By Barbara Ortutay
Daily Bruin Senior Staff
The University of California hires female faculty at lower rates
than the available labor pool, leading to a gender disparity among
professors.
A state audit conducted over a five-year period and released
Wednesday found that while 46 percent of the applicants available
for hire nationwide are women, only 29 percent are actually hired
to be professors at the UC.
Part of the reason for this disparity lies in the fact that
departments tend to hire more established, senior faculty rather
than assistant professors ““ and these tend to be men. Also,
opening up applications to international candidates, as well as
focusing faculty searches on male-dominated fields like engineering
and physical sciences, significantly reduce the number of women in
the applicant pool, according to the study. Thus, the actual pool
from which the UC hires professors is only 33 percent female.
“The audit showed no direct discrimination, but we should
attempt to improve as much as possible,” said Abby Lunardini,
spokeswoman for the UC Office of the President.
“The pool we hire from cuts out people who get their Ph.D.
from a lower-level institution and have no outside research
experience,” she said, adding that this is something the UC
definitely wants to change.
Martha West, a law professor at UC Davis, said the UC
“plays a game of “˜let’s steal your
superstars'” instead of hiring younger assistant
professors.
Gender disparity is especially significant in the physical
sciences. In the engineering school at UCLA, for example, about 10
out of the 140 professors are women.
J. Woody Ju, chair of civil and environmental engineering, said
only one of the 15 professors in his department is a woman, despite
continuous attempts to attract female faculty.
“The relative pool of outstanding doctoral candidates are
male. In my department, there are roughly 60 Ph.D. students and
only three are female,” he said. “But the same is not
true at the undergraduate level, where in the civil engineering
almost half of the students are female.”
Because of a recent Supreme Court ruling that narrowed the
applicability of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, it will be more
difficult for women, or minorities, to sue for discrimination
““ unless it was done intentionally.
“Now, if 80 to 90 percent of our faculty are white men, we
can’t use that to prove discrimination exists.” said
Student Regent Justin Fong, who added that he sees definite
discrimination in the faculty hiring process.
The audit, requested by state Sen. Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo,
also looked at the starting salaries for female faculty, and found
that, on average, women receive 90 to 92 percent of the pay male
professors receive when they are first hired. Some of this
disparity, however, has more to do with women’s concentration
in lower-paying fields and does not necessarily mean women are paid
less for doing the same job. Nevertheless, the report recommends
further monitoring male-female salary ratios.
The audit also found that departmental search committees are
overwhelmingly male ““ in fact, the search committees for
nearly two-thirds of the 242 newly hired professors the audit
tracked included no women at all.
According to the Bureau of State Audits, a decline in the
proportion of newly hired female faculty was the reason behind the
report ““ especially in light of Tidal Wave II, which will not
only increase the number of students in the UC by 60,000 over the
next decade, but also prompt the hiring of about 7,000 new faculty.
Currently, the UC employs about 8,000 professors.
“Is there a strategy to deal with the increase in
faculty?” asked Jim Turner, assistant vice chancellor of
graduate division.
The UC has 60 days to respond to the report’s
recommendations, which include avoiding all-male search committees
and considering additional outreach to identify wider applicant
pools. But because of Proposition 209, the 1996 state initiative
that banned the consideration of gender and race in university
hiring and admissions, the UC cannot actively recruit female
faculty, or decide who to hire based on the person’s
gender.
According to Fong, new criteria the university has implemented
to address the drop in underrepresented minority admits ““
such as looking at geographic or socioeconomic background ““
does not address the gender disparity in faculty hiring.
“A lot of attention has been paid to admissions and
minorities,” Fong said. “The issue of gender
isn’t something that has been spoken of.”
With reports from Noah Grand and Hemesh Patel, Daily Bruin
Senior Staff and the Associated Press. To read the report in its
entirety, please see www.bsa.ca.gov/bsa/summaries/2000131s.html