Posted on 10/24/2001 3:21:14 PM PDT by FairWitness
[SAN DIEGO] Complaints that women still face discrimination in the upper reaches of US academia have been mounting in recent years. Now the National Science Foundation (NSF) — whose own director, Rita Colwell, is the first woman ever to hold the position — plans to do something about it.
On 9 October the agency issued eight 'transformation grants', worth over $3 million each, to help universities try out different approaches to tackle alleged iniquities in promotion practice on their campuses.
"There is not an institution in the country that couldn't use this kind of initiative," says Alice Hogan, head of the new NSF programme, which it calls Advance. "This is an investment," she says. "We are concerned about the health and viability of the American scientific and engineering workforce."
During the past 25 years, numerous reports have highlighted problems in hiring women faculty, providing them with tenure, and promoting them to positions such as that of department chair or dean. Many universities have undertaken individual plans to address deficiencies. But interviews with NSF grant winners show that such problems continue to persist.
Particle physicist Tricia Rankin, for example, who will run the Advance programme at the University of Colorado in Boulder, says: "Twenty years ago, I can remember being told the times are changing. Physics has certainly made improvements, like increasing the number of women physicist graduate students, but it is clear women are not making the breakthroughs anticipated."
The Colorado Advance programme is designed to address campus-wide issues. It seeks "to improve the management and leadership skills of women so they can go up the academic ladder," says Rankin. "But if you really want to encourage change, you are better off modifying the behaviour of men, not women."
Susan Bryant, dean of biological sciences at the University of California, Irvine, who will lead the Advance programme there, says it will concentrate on making sure that women are adequately represented in candidate pools for faculty positions. "People have a tendency to forget either to be inclusive or to make a little extra effort," says Bryant.
At the University of Washington in Seattle, Denice Denton, dean of the school of engineering, will direct the programme. "I would like to see more women department chairs," she says. Women faculty have grown in number at universities such as Denton's, but few women chair departments. The University of Washington has no women chairs in science or engineering, for example.
The other Advance programme grants will go to the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta, New Mexico State University at Las Cruces, the University of Puerto Rico, the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin at Madison.
The eight winners were selected from 76 universities that applied for the grants, and a ninth winner is expected to be announced shortly.
I am all for women in academia being all they can be; I hope it is on the basis of merit/creativity/leadership. How a $3,000,000 grant to each of who-knows-how-many Universities will accomplish this - besides giving power to the dispensers of the money - remains to be seen.
Our Governor-General is a woman; the Attorney General is a woman; the Prime Minister is a woman. The Teleban also wear dresses and they're not doing too well for Afghanistan either. Go ahead, call me prejudiced. I think this is a move toward creative statistics and shifting gender power within the workplace with no regard to the official [fair] line I detailed above.
Some cheese with that whine? She's the bleepin' Dean of the Engineering School. Doesn't she have any responsibility for getting the demographic set asides right? Or is she counting on the right number of sexist male department chairmen to do the right thing and take early retirement?
Man, you sure are right. I mean, someone tell me if there's been a man appointed to the presidency of a college or university lately?
Maybe it's time for men to start filing sexual harassment charges and class action suits against some of these institutions instead of just obediently taking it.
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Marilyn vos Savant writes the "Ask Marilyn" column in Parade Magazine. She is listed in the Guinness Book of World Records Hall of Fame for "highest IQ." This is Marilyn's explanation of why the widely-quoted statement "women, on average, earn 77 cents on the dollar compared to men" is a misunderstanding and why she believes the wage gap between the sexes actually may be tiny. The results of her poll about men and women in the workplace follow it.
This week's special edition:
Some time ago, you polled your readers for their opinions about men and women in the workplace, and I put in my 2 cents. I’m still waiting to read the results. Can it be that they are too controversial to publish? —Herb Millspaugh,
San Francisco, Calif.
No, but they’re surprising, all right! Before the survey, I replied to a question about the claim that women are paid less than men for equal work by writing: “But if their work is equal, why aren’t employers slashing their payroll costs by hiring women instead of men? In a free market, businesses are highly competitive, and if they’re paying men more than they pay women, there must be a reason.”
One reason, I wrote, might be that women often have less experience because of years spent at home raising children. During that time, men and women with unbroken careers have built customer bases, cultivated professional relationships and stayed in touch with developments in their industries. Those employees are going to be worth more, and that’s only fair.
The National Committee on Pay Equity wrote to complain about that assessment. It blamed sex discrimination instead: “Women, on average, earn 77 cents on the dollar compared to men. Some of the gap is attributable to experience, education and time taken out of the workforce to raise children. But there is plenty of evidence that shows wage discrimination exists. We routinely hear from women who discover that they are paid less than equally qualified men.”
This is a common misunderstanding, based on an inflammatory misinterpretation of Census Bureau survey statistics: The “77 cents on the dollar” figure is simply the weekly median (meaning middle: an equal number of women above and below) earnings figure ($473) of all working women divided by the weekly median earnings figure ($618) of all working men. These figures include everyone from dishwashers to physicists and have nothing whatsoever to do with equal pay for equal work. Yet the misleading phrase “77 cents on the dollar” has been the impetus for lawsuits and legislation, not to mention the source of unnecessary fury on the part of both sexes.
In short, much of the “wage gap” is due to experience, education and delayed or broken careers, plus the fact that women are concentrated in lower-paying occupations. It is possible that very little equal-pay-for-equal-work gap exists at all. Note: Equal qualifications don’t produce equal performance in the workplace. Just because employees complain that they’re not being paid as much as others doesn’t mean their complaints are justified: Both male and female employees routinely fail to recognize their own personal shortcomings, and both complain about not being paid as much as fellow workers who they believe are equal or inferior to themselves.
To be convinced of any real equal-pay-for-equal-work gap, first we must see unbiased studies that show men and women working in the same jobs and producing the same results but with unequal pay. And even that isn’t enough. Then we must consider relevant additional factors, and there are many. For example, employees with management potential may be paid more. If women are perceived to have less ability to handle positions of more responsibility, they could lose some ground here.
To see if women are considered equally capable and valuable in other ways (that is, excluding management potential) by the public itself—not by employers—readers were asked to fill out a questionnaire. The results were amazing. There wasn’t a single job for which the vast majority (say, 90%) of the readers answered that “it made no difference.” And the only job for which even a simple majority (over 50%) of the readers actually preferred a woman was a babysitter, and that turned out to be the vast majority (about 90%). The runner-up (and still under 50%) was soothing angry customers—handling complaints! So that’s how we see it. Are we right or are we wrong? Are men and women equal or unequal?
If any unfair gap exists, litigation can help with situational inequities, but lawsuits make the stereotype worse, because they imply that women, as a group, need special help and are incapable of competing with men on their own. (For example, forced hiring and promoting has cast a cloud of doubt over all women.) On the other hand, if employers are not seriously biased—and the pay differences are for good reasons—I believe that forcing equality in pay is unfair to men.
In my judgment, women are capable of far more than they currently demonstrate, but to realize their full professional potential—whatever that may be—they would need to give up the home values they cherish, and I doubt that will happen. As I once wrote, “Money, power and fame are not most mothers’ goals.” Nor should they be.
I can't say much about Universities, but I have noticed during the last 6 years (because of kids in small colleges) how many college Presidents are women these days.
As someone who is currently going to engineering school at night and have been for many years, I can attest to the fact that the simple reason women do not chair departments in the numbers the feminazis think is correct, is because women represent a small minority in the engineering fields. And to boot, most female engineers with a few stella exception I have worked with, are just lousy engineers.
There are decent representation in some disiplines like computer science and chemistry but by and large it still at a least 5 to 1 male to female ratio. Which is a good number considering that when I first started school it was like 20 to 1
Sounds analogous to the $3,000,000 grants, discussed in the above article, that are meant to "help women climb the ladder".
ACE STUDY SHOWS GAINS IN NUMBER OF WOMEN COLLEGE PRESIDENTS, SMALLER GAINS FOR MINORITY CEOs: The report, The American College President: 2000 Edition, notes that since 1986, the percentage of women college presidents has doubled—from 9.5 percent to 19 percent—while the percentage of minority presidents increased from 8 percent to 11 percent during the same time period. The report is based on surveys of chief executives of regionally accredited, degree-granting colleges and universities who were in office in 1998, and is the fourth in a series of reports beginning in 1986 on the backgrounds and career paths of college presidents in the United States. It is the only source of demographic data on college presidents in all sectors of American higher education.
Not as many as I thought, but growing steadily. Since the average college president probably serves for about 10 years, it will take a while to get to "equity". Actually, the numbers for "minorities" (11%) sounds like it is almost there already.
I think you're right. There are a lot of "support staff" jobs that only women take. Hardly ever do you see a man working as a secretary, receptionist, dental assistant, etc. For whatever reason, some women choose to take these jobs that don't pay as well as management or skilled-trade jobs that men generally take.
I am a woman who teaches on the university level. Women have flooded into my area over the last ten years, previously my discipline was nearly 100 percent male; we have numerous women administrators in my college as well.
As for me, I'd LOADS rather be at home, but genuinely cannot afford to be. I look forward to the day when both Princess Anne and Princess Anne are finished with college and perhaps I can quit teaching.
This stuff about women needing help to make a go of it in academia is total CRAP. If anything, academia is strongly slanted toward more and more women achieving tenure and getting promoted into administrative positions.
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