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MIT Women Win Fight Against Bias
Women professors at the Massachusetts Institute of
Technology presumed that their numbers were low for the reason
everyone had accepted as fact: Girls just don't like science. Then
they took out their tape measures. Sneaking around the nation's
most prestigious institute of science in 1994, 15 women went
office to office comparing how much space MIT awarded women
with
that of men of equal status. It was less by about half. Salaries
were less too. As was the research money given women. And the
numbers of women on committees that made decisions about hiring
and funding. There were no women department heads and never
had
been. And while MIT lavished raises on men who got job offers
elsewhere, it simply let the women leave.
Like most universities facing complaints of bias, MIT at first
resisted the women's charges of inequity. But unlike schools that
have waited for lawsuits to act, MIT did something rare in academia:
The institute looked at the numbers and admitted it was wrong.
In an
extraordinary admission, top
officials at MIT issued
a report acknowledging that female professors at MIT have suffered
from pervasive, if
unintentional discrimination. "I have always
believed that contemporary gender discrimination within
universities is part reality and part perception," the university's
president Charles M. Vest, said. "True, but I now understand that
reality is by far the greater part of the balance.'
The report found that in 1994 in biology, undergraduate
women
numbered 147, compared with 142 men, but the sex balance shifted
as status advanced so that at the highest level of faculty, there
were only 7 women and 42 men.
Martha S. West, a professor of law at UC Davis said of the
report, 'what's amazing is the president's acknowledgment that
there is a scientific basis for our continued perception that things
are not good for us. My perception is that things have been getting
worse, not better for women over the last 10 years."
-wage@wage.org-