

1. VALIAN, V. 1998. Women in Academia. In Why so Slow? The Advancement of Women. MIT Press. Cambridge, MA. pp. 217-249.
2. BAILYN, L. 1989. Understanding individual experience at work: Comments on the theory and practice of careers. In Handbook of Career Theory. D. T. Hall, M. B. Arthur & B. S. Lawrence, Eds.: 477-489. Cambridge University Press. New York.
3. This holds true even when both tenured and tenure track positions are included, 60% of women compared to 77% of men. This controls for the differences in average age and tenure in academia between women and men.
4. RADCLIFFE PUBLIC POLICY INSTITUTE (RPPI). 1997 Human Resources Survey. Unpublished report. Radcliffe College. Cambridge, MA.
5. The research cited in this paper on the biotechnology industry was conducted under a grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to the Radcliffe Public Policy Institute at Radcliffe College and with the support of Professors Lotte Bailyn, Thomas Kochan, and the Human Resources Network at MIT. The Sloan Foundation project team includes Françoise Carré (Co-Principal Investigator), Paula Rayman (Co-Principal Investigator), Lotte Bailyn (Study Director), Ann Bookman (Study Director), Constance Perin (Study Director), Susan Eaton (Research Associate), Sandra Resnick (Research Associate), and Wendy Hernandez (Research Associate).
6. Our definition of professionals and "scientists" for this paper includes those who have achieved the Ph.D. degree in a scientific field, the M.D. or D.V.M. degree in a medical field, or the B.S. or M.S. degree in a scientific field that has been followed by either specific work experience or specialized training that permits the individual to svork independently and that allows the individual to specialize in a field. We are also interviewing technical workers, but this paper is restricted to scientific professionals. Where relevant, we have noted their degree credentials in this paper.
7. OFFICE OF TECHNOLOGY ASSESSMENT. 1991. Biotechnology in a Global Economy. Government Printing Office. Washington, DC.
8. Some of the industry characteristics cited here are drawn from work done by Sandra Resnick9 in collaboration with Françoise Carré. Biotechnology came into being as a result of revolutionary advances in biology in the 1970s. While early success in actually "designing" drugs led to excitement and a rush of financing to the industry, the pace of development did not continue as more complex diseases and product disappointments emerged in the 1980s. Most firms are concentrated in the north-eastern United States and in California.
9. RESNICK, S. 1996. Appendix: Biotechnology industry information. In Opportunities for Work and Family Integration for Professionals. Paula Rayman & Françoise Carre, Eds. Radcliffe Public Policy Institute. Cambridge, MA.
10. FEDER, B. 1997. Biotechnology: Ways to rein in the risks. NY Times. March 30.
11. POWELL, W., et al. 1996. Interorganizational collaboration and the locus of innovation: Networks of learning in biotechnology. Administr. Sci. Q. 41: 116-145.
12. RESNICK, S. 1997. Background information on the biotechnology industry-profiles. Unpublished memorandum.
13. HEWITT, P. 1997. Tufts Center for the Study of Drug Development. Personal interview with Sandra Resnick.
14. DIMASI, J. A. et al. 1991. Cost of innovation in the pharmaceutical industry. J. Health Econ. 10: 107-142.
15. Http://www.phrma.org. 1997. PHRMA Facts and Figures. Ch. 2, p. 3.
16. See definition of professionals in Ref. 6. We interviewed, in addition to 28 full-time scientists, two scientifically trained administrative professionals, including one training director and one marketing director who are employed in biotechnology firms, and we have included them in the table and in our analysis because some women take alternative routes like these after working as full- time scientists.
17. The overall study includes case studies conducted in three firms, a survey of the entire population of firms, and interviews with industry experts. One of the three firms has more manufacturing workers and is producing a larger volume of product compared to research, so the workforce is not directly comparable in focusing on professionals' careers. Although we use interview data from employees in all three firms in this paper, 90% of the scientists are employed in the two primary firms.
18. Prima was founded in the first wave of biotech companies, in the 1980s. It grew to a medium-sized company of 150 employees. It restructured in the mid-1990s and now focuses mainly on research. Prima relies on alliances for manufacture and sale of its key compounds and has two products in various stages of early clinical trials. It continues to seek partners and is in an unsettled stage of what we call the "uncertainty spiral," so it is here that we can observe the effects of severe uncertainty on employees. Segunda was founded in the early 1980s, achieved government approval of its first product, and maintains a production facility on-site. It has licensed its proprietary products to several corporate partners and actively seeks collaborations with academic institutions and industry. Segunda has also suffered setbacks and restructuring, and its ultimate success will be determined by its products in the "pipeline." Although it is more financially secure, Segunda is still in an ambiguous situation, and we witness job insecurity in a company with a medium level of uncertainty.
19. This is a relatively high percentage, 10% of all employees, in the scientists' grades. The fact that all those who work part-time are bachelor's degree-level scientific professionals may indicate that for women with doctoral degrees, part-time work is perceived as a career-limiting option.
20. Clearly, the scientists interviewed constitute a sample with potential "selection bias," in the sense that those who found the uncertainty intolerable might never have come, or might have left so they are no longer in the sample. We are in the process of following up with those scientists who have left the firms voluntarily to establish their reasons for leaving, and the influence of uncertainty. Both primary firms experienced layoffs within the two years preceding the study, but these were not primarily of scientists.
21. These characteristics of the sample are generally in line with a statewide survey conducted by RPPI, which showed that one-half of the workforce has children at home and 46% of the children were under age 5. (See Figs. 11 and 12 in Ref. 4.)
22. SONNERT, G. 1999. Women in science and engineering: Advances, challenges, and solutions. N.Y. Acad. Sci. 869: this volume.
23. AISENBERG, N. & M. HARRINGTON. 1988. Women of Academe: Outsiders in the Sacred Grove. University of Massachusetts Press. Amherst, MA.
24. BAILYN, L., et al. 1996. Relinking work and family: A catalyst for organizational change. Working Paper WP #3892-96. MIT Sloan School of Management. Cambridge, MA.
25. One CEO commented that he could hire unknown people, but he would rather work with those whose strengths and weaknesses he knows. Work observation shows that working relationships and the ability to get along with others matters in these firms where cross-disciplinary projects are the norm and not the exception. One barrier to offering new part-time jobs to women scientists, however, may be captured in one female employee's observation that a good deal of the start-up time is spent reading and getting to know the specific projects. This may make firms more reluctant to make such an investment in an initially part-time employee.
26. There is an interesting potential study here, which might also encourage compressed work weeks or other alternative schedules. Those who are able to work more effectively in fewer hours (when they have to or have an incentive to) could create new and more efficient ways of working for themselves, and perhaps for others. This is a phenomenon we have observed in other industries. BAILYN, L. 1993. Breaking the Mold: Women, Men, and Time in the New Corporate World. Free Press. New York.
27. KANTER, R. M. 1977. Men and Women of the Corporation. Basic Books. New York.
28. RAYMAN, P. & J. JACKSON. 1996. Women scientists in industry. In The Equity Equation. C-S. Davis et al, Eds.: 290-320. Jossey-Bass. San Francisco.
29. We have not explored here, but do expect to analyze in future work, the tendency for women to leave the "bench science" jobs and move into other areas of biotechnology, such as marketing, development, or administration. More than half of the human resource professionals we surveyed and have met in the industry association are women, as are a good proportion of marketing and development managers in the industry, though we do not have exact figures. This may reflect a relative lack of opportunity to move into highly responsible purely scientific jobs, or it may reflect something else at work.
30. RABINOW, P. 1996. Making PCR. University of Chicago Press. Chicago.
31. WERTH, B. 1994. The Billion Dollar Molecule: One Company's Quest for the Perfect Drug. Simon and Schuster. New York.
32. In part, the nature of the science involved here could help to explain the differences from what we observed in our study. As we understand it, firms that "discover" or "develop" drugs or proteins often rely on multiple assays to recombine them and then test them, a process that inherently takes a certain period of time. Firms that attempt to "design" drugs often work on a faster time line, since more of their work is modeling and conceptual rather than biology-based. The distinction is not always so clear, but it often seems relevant.