Acknowledging that women face hurdles in the fields of science and engineering, the leaders of nine of the nation’s top universities have vowed to work together and individually toward “equity and full participation” of their women faculty members.
The university leaders made their statement after recently gathering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a group of women professors became folk heroines of a sort two years ago after producing a detailed analysis of inequities that prompted the institution to admit that it had unintentionally discriminated against women.
That widely publicized admission prompted women at other universities to say they had been reporting the same problem–to deaf ears–for years.
A statement issued after the meeting of university provosts and presidents promised that the institutions would work toward diversity in their faculties, equity for women in compensation and resources and policies that do not unduly burden women with families. They also promised to produce and share annual reports on salaries, resources and hiring, and to include women in their analyses.
“We recognize that this challenge will require significant review of, and potentially significant change in, the procedures within each university, and within scientific and engineering establishments as a whole,” the statement said.
Charles M. Vest, president of MIT, said, “This is a clear and unambiguous recognition that there do remain barriers, that we face significant issues in getting the full participation of women.”
The meeting included presidents, provosts and a handful of faculty members from Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the University of California at Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology.
Simply requiring the sharing of data on salaries, hiring and resources is an accomplishment for the equity advocates. When the women at MIT began to work on their report about bias in 1994, after a casual conversation revealed shared frustrations with their work, several administrators initially blocked their efforts to get the information they requested.
Vest acknowledged that the one-page declaration did not contain many specifics. But the group has promised to share details of what each campus does to address the problem in the next year. “If you think about where we were a year ago,” he said, “when we were worried about whether other institutions would recognize there is a problem, this is a pretty good piece of work.”
After the original report by the MIT women, the Ford Foundation gave the institute a $1 million grant to promote similar efforts on other campuses, and the meeting was part of that effort.
“One of the things that was heartening to me was the recognition on the part of top universities that this is not a one-shot deal, it’s a long-term problem that requires continual monitoring,” said Barbara J. Grosz, a professor of computer science at Harvard, who attended the meeting.
“What was extraordinary was that people who came to the meeting started with the agreement that there was a problem,” Grosz said, “then jumped in, discussing how they might go about approaching the problem.”
The original MIT report was attacked by Judith S. Kleinfeld, a University of Alaska psychology professor who has criticized studies suggesting schools shortchange girls, as being light on data and heavy on political correctness. (The data on hiring and salaries was eliminated from the final report to the MIT faculty because it was confidential.)
Even at MIT, profound change has yet to occur.
“I don’t think we are kidding anybody that in this period of time gigantic progress has been made,” Vest said. Still, he said, the study by the initial group of women in MIT’s School of Science has been replicated in the institute’s other schools. Permanent councils on equity and diversity have been established, and there have been gains in the number of women earning tenure, and in salaries for women faculty members.
Nancy Hopkins, a noted biologist who led the initial MIT effort, said: “It’s a different world for women now. But the question is, how do you institutionalize it so it will last for the next generation? You have to change the behavior of 800, 900 faculty in the institution, because that’s where the day-to-day work is, no matter how many administrators have recognized what you’re saying is true.”
