By Kevin Lee
Daily Bruin Contributor
Gender inequality among University of California professors is
among the issues currently at the forefront of university
concerns.
In a UC-wide effort to increase awareness of gender equity, 18
female UC faculty members testified at a State Senate’s
Select Committee on Government Oversight hearing Jan. 31.
State Sen. Jackie Speier, D-Hillsborough, organized the hearing
in response to complaints by various UC women faculty on the
disproportion and relative career success of women faculty compared
to men.
Carole Goldberg, a UCLA law professor and President of the
Association of Academic Women, was one of the faculty members who
testified at the hearing.
In her speech, Goldberg noted that women in the UC system are
mostly concentrated in the “non-ladder,” entry-level
faculty positions, where they normally receive heavy teaching
burdens, low pay and little consideration for promotion to the
“ladder”.
The “ladder” is a system which ranks professors at
different levels according to a hierarchy. It is instituted at most
universities.
Goldberg advised a repeal of SP-2 and Proposition 209, which
ended affirmative action in university hiring and in state hiring
and admissions, respectively.
UCLA conducted its own study on gender equity, published Oct.
2000 titled “Gender Equity Issues Affecting Senate Faculty at
UCLA.”
Co-chair of the committee that produced the report, planetary
physics professor Margaret Kivelson could see a lack of female
faculty in her own department .
“There are only two women out of 28 faculty in my
department,” Kivelson said.
According to the report, the hiring of women faculty at UCLA did
not reflect their availability. This disproportion was especially
pronounced in the sciences, engineering, and the Anderson School at
UCLA.
“I find it very inspiring when I do see female professors
in my science courses,” said Sherry Liu, a third-year
electrical engineering student. “At UCLA, I’ve only had
three female professors, which is an average of one per
year.”
Women faculty at UCLA are 4 percent less likely than men to
reach the rank of full professor and 6.7 percent less likely to
reach the highest Step VI level.
University faculty go through a series of steps in their
professorship, Step VI being the highest level. To reach Step
VI, the faculty member needs to be reviewed by the central campus,
not just by their own department. The candidate must also
essentially be an internationally renowned scholar, according to UC
Davis law professor Martha West.
“Step VI in itself is a giant step,” said West, who
also testified at the senate hearing. “It is also of course a
very big salary step.”
The UCLA report was inspired by a similar report done in 1999 at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology ““ a university that
spearheaded the movement towards gender equity.
The senate hearing revealed that there is only a small
percentage of women faculty with higher positions in the UC
system.
One of four faculty members are women, according to statistics
from the UC Office of the President.
“Women faculty salaries are on the average 10 percent and
12 percent lower than that of men,” West said.
Statistics at the hearing showed that women made up a record 37
percent of new hires by the university in 1994, but only 27
percent in 1998 ““ a year when 48 percent American doctoral
recipients were women. Â
UC Santa Cruz Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood, who spoke on behalf
of the UCOP, acknowledged that there is an underrepresentation of
women in UC faculty, but defended the institution’s record by
noting that the system had substantially more female faculty
members than other top institutions such as Harvard University and
the MIT.
But West disagrees with the accuracy of the UCOP statistics,
saying that the the President’s office deliberately chose
years when female faculty hiring was highest when compiling the
data, instead of using all of the years.
Another point discussed at the hearing was how the academic
career of a UC professor is biased against women. West said that
most professors acquire tenure at age 30, a time when most women
are ready to have children. Statistics show the decline of female
faculty hirings and proportion of women entering ladder ranks
followed the 1996 passage of Proposition 209, which ended the
consideration of race and gender in college admissions and
hiring.
But West said Proposition 209 should not have had an effect on
women faculty hiring.
“Regardless of Proposition 209, we have always been
subject to federal and state law, which have prohibited sex
discrimination in university employment since 1972,” West
said in her testimony. “The consistent gap between the
percentage of women with Ph.D.s and the percentage of women among
new faculty hires indicates a significant statistical measure of
discrimination”
U.S. Executive order 11246 states that every employer who
contracts with the federal government for $50,000 or more, and has
50 or more employees, must maintain employment affirmative action
plans.
“The president of MIT has been the only president of a
major university to admit that there is a problem with gender
equity at their school,” West said.
UC Assistant Vice President for Academic Advancement Ellen
Switkes told the San Francisco Chronicle Feb. 8 that gender equity
was something UCOP did not specifically pay attention to.
“After 209, other things came up and the focus that has
been on our diversity in hiring just faded away,” Switkes
told The Chronicle “It is easy, if there isn’t
squawking, to neglect it.”
The UC system is aggressively hiring to keep pace with
anticipated growth in enrollment and expects to hire more than
7,000 faculty members over the next 10 years, according to UCOP
statements.
UC is doing well in some areas with respect to gender equity. In
letters and languages, UC hired 46.9 percent female faculty in the
years after the affirmative action ban, just below the national
hiring pool of 49.3 percent and its own doctoral graduates of 48.5
percent, according to UCOP statistics.
While each of the UC’s 600 departments does its own
hiring, UC President Richard Atkinson is meeting with the
chancellors of the system’s nine campuses this week,
emphasizing that faculty need to be vigilant about including women
and minorities in hiring searches.
Campuses are being encouraged to hire fewer experienced faculty
where there is a more diverse pool of applicants. To find them, the
UC plans to create a system-wide database of graduate students
working on dissertations.
Leaders of the nation’s top universities, including UC
Berkeley, Stanford and Harvard, met recently at the MIT and made an
unprecedented admission that even though women earned 43 percent of
the doctorate degrees, they still faced a continuing, and, in some
cases, increasing disparity in hiring.
FEMALE FACULTY
UC female faculty hires 1989-1999
SOURCE: University of California Office of the President
Original by VICTOR CHEN/Daily Bruin Web Adaptation by MIKE
OUYANG/Daily Bruin