Lower salaries. Smaller labs. Fewer committee assignments. A 1999 faculty study at MIT showed that women teaching in the School of Science routinely experienced discrimination. And, most stunning to the academic world, MIT admitted it.
At MIT's invitation, the presidents of Stanford and seven other prominent research institutions came together on the Cambridge campus in January to make another very public statement: "We recognize that barriers still exist to the full participation of women in science and engineering." In five brief paragraphs, the men who lead MIT, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, the University of Pennsylvania, UC-Berkeley, the University of Michigan-Ann Arbor and Caltech pledged to diversify their faculties, share information about how salaries and resources are assigned and ensure that professors with "family responsibilities" are not "disadvantaged."
In a speech to the Stanford community six weeks later, President John Hennessy said his administration would "monitor and guard against inequities in the hiring and promotion of any individual." He also comMITted to "continue the process of adding more women and people of color to both our faculty and staff." Vice provost for faculty development Pat Jones, who also attended the MIT meeting, will assemble an advisory committee to focus on the status of women faculty.
"We think our chairs and deans are making appropriate decisions in terms of setting salaries and assigning lab space, and we expect that gender is not a factor in those decisions," says Jones, a highly regarded specialist in immunology who was the first woman to chair the biology department. "But we think the central administration has a very important leadership role and an important role in vigilance over these processes."
According to some who've monitored the progress of female faculty, Hennessy and the other university presidents' willingness to openly acknowledge and address gender inequity could make a difference. "It's a very hopeful step, and it could be a first step in building a new consciousness," says education professor Myra Strober, one of four Stanford representatives at the MIT meeting. "But I'd say the jury is still out."
Stanford has been grappling with the question of how to increase the percentage of women on the faculty for years. In 1993, Strober chaired a committee that found the University was "seriously lagging with respect to recruitment and retention" of women. Today, she says, the numbers still tell a "sad story," particularly in the sciences and engineering. As of September 1999, women represented 8 percent of the engineering faculty and 12 percent of the natural sciences faculty.
While that's "not bad compared to the national figures," Jones says, it is "much lower than we want it to be." The so-called pipeline--women enrolled in PhD programs in the sciences and engineering--is "very leaky" today, she observes, as students increasingly choose careers in industry over academia.
And the number in the pipeline is not exactly robust to begin with. As of 1997, about 18 percent of the enrollees in undergraduate and master's-level engineering courses, and 12 percent of those in doctoral-level courses, were women. Sheri Sheppard, the only tenured woman on Stanford's 36-member mechanical engineering faculty, is conducting a yearlong study at the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching to figure out why young women are being turned off by engineering classes--and what can be done to bring them back.
Sheppard believes her department must aggressively recruit more women faculty. But she thinks University administrators have to provide clear leadership. "A message from the president is a good start," she says. "But how does that message get implemented at the level of department chairs and senior faculty making decisions? How do you judge earnestness, and how will we as an institution hold ourselves accountable?"
The 35 students in Engineering: Women's Perspectives, a seminar Sheppard teaches, have more immediate questions about the dearth of female faculty and the dismissive attitudes they perceive from many senior professors. At the final meeting of the class in March, they put their concerns to engineering dean Jim Plummer.
"Is it a matter of time, waiting for junior faculty to move up?" one student wanted to know. "Or is there something we can do now to help create a more woman-friendly environment?" Plummer, ms '67, PhD '71, promised to talk with department chairs the following week and agreed to meet regularly with the students.
"Something that really bothers me is that engineering is such a dynamic discipline and it's always changing, but changing the dynamics and increasing the population of women is harder than adopting the latest computer technology," Plummer said. "It's an agonizingly slow process."
