found that widespread ideas about women's and men's differences were largely irrelevant, including theories advanced such as cognitive abilities or preferences, career aspirations and ambition, or productivity and work ethic issues. Finally, the report reviews a number of potential solutions and makes a variety of recommendations to level the playing field and "stop the leaks" in the leaky pipeline. These steps include~~ Different types of reform that will help mitigate eliminate biases. National Academy of Sciences alteration of academic procedures for hiring and evaluation ("promotion and tenure"), at the institutional level; additional support for working parents at the institutional level; efforts across the field to monitor hiring practices efforts to institute blind-review in peer review processes to eliminate gender bias; and other efforts. Reception and influence The report was widely well-received, received significant media coverage, and sparked a number of institutional-level meetings in the months after its release. In general its even-handed and data-rich approach was lauded, although John Tierney, a New York Times opinion columnist, suggested that the report must have been biased because its committee was largely made up of women. In response, Donna Shalala denied that the gender of the scientists biased their scientific findings, and pointed out that while the committee itself was largely made up of women, the committee's work was peer-reviewed by a National Academy of Sciences committee of 19 that included 10 men. A number of educational institutions held meetings or established committees to implement recommendations from the report, including Harvard University, M.I.T., University of Texas, Iowa State University, University of Wisconsin–Madison, Boston University, Stanford University, and the National Science Foundation, The American Council on Education (ACE), a higher education umbrella organization, took the recommendation from the report to monitor hiring practices, and agreed to convene its member organizations to examine ways to do so. The American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) also convened a meeting at its annual conference. Critics have pointed out that in comparing the representation of women in the hiring pool (recent PhD recipients) versus among recent hires (assistant professors), approximations were used as mentioned in Notes on page 17 of the report; these overestimated both the representation and the utilization of women. One was taking the representation of women among professors from the Survey of Earned Doctorates; as noted in the report, this ignored all professors who received their PhDs abroad. Also data from the Survey