March-April 2005

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From the General Secretary-Gender Inequity

By Roger Bowen

Nietzsche once described justice as a "mutual adjustment between roughly equal po-wers." As those terms apply to women, justice is a long way off. Women continue to suffer from gross inequities resulting from the dominant male power structure, inertia, an absence of political will, and culture and custom.

Last winter, at roughly the same time that the AAUP released a fact sheet on gender equity in academia, the Institute for Women's Policy Research released The Status of Women in the States. I was struck, but not surprised, to see that the earnings gap between women and men is greatest in those states where women are least likely to hold managerial positions: Alabama, Arkansas, Idaho, Louisiana, Mississippi, Montana, South Carolina, and West Virginia, to name several where the problems are most acute. According to AAUP data, the ratio of average salaries for women faculty to those of men is slightly below the national ratio at public universities in most of these same states.

Most people would expect that women in the academy enjoy far better working conditions and opportunities than women in the wider society. In terms of pay, that is so: across all ranks and institutional types, women professors earn 80 percent of what men earn. The figure for women generally is 76.2 percent. This mere 3.8 percent difference is, in a word, disgraceful, but arguably less disgraceful than the 20 percent difference separating salaries for the genders in academe.

The AAUP's report On Processing Complaints of Discrimination makes clear that because "sex discrimination is seldom overt, statistical evidence is an essential tool" to discern patterns of discrimination. It looks to "salary differentials between men and women" as the first piece of evidence for proving the existence of gender discrimination, but also suggests examining other types of evidence.

One such piece of evidence is the proportion of women on the faculty. The AAUP fact sheet shows that, nationally, women make up only 38 percent of all faculty and just 33 percent of faculty at doctoral-level institutions. If women faculty wish to work in an environment in which gender is balanced, then they should logically opt to teach at a community college, where 50 percent of faculty members are women, or at a church-related school, where women make up 40 percent of the faculty. They will be a distinct minority at public and private-independent institutions.

Another measure, less clearly spelled out by the AAUP, is the proportion of women in each rank. A perverse "balance" can be found at the lower ranks of the professoriate, where women hold a solid majority of the positions (58 percent of instructorships, 54 percent of lectureships, and 51 percent of unranked positions). But women are poorly represented at the upper ranks, where only 23 percent of all full professors are women. Women faculty members, in brief, tend to suffer lower pay and rank than their male colleagues.

The AAUP has issued policy statements about gender discrimination, endorsed affirmative action, provided procedures for correcting imbalances, and offered approaches to dealing with sexual harassment. But the AAUP, like the larger society, has failed to achieve gender justice in the academy, sadly evidenced by the dismal fact that the salary gap between men and women faculty has not improved over the past twenty-five years. What is to be done?

The feature report in this issue of Academe recommends creating a gender equity index to expose inequities; yet shaming violators of gender justice is no guarantee that reform will follow. More aggressive steps may need to be taken. Identification of campuses where gender inequities are obvious and persistent should be followed by development of strategies—both political and legal—for correction. Political approaches include conversing directly with the administrations of those campuses, publicizing inequities in campus newspapers, and working with colleagues to develop specific steps for forcing corrective action. Legal strategies include consulting experts in gender discrimination and local AAUP chapter leaders, followed by identifying legal counsel who have a proven record for accurately interpreting and aggressively acting on gender-equity reviews. Filing a complaint with the U.S. Department of Labor or with the Equal Employment Opportunity Com-mission can be used as a final resort.

"To know but not to act is not to know," observed a seventeenth-century Confucian scholar. Otherwise put, not to act to correct a known wrong is to condone the wrong. The AAUP is obliged to use its considerable expertise to battle gender discrimination in the academy, to foster a Nietzschean "adjustment" that makes academic justice between two roughly equal parties possible.