Thought I'd pass this along from the Tomorrow's Professor Listserve which
has had some great articles for grad students, post-docs and junior
faculty about teaching, faculty, careers, etc.
My 2 electrons,
Brian
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Folks:
In Feburary, 1998 I attended a conference at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology, on the role of women in higher education. Of all the co-ed
schools in the U.S., my guess would be in the entire world, M.I.T. has the
highest percentage of undergraduate women majoring in science and
engineering. The conference was designed to address the issues faced by
women graduate students, postdocs, and faculty.
The article below, from the March 23, 1999 issue of the New York Times, is
to some extent an outgrowth of this conference and and update on the
situation.
Regards,
Rick Reis
reis at cdr.stanford.edu
-------------------1,041 words --------------------
MIT ADMITS DISCRIMINATION AGAINST FEMALE PROFESSORS
BY CAREY GOLDBERG
New York Times
March 23, 1999
CAMBRIDGE, Mass. -- In an extraordinary admission, top officials at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology, the most prestigious science and
engineering university in the country, have issued a report acknowledging
that its female professors suffer from pervasive, if unintentional,
discrimination.
``I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within
universities is part reality and part perception,'' the university's
president, Charles Vest, said in comments to be published in the faculty
newsletter within days and already posted on its Web site. ``True, but I
now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance.''
Vest's comments introduced a report five years in the making that documents
a pattern of sometimes subtle -- but substantive and demoralizing --
discrimination in areas from hiring, awards, promotions and inclusion on
important committees to allocation of valuable resources like laboratory
space and research money.
Such discrimination, national experts say, continues and in some way has
worsened at institutions across the country, despite the growing number of
female professors. In a report issued last month, the American Association
of University Professors found that although women make up 34 percent of
faculties nationwide, up from 23 percent in 1975, the gap between salaries
for male and female professors widened in that period.
And Stanford University officials confirmed last month that the U.S. Labor
Department is investigating whether their university engaged
in``widespread'' gender discrimination and violated federal affirmative
action law. The investigation had its origins in a complaint brought by
more than a dozen female researchers at Stanford who sent federal
investigators a 400-page report last year alleging gender discrimination
and affirmative-action lapses.
Remedies on the way
Female faculty members involved with the MIT report say they do not believe
the institute discriminates more than other top-flight universities; it is
simply more willing to admit it and address the problem. A push to increase
the number of tenured female professors is already under way, the report
says, along with other efforts to redress inequities in the allocation of
resources.
The MIT administration's comments on the report ``are the most
forward-looking statements on gender discrimination that I've read by a
high-ranking administrator in one of these elite institutions in the 25
years I've been a faculty member,'' said Nancy Hopkins, a prominent
molecular biologist and an initiator of the committee that issued the
report.
Robert Birgeneau, dean of the School of Science, the section of MIT that
was the focus of the report, said Monday that he believed the university
was unusual in its willingness to make such a document public. He also
noted in his written comments: ``I believe that in no case was this
discrimination conscious or deliberate. Indeed, it was usually totally
unconscious and unknowing. Nevertheless, the effects were real.''
Real, but hard to pin down until three tenured female professors in the
School of Science started to compare notes in the summer of 1994. As the
report describes, they decided to poll their other female colleagues,which
was not difficult because in the entire School of Science, there were only
15 tenured women, compared with 194 men.
In fact, the report notes, the percentage of the School of Science faculty
who are women, 8 percent, has remained virtually unchanged for perhaps 20
years. And that, too, seemed a problem, with no sign of improving on its
own.
By August 1994, the female faculty members in the School of Science
proposed creating an initiative to improve the status of women in the
school -- to which Birgeneau readily agreed -- and, being scientists, they
began to collect data on everything from the allocation of laboratory space
to the amount of research money professors had apply for themselves instead
of being handed it by the university.
`It was data-driven,'' Birgeneau said of the report, ``and that's a very
MIT thing.''
Other studies at other schools have found women consistently paid and
promoted less, said Martha West, a professor of law at the University of
California-Davis and a member of the American Association of University
Professors' committee on the status of women. But, she said of the MIT
report, ``what's amazing about this is the president's acknowledging that
there is a `scientific' basis for our continual perception that things are
not good for us. And my perception is that things have been getting worse,
not better, for women over the last 10 years.''
Birgeneau said participants in the report had not examined its legal
implications. Laying the statistical basis for the report involved
fact-finding that uncovered some interesting wrinkles. For one, junior
female faculty tended to feel untouched by discrimination; it was only as
they became senior faculty, and competed for real power, that they felt
themselves increasingly marginalized and overlooked by male-dominated
networks. And that did not seem to improve with time,the report found.
Another interesting aspect of the process was the dawning comprehension
among the faculty, men and women both, who participated in the report that
they really were seeing a pattern of discrimination, not a set of
individual cases, all of which had ``special circumstances.''
Uncovering reasons
Each little slight to a woman might involve an assumption that served as an
explanation: say, that a single woman might seem to need a raise less than
a family man, or that a woman might be less likely to seek an outside job
offer to propel her promotion, or that it might seem implausible that a
woman with children could work hard enough for a given job. But they all
added up.
The women ``needed to prove to themselves almost at the level of scientific
proof that this was really not fair before they had the conviction to
act,'' Hopkins said.
The tenured female faculty members and the dean, the report says, ``found
that discrimination consists of a pattern of powerful but unrecognized
assumptions and attitudes that work systematically against female faculty
even in the light of obvious good will. Like many discoveries, at first it
is startling and unexpected. Once you `get it,' it seems almost obvious.''
The report, first reported on in Sunday's Boston Globe, recommended
vigilance, noting that in the School of Science, there has never yet been a
female department head or even associate head. It made a raft of
recommendations, including a yearly collection of ``equity data'' and the
dismissal of administrators who knowingly discriminated.
It also pointed out that there was still a long way to go.
IF YOU'RE INTERESTED
The MIT report is published at http://web.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html.
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My 2 electrons,
Brian
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