Discrimination Everywhere!
9 Universities Will Address Sex Inequities
January 31, 2001
By KATE ZERNIKE
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 female faculty members.
The university leaders made their statement after gathering on Monday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a group of female professors became folk heroines of a sort two years ago after producing a detailed analysis of inequities that prompted M.I.T. 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 Monday 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 did 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 M.I.T., 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 faculty members from M.I.T., Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, the University of California 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 M.I.T. began to work on their report about bias in 1994, after a conversation revealed shared frustrations with their work, several administrators initially blocked their
efforts to get the data.
Dr. Vest acknowledged that Monday's 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 M.I.T. women, the Ford Foundation gave the institute a $1 million grant
to promote similar efforts on other campuses, and Monday's 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.
"It was exhilarating just to see all of the ideas that came out," Dr. Grosz said.
Professors at the Monday meeting said the problems were not limited to science.
"I've been serving on a committee of women mostly in nonscience fields, and they're desperate about
many of these same things," said Howard Georgi, a physics professor at Harvard.
Those problems, Dr. Georgi and others said, include a dearth of women in leadership posts and
feelings of being marginalized after taking time off to have children and of a lack of support because of
the small number of women in the field.
Even at M.I.T., 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," Dr.
Vest said.
Still, he said, the study by the initial group in the School of Science at M.I.T. has been replicated in the
institute's other schools. Permanent councils on equity and diversity have been established, more
women are earning tenure, and salaries for women on the faculty have risen.
Nancy Hopkins, a noted biologist who led the initial M.I.T. 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?"
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