You can go to our
Newsletters.
Or search for a word here:
UC and Women Faculty
By Martha West,
Prof., UC Davis School of Law
and employment law expert
Illegal discrimination against women seeking faculty positions at
America's research universities has been getting worse, not better, over
the last ten years. Women are obtaining Ph.D.'s at ever increasing rates,
but are not being hired or promoted into tenure track or tenured faculty
positions in proportion to their numbers in the employee pool. In 1981,
women were 35% of U.S. Ph.D. recipients, held 27% of theU.S. full-time
faculty positions, and were 12% of the faculty at UC. In 1991, they were
44% of U.S. Ph.D. recipients, 30% of the U.S. fulltime faculty, and 18%
at UC.
The percentage of women faculty in the UC system lags far behind
the national norm. Research universities, in general, hire fewer women
faculty than nonresearch colleges and universities; the more prestigious
the type of institution, the fewer the women faculty. In 1987, women were
37.9% of the full time instructional faculty at public two year colleges,
20.7% at public research universities, and 19.5% at private research
universities. In 1987 UC had 14% women as full-time instructional faculty.
In 1992, UC women had increased their share, reaching 19% of UC's ladder
faculty.
If women are not being hired at equitable rates into ladder faculty
positions, where are these women with Ph.D.'s going? They are going into
the less prestigious, lower paid, often temporary, nontenure track
positions of lecturer, instructor, researcher, or adjunct faculty. While
the percent of women full professors at public research universities rose
from 6.7% to only 10% from 1972 to 1992, the percent of women instructors
increased from 44% to 61%.
UC follows the same patterns. At UC Davis in l991, women were 10%
of the full professors, 17% of ladder rank faculty, and 51% of the lecturers.
At the current rate of change in the faculty's gender composition, at UC
Davis it will be 57 years before women hold 50% of tenured faculty positions,
and 83 years before women are 50% of the full professors.
Further indications of the lack of progress of women in higher
education are the percents of faculty women and men who have tenure.
In 1975, 65% of the male full time faculty had tenure, and 46% of the women.
In 1992, men had reached 71%, while women were still at 46%. The data show
that the popular myth that women have "made it" in academia is just that, a
myth, with no basis in reality.
As labor sociologist Barbara Reskin has said, white men simply have
"dibs" on the best jobs in America. This is certainly true in our research
universities and in the UC system. The gender differentials we find among
university faculty are not the result of chance, but are a product of the
continuing and pervasive discrimination women face. Men are "steered" into
the best faculty jobs; women are "steered" into the temporary, part-time,
lower status positions. A few women are hired into the tenure tracks, and
some receive tenure. Other women must file lawsuits to reach the tenured
ranks. And many more women never get hired into tenure track positions in
the first place.
Although universities pretend to do open hiring, to advertise and
recruit nationwide, most hires are still a product of a white male network
who you know, who your faculty mentor knows, who thesearch committee chair
calls to get names of the "best" Ph.D. students to contact. Bernice Sandler,
an expert on college and university hiring systems, estimates that only 25%
of faculty positions are filled through truly open searches; the remaining
75% continue to be filled by the "oldÐboys" network. A recent example:
at UC Davis, we opened a new neuroscience center in 1993, hiring six new
faculty members. The director, male, was hired with tenure. He then hired
five new assistant professors in a field where women now are 37% of the
available pool. These hires were all men. Not one woman was hired through
this "open" recruitment.
Discrimination in hiring is only one aspect of the gender bias
women face in the UC system. Differential evaluation of tenure files is
another serious problem. Women faculty have to be superstars to get tenure,
whereas ordinary men seem to get tenure on a regular basis. We are tired of
carrying this extra burden.
When we talk about hiring and promoting women faculty, we are
talking about putting an end to discrimination based on sex. We are not
talking about affirmative action or any controversial plan to mandate
diversity. In fact, the only beneficiaries of any "affirmative action"
have been white men the only ones who continue to be hired, year after
year, at percentages higher than their availability in the qualified national
labor pool. We want to end this system of white male preference and to give
women and men of color an equal chance to be considered for faculty positions.
One way the UC system limits the number of women is by hiring
faculty at higher, tenured ranks. 40% of faculty hired by UC since 1984
have been to tenured ranks. Only 18.5% of these hires were women, not
surprising since only 20% of the faculty teaching in U.S. research
universities were women. The pool for candidates for entry level positions
is the pool of recent Ph.D.s, 44% of whom are now women. In UC we find that
32% of those hired into the entry level assistant professor positions
have been women. Although this figure is below the percent of women in the
Ph.D. pool, it is a significant improvement over the 18% of tenured hires.
UC's early retirement program has been the most effective
"affirmative action" program ever implemented by the University. As a
result of the first wave of retirements, the percent of women faculty at
UC Davis increased from 16% to 17%, not because women were hired but
because so many men retired. Across the UC system, 93% of those who took
the first two retirement options were men. The retirements are significant
for two reasons: they change the present gender balance on campus among
the remaining faculty, and they open up the possibility of hiring higher
percents of women in the future.
UC can maximize hiring women into adder faculty positions by
increasing the percent of hires at the assistant professor level. This
will not only increase gender diversity on the faculty, it will also save
money in these tight budget days. In order to end discrimination against
women seeking faculty positions in the UC system, I propose that 50% of
all future faculty hires be women. The next ten years will be a critical
period for UC. The time to end discrimination against women in UC is now,
not twenty years from now.
Source: Extracted from Dr. WestÕs testi-mony at the WAGE Roundtable
on Gender Bias and Gender Equity at the University of California,
March, 11, 1994
-wage@wage.org-