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Report Says Women Faculty Still Marginalized
Faculty committees at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology issued reports this spring on the status of women faculty in MIT’s schools of architecture and planning; engineering; humanities, arts, and social sciences; and management. The reports follow an influential 1999 analysis of the status of women faculty members in the school of science, which found that women were often marginalized and treated unequally with regard to office or lab space, decision-making power, and compensation. The 1999 study prompted reform efforts at MIT and at other institutions.
The new reports, issued in March 2002, conclude that problems faced by women in the other schools are similar to those in the school of science: marginalization, isolation resulting from having few female peers, and difficulty in balancing work and family responsibilities. The reports note that marginalization occurs when women are excluded from professional activities, often through an accumulation of incidents that, in isolation, do not appear important. For example, women in some departments reported that they were not asked to serve on the Ph.D. thesis committees of the students of their male colleagues or on faculty search committees. They said they were also excluded from participation in group grants.
The small number of women professors at MIT—overall, they compose just 16 percent of the faculty—is attributable partly to the fact that most faculty members at the institution are in science or engineering, fields in which there are many more men than women. Although the overall number of women on MIT’s faculty has increased by 60 percent (from 96 to 154) since 1990, the reports say that the proportion of women in many departments does not reflect the proportion of women doctoral recipients in those fields. Women of color are particularly underrepresented in all departments, according to the studies. With regard to work and family issues, the committees found that many women faculty members referred to having greater responsibilities than their male colleagues for caring for children and aging parents.
The committees found that past salary inequities in three of the four schools studied had been corrected in recent years, partly in response to the committees’ work and reform efforts. Like the 1999 report on the school of science, the new reports question whether outside job offers from other institutions play too large a role in compensation decisions and whether they favor men, since women may be less likely to have spouses who are willing to follow them to a new job and may be taken less seriously when they say they are considering such a move.
Despite the persistence of problems, the reports are optimistic and praise the commitment of MIT’s president and other administrators both to "quick fixes" to specific inequities and to the development of long-term solutions to prevent further inequities from arising. The reports’ authors note that the 1999 study occasioned some surprise that an influential piece of social analysis had come from an institution focused on science and engineering. The authors speculate that the problem-solving mindset typical of engineers is an asset for such a study: "A confident belief that data-gathering, analysis, design of goals, and development of metrics can solve most problems may give MIT the courage to try to change societal problems as elusive even as gender bias."
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