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RHODE: Disparities favor men.
David Weintraub |
AT A TIME when women comprise
40 percent of all faculty and senior staff at the nation’s
colleges and universities, the percentage of tenured
women on the Stanford faculty hovers at 17.4 percent—up
3 percent from five years ago. While the number of women
in leadership positions has improved with several key
appointments in recent years—three of the seven
schools now have women deans—a new report from
the provost’s office finds that “ensuring
gender equity in the academic workplace remains a challenge
for higher education in general and Stanford in particular.”
Three years in the making, the report is the work of
the 13-member Provost’s Advisory Committee on
the Status of Women Faculty. The committee was launched
in 2001, after University president John Hennessy met
in Cambridge, Mass., with the presidents of eight other
leading research universities—Caltech, Harvard,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, University of
Michigan-Ann Arbor, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton,
UC-Berkeley and Yale. The nine men convened for the
first MIT Conference on Gender Equity in Sciences and
Engineering in the turbulent wake of a 1999 MIT faculty
study that showed women in those fields routinely experienced
discrimination.
“The data reflect partial progress,” committee
chair and law professor Deborah Rhode says about the
176-page report on women at Stanford. “The University
has paid quite substantial attention to pay-equity issues
for obvious reasons—those are the easiest to quantify,
and there are obvious legal implications that follow
from failure to address them. But I think one of the
striking findings is that while there’s been enormous
progress, there’s still progress that remains
to be made.”
The overall picture of gender equity on the Farm is
“mixed and complicated,” according to the
executive summary. For the first time, faculty were
asked so-called “quality of life” questions
about professional satisfaction, workload and academic
climate.
While there are no significant gender differences in
overall faculty satisfaction at Stanford, the report
notes the low representation of women, particularly
women of color, in certain fields, as well as the frequency
of “perceived disadvantages due to gender.”
What’s more, Rhode says, there is a “unidirectional”
pattern of differences campuswide. “Whenever disparities
occur, virtually all involve men receiving higher compensation
and support than women.”
The report makes 18 recommendations for recruiting,
retaining, compensating and supporting women, and vice
provost for faculty development Pat Jones says the University
is committed to seeing that they are implemented. On-campus
child care is at the top of the administration’s
concerns. With 500 names on the waiting list, she says,
discussion about another on-campus center “is
taking place at the highest levels.”
A highly regarded specialist in immunology and the first
woman to chair the biology department, Jones has seen
the number of women biologists at Stanford climb from
one when she was hired in 1972 to 13 today, comprising
28 percent of her department’s professoriate.
Jones put discussion of the advisory committee’s
report on the agenda at the annual meeting of department
chairs and also met with faculty late in September to
talk about the findings.
The 2004 Stanford report comes five years after the
U.S. Department of Labor launched a still-open investigation
into Stanford’s hiring and promotion of women
faculty, and more than 10 years after a 1993 report
by the Provost’s Committee on the Recruitment
and Retention of Women Faculty, chaired by education
professor Myra Strober. At the time of that study, women
comprised 11.2 percent of the tenured faculty, and many
of them, according to the new document, felt “isolated,
unsupported and overburdened.”
“We pointed to the need for changing the culture
of support,” Strober said in a recent interview.
“The way I view the new report is that change
is taking place slowly, the percentage of women faculty
is increasing, the salary equity is getting better,
child care is getting better and women’s leadership
is getting better.”
Sociologist Cecilia Ridgeway, whom the provost has invited
to speak to meetings of department chairs about gender
equity and stereotype biases, commends the University’s
stated desire to increase the representation of women
in the professoriate and to address their professional
well-being.
Avoiding lawsuits, “keeping the feds off your
back, maintaining good press—all those externalities
are best accomplished by just being better at it,”
Ridgeway says. “The current administration knows
it’s the right thing and the smart thing to do.”
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