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Universities Pledge to Treat Women Faculty Better
Nine research universities agreed in January to improve their treatment of women faculty in the sciences and engineering. The agreement came after a meeting between women scientists and senior administrators from the California Institute of Technology; Harvard University; the Massachusetts Institute of Technology; Princeton University; Stanford University; the University of California, Berkeley; the University of Michigan at Ann Arbor; the University of Pennsylvania; and Yale University. The meeting was initiated by MIT president Charles Vest, who invited the presidents of the other universities and asked each one to bring along another administrator and two women scientists.
"It was a remarkable day—some years ago no one could have believed that the presidents of these universities would get together to talk about this issue," says Lotte Bailyn, an MIT faculty member who was instrumental in forming a committee that studied the status of women science faculty at MIT in the 1990s.
A 1999 report issued by that committee noted that although women faculty said they had adequate support at the start of their MIT careers, they felt increasingly marginalized as their careers progressed. The report concluded that data showed that tenured women faculty, even when they were as accomplished as male colleagues, often received worse treatment in the areas of salary, space, awards, resources, and counteroffers to job offers from other institutions. It also noted that as of 1994 the percentage of women on the faculty of MIT’s School of Science had held steady at about 8 percent for a decade or two.
While critical of conditions at MIT, the report also praised administrators for responding quickly once they became aware of the problems. For example, after receiving an interim report from the committee in 1995, the dean of MIT’s School of Science took immediate steps to address inequities and to recruit more women faculty, bringing the percentage up to 10 percent. Indeed, the MIT administration has been unusually welcoming of the criticism; in a preface to the 1999 study, MIT president Charles Vest commended the study and asked the MIT faculty to act on it "personally and collectively."
The statement approved by the leaders of the nine universities said that barriers to the "full participation" of women in science and engineering still exist. It outlined goals for the future, including a faculty whose diversity reflects that of the students; equity for, and full participation by, women faculty; and an academic atmosphere in which family responsibilities are not a disadvantage. The institutions agreed to reconvene to discuss progress toward these objectives.
"The fact that they all recognize that there still are barriers, and that time alone won’t fix them, is remarkable," says Bailyn. "But this is not going to be solved overnight, and solutions require a lot of hard work, so we will have to wait and see what happens."
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