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Victory for Gender Equity in Rhode Island
By Hans P. Johnson
Faculty advocates for gender equity praised a settlement reached in late March between administrators at the University of Rhode Island and the local AAUP chapter over a grievance filed by the AAUP on behalf of women faculty in the College of Engineering. Under the terms of the resolution, the university's president and provost and the college's dean admitted responsibility for allowing a "hostile climate toward women" to persist in the college, where men predominate in faculty positions and in the student body.
Deborah Pence, a faculty member at the college who left the university in 1998, was one of the women who initiated the grievance under provisions of the university's contract with the AAUP chapter, which serves as the bargaining agent for professors. The settlement requires the college's dean and associate dean to distribute research funding and lab space more equitably, to open the college to an external audit of gender equity in its functions, and to take steps to support the research of its two remaining women faculty members, who agreed to withdraw grievances of their own upon the settlement.
"It's a wake-up call to other campuses for settling issues like gender equity that are boiling under the surface," says Bill Ohley, a professor of electrical and computer engineering and president of the URI chapter. "Without the collective bargaining agreement, we wouldn't have had any remedies, and this would have been swept under the rug or tied up in lengthy, costly litigation." As it was, he reports, the settlement followed nineteen months of negotiations.
Pence, now a professor of mechanical engineering at Oregon State University, told Academe that another female faculty member gave up her position at the college before Pence did, citing concerns similar to those Pence and her two fellow grievants expressed. "We may have been only 5 percent of the faculty there," says Pence, "but we were 100 percent of the female faculty. I'm a scientist, and if 100 percent of the subjects in my research indicate a problem, then I need to take that seriously."
Thanks in part to the settlement, Ohley says that the college now has a diversity committee that is "trying to do proactive things." He reports that administrators also agreed to create a new associate deanship devoted to addressing diversity concerns. "I think it's time for the university to recognize that it's not a white-bread, male-only world anymore."
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