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BY JAMES ROBINSON The Provost's Advisory Committee on the Status of Women Faculty on Thursday issued a variety of recommendations to strengthen the recruitment and retention of women faculty and, in a first-ever comprehensive analysis, has preliminarily found "insignificant" differences between men and women in benefits and support such as laboratory space, equipment, startup funds, research funds and summer salaries. "I think the single most significant finding that comes out is the lack of significance of gender with respect to most issues," said law Professor Deborah Rhode, who chaired the committee. "Overall, the overwhelming significance of these data for gender is their insignificance," the report says. "There seems to be no pattern of disparity that suggests any systemic gender inequity." Provost John Etchemendy created the panel in the wake of a 2001 meeting held at MIT for Ivy League schools and peer institutions on the representation of women in the sciences and engineering. One "possible exception" to a finding of insignificance, Rhode added, was among "high fliers" -- mostly men who, the report said, were "recent hires or 'retained faculty' who had won significant retention bonuses when they negotiated in response to outside offers." Rhode cautioned that the group was issuing a progress report and would return to the senate next year with a final report. "But one explanation for the general pattern may have something to do with a phenomenon that's often noted in the research findings on academic institutions, which is women's inability or disinclination to drive hard bargains. "And that, in turn, may reflect a variety of factors. Women may be more likely than men to have family obligations and be more geographically constrained as a consequence. Socialization may play a role as well. And if those are the explanations, there aren't any easy fixes. It's not, for example, obvious that you would want to set up a series of workshops to teach women how to, you know, claim more and receive disproportionate treatment." The committee was split into three subcomittees: Compensation, Resources and Recognition; Recruitment, Promotion and Retention; and Quality of Life. In consultation with the latter subcommittee, the provost's office has just distributed to all faculty a quality of life survey -- modeled after one undertaken at MIT -- which Rhode and Etchemendy urged their colleagues to complete at http://facultysurvey.stanford.edu. To improve recruitment and retention of women faculty, the committee recommended that deans actively monitor the composition of search committees; and that searches open themselves to wider sources of information about potential candidates, advertise openings in specialty journals and make personal contacts with other universities to expand the candidate pool. Sometimes, the committee recommended, it may be important "to expand the short list so as to include more women candidates." In areas where women are significantly underrepresented, "it may be important to evaluate all potential female candidates and to consider defining the field more broadly or altering subject matter priorities in light of the availability of qualified women," the report said. Analyzing offer and retention letters The impetus for the 2001 meeting at MIT came about after women faculty there began meeting informally and discovered apparent disparities in such important areas as allocation of laboratory space. To see if disparities in such areas existed at Stanford, officials analyzed almost all offer and retention letters made to faculty over a four- or five-year period as well as summer salaries, individual research accounts and laboratory-space data. Because information from the medical and business schools had not yet been analyzed, the committee will return to the senate next year with a more complete report. In looking at the actual texts of offer and retention letters, "What we've been doing in the last year or so is certainly unique at Stanford" and could be unique in the country, said law Professor Bob Weisberg, special assistant to the provost for faculty recruitment and retention. Discussion on the report began with a comment by Phyllis Gardner, medicine, who said the report left her with a sense of a "numbing vision of everything's OK and there are numbers. And somehow it doesn't capture for me 18 and a half years at Stanford of what I've personally heard and personally experienced of some differences." Gardner said differences were more apparent in retention than in recruitment. "Somebody is selected as the golden boy -- to me, it's aways the golden boy, it's not a minority and it's not a woman -- and that person is regarded as the great star of the future and they're given just a little bit more or a lot more . . . They get promoted more quickly, they get a slightly higher salary disparity. And then it just gets perpetuated. Sometimes those golden boys in my mind are not necessarily better than anyone else, but they were picked out," she said. "I think we need more of that kind of attitude" for women and minorities. The existence of such a "golden boy" type is "perfectly possible," Etchemendy responded. "And that's something that we have to watch out for." Rhode added that it was important that "women faculty be appropriately rewarded for their productivity and contributions regardless of whether they've gone outside and gotten offers." A call for annual reporting In recent years, the issue of women faculty has come up every spring in conjunction with a detailed annual report on faculty gains and losses. The senate's steering committee had elected to have such a presentation on gains and losses every other year -- with this being the first off year in some time -- and instead focus last week's meeting on the report of the provost's advisory committee. That, however, did not sit well with Gardner and several other senate members. Joanne Martin, business, made a motion that such reports once again be made annually. The annual reports have shown the proportion of women faculty on campus edging up by a small fraction each year. As of Sept. 1, 2002, the proportion of women faculty had increased to 22.1 percent from 21.6 percent one year earlier. "If you look at the data that we were given, you see the reason why a yearly report is actually quite meaningless," said Bob Simoni, biological sciences. Cecilia Ridgeway, sociology, said that while the annual change isn't large, "what annual change does occur is heavily affected by the degree to which change is monitored. And what you want to do is always monitor." Martin's motion passed overwhelmingly. |
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Stanford Report, May 21, 2003
