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VIP VICTORY FOR ALL UC ACADEMIC WOMEN
Just this summer, after a seven year battle, UC Berkeley mathematician Dr.
Jenny Harrison won not only tenure, but immediate promotion to Full Professor. She is
one of only two women in a department with 55 men. Previously, Harrison won the right
to personally examine the files of the eight most recently tenured men in her
department for comparison with her own file. This precedent insures that other
academic women will now be able to gain access to tenure files as needed to prove
discrimination. In case after case, women charge that men of equal or lesser
accomplishments are promoted through the ranks with both greater ease and speed.
Professor Harrison also received a financial settlement, the terms of which are
secret as mandated by the university.
Women Continue to Win Cases against UC
Professor Nancy Stoller, now Chair of Community Studies at UCSC, won a
four-and-one-half-year battle involving anti-gay discrimination in 1987. Her tenure
victory drew attention to issues of pervasive homophobia at the UCSC campus, allowing
countless lesbian/gay faculty and students to follow her out of the closet. Eleanor
Swift, UCB law professor, won the right to a comparative tenure review with six white
male law professors, thereby providing the precedent that led to Harrison's later
victory.
One of the earliest cases against UC was won by the federal EEOC for Eloise
Hay, UCSB English Professor, whose promotion from Lecturer to the professorial ladder
was initially offered instead to a strikingly less qualified male. Several women
victories against UC have been supported by the American Association of University
Women, including Stoller (UCSC), Harrison (UCB), Dr. Margaretta Lovell, UCB art
historian, and Dr. Leigh Segel, UCD biochemist. The National Women Studies
Association and Southern California Women for Understanding are supporting the
inprogress case of Dr. Julia Moore, UCSB musicologist.
Dr. Rickey Hendricks, whose recently published book was funded by NIH, won
a large monetary settlement for emotional distress but was denied reinstatement at
UCSF History of Health Sciences Department. Dr. Lynn Ponton, UCD psychiatrist, won a
court victory in November 1992. Furthermore, an outside arbitrator, two-and-one-half
years ago, found in Ponton favor on every count, yet her Chancellor has so far
refused to implement either decision. Similar long delays in receiving the terms of
their settlements have characterized most of the women's victories mentioned here.
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