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Nine Universities Address Sex Inequity
by Charity Hirsch
Inspired and instigated by the MIT report (see
Fall
2000,
Spring
2000, and
Spring
1999
Newsletters) nine universities met to promote
diversity in their
faculties. MIT,
Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, University of
Pennsylvania, University of
Michigan, University of California, Berkeley, and the
California Institute of
Technology
had representatives at this meeting. It is unclear if this
was the total of
institutions
invited or if some of those invited declined to
attend.
The universities issued a statement which said, "We
recognize that this
challenge will require significant review of, and
potentially significant change
in, the
procedure within each university, and within scientific and
engineering
establishments
as a whole." They promise to share annual reports on
salaries, resources,
and
hiring, and to include gender as a category in these
analyses.
The production and sharing of such reports is a step toward
change. Without
such information, and the information that the California
state audit should
supply (see
Fall
2000
Newsletter), the extent of discrimination and failure
to comply with
affirmative action is difficult to know. It is always even
more difficult to
create change.
Even with such information, many faculty think, for example,
that a paucity of
women
faculty merely proves that women have inferior brains - else
more women would be
on the faculty.
MIT, the institution which first had such a report on the
women in its School of
Science, has done similar reports in its other schools. It
has also instituted
permanent
councils on equity and diversity. The number of tenured
women at MIT has
increased,
and salaries for faculty women have risen.
WAGE eagerly awaits future reports from this group of nine
universities and
hopes to see the University of California administration
provide honest
leadership in
this endeavor to increase the number and percentage of women
on the UC faculty.
(Source: New York Times, 1/31/01
The statement from the nine universities is available at
http://web.mit.edu/newsoffice/nr/2001/genderstate
ment.html)
-wage@wage.org-