For Graduate Women Who Aspire to be Faculty Members

This conference was focused on the status of women faculty but much of this information should be of interest to graduate students as well. A very broad range of material was presented, of which the following is an all-too-brief summary.

	The bad news: women are still under-represented and underpaid in the upper echelons of the academy
	The good news: useful new work is being done, not only examining the complex reasons for the bad news but also demonstrating how it can be successfully addressed

The Old Story

An overview

No institution has met its own goal for hiring female faculty! This recruitment pattern was reported by a number of different women: hiring the first woman into a department is hard, the next few are easier but when the numbers reach around 20-25% of the faculty, there is great concern about the lack of men and the hiring of women slows down.

Tenure is still very male-dominated. Although the increase in women Ph.D.s will take time to work through the promotion system, it is also true that the process keeps women junior longer, i.e. women take longer to get tenure, compared to the male colleagues. And too many women are "off the ladder" in jobs that do not lead to tenured positions.

Although qualified women may be scarce in the hard sciences and mathematics, those who do exist are not women being hired in the same proportion as men.

Salaries

Nearly a quarter of male faculty at research universities earn $70,000 or more, compared to only 6% of the female faculty. Part of this is that the distribution of men and women across fields has not changed significantly, even though the number of female Ph.D.s has increased. Meanwhile salary dispersion between the fields has increased (e.g. the salary gap between engineers and classicists is bigger than it used to be). However women faculty still earn less than men even after you account for field, age, family status, publications, institutions etc. etc. One study tried 47 different control variables in combination but still found that gender was a significant factor in determining salary.

One paper argued that working conditions and the costs of getting Ph.D.s are insufficient to explain the gender differential and that men have economic and prestige incentives to try and keep women out of the more lucrative fields.

Productivity

Two studies looked at the differences in publication output between men and women between 1969 and 1993. Women did have lower publication rates than men but this difference disappeared when one took account of other factors such as:

	Background (time to Ph.D., experience as a faculty member)
	Career characteristics and resources (institution, funding, rank, teaching load etc.)
	Family (on this, women in research universities are more likely to be single or divorced than the average)

The new stories

A new issue: Retention

The "3 R's": Whilst recruitment is an old issue (see above), the new issues for university administrations (as articulated by our very own) are the other two "Rs": Retention and Retirement. Retention is a particular issue for female faculty, who are leaving the profession in disproportionate numbers. It is clearly not enough merely to recruit female faculty: they need to be retained, and this has proved difficult.

Why is retention a problem?

Although women are clearly voting with their feet, it is difficult to articulate, let alone chart the new issues that they now face. These issues are changing, complex and multidimensional in nature. Survey research provides some indicators.

	Women faculty suffer "extreme stress" in greater numbers (44%) than do male faculty (28%).
	When asked about the causes of that stress the women cited the same factors as the men but added "subtle discrimination" and a lack of personal time.
	When male and female faculty were asked about the skills that were important for a graduate student to succeed, female faculty not only said that women had to be better all around, but they put a particular stress on the importance of interactive skills for women to succeed.

New solutions

A number of different programs were reported. The exciting one was a very successful program at the Department of Medicine at Johns Hopkins. As a result of an initiative by the (male) head of that department, and with the benefit of his continuing support, the department was able to institute a long term (15 year) multi-factorial intervention which, although still underway, has already had very promising results.

The first phase was an anonymous survey of the faculty to identify the obstacles that women faced. The most exciting part about the survey was the way in which it articulated a number of informal and subtle problems. For example, isolation was a particular problem for women, but it was recognized as having many varieties: women were isolated from colleagues, from leadership, from recognition, from quality mentoring and from the chance to gain the information and skills necessary for development.

In the second phase a multi-faceted long term program was developed that sought to address the complex and multiple obstacles that women faced. A number of different interventions addressed faculty education about gender discrimination and the isolation of female faculty, procedures were implemented to ensure that women were evaluated for promotion and salary increases as often as men.

Monitoring and evaluation are also important components of the Hopkins program. Initial results after the first five years were already very promising. Both men and women recognized that gender discrimination in their department had decreased. Women were much more likely to expect to stay in academic medicine - and so were the men.

From this experience we can learn that real change is possible. It is possible to articulate the "informal and subtle" obstacles that women face and to deal with them. It is clear that the Hopkins success stemmed from a long term program designed to meet a complex set of local needs and that other programs need to recognize the complex multi-faceted nature of their local needs.

The Hopkins program was aided by strong support from the departmental leadership. Interestingly the program improved how the men felt about their careers as well, suggesting that some of the interventions that can reduce the gender gap will also benefit male faculty, especially junior male faculty. More information about this program is available in the following article: "Career Development for Women in Academic Medicine" Fried et. al, JAMA, September 18, l996, Vol 276, No. 11. Copies are available from the Women's Center.

New sources of hope?

The research university is under pressure to change: does this afford a new opportunity to improve the position of women within the institution? Universities are facing new types of students and there is a concomitant need for new forms of pedagogy. It was argued that women may be able to make a distinctive contribution in meeting these new demands, a factor which may increase their power to demand change. This was based on survey research that showed that female faculty had different value orientations compared to their male colleagues. They were more focused on student-centered pedagogy and thought it was important to teach personal development and civic responsibility to their students. Unlike their male counterparts, female faculty valued teaching over research (this was reflected in their allocation of time).

It was also suggested that women had often had community connections and strengths in fundraising which could help to make them more powerful. This perhaps reflects the fact that female faculty valued service to their institution and community as professional goals (again, unlike their male counterparts).

It mnay also be worth noting that the older predominantly male tenured faculty are finally retiring, which means new opportunities for women to finally achieve promotion.

In conclusion

Whilst there are still no simple or universal solutions, being conscious of these issues helps (thank you for reading this far!). There is still potential for activism:

	We need to keep researching: there is a continuing need to replicate studies, to demonstrate again that these problems have not been solved and that they are still a problem. We need to keep organizing.
	Even if the new issues require local solutions, wider organizations help us to share information: about how to articulate the issues as well as about the kind of changes that are needed and how to campaign for them. For example CUWFA is an organization which looks at family issues and can provide information about the solutions that other institutions have tried.
	On a personal note, this conference demonstrated to me that none of us need to feel alone in facing these problems: others share them and can help us to solve them.

As a follow up to the conference there should be an ongoing e-mail list - contact mbaum@princeton.edu to be included. Also the conference proceedings should be published next year (1999).

Details

The conference was sponsored by the Committee for the Equality of Women at Harvard. It took place 13-14 November 1998 at Harvard / Radcliffe Cambridge, Massachusetts. Three women from Princeton University attended, Amanda Dickins (Politics Department,), Heidi Swanson (German Department) and Mary Baum (Administration).

Any further questions?

You might like to know that the reports and other materials we brought back from the conference are deposited with the Women's Center. These include an article describing the Johns Hopkins program in more detail as well as statistical information on women in academia from which the figures given above were extracted.

In addition, I would be happy to talk about my experience of the conference with anyone who missed the presentation that Heidi and I gave on our return from the conference. I can be contacted at adickins@princeton.edu