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Chancellors' Advisory Committees on the Status of Women Meet at UC Irvine
by Anne J. MacLachlan
On April 19th more than a hundred women from all the UC campuses
met at Irvine to exchange ideas and develop action plans for areas of critical
interest to UC women. The conference was organized by De Gallow, Director
of the UCI Instructional Resource Center, and Paula Goldsmid, Director for
Women and Gender Education at UCI; their good planning helped make this a
productive meeting.
The conference opened with an address by UCI Chancellor Laurel
Wilkening. Her suggestion to solve women's issues on campus, "to just do it,"
had ironic results; as UCI had no Committee on the Status of Women the
conference organizers formed one that day. After this, the two previously
held CACSW meetings were summarized.
The participants then broke up into six issue-centered focus groups
which worked on defining specific problems, and after lunch, on finding
solutions. Their work was presented in a plenary session and then discussed
in campus-specific groups.
The three CACSW conferences held to date have put the issues facing
UC women in sharp relief and generated useful ideas to resolve some of them.
Among the issues: pay equity, glass ceilings, isolation, over representation in
marginal/soft-money jobs, lack of recognition for their work and
harassment. Some of the proposed solutions: using the UC Davis pay equity
study as a model for both academic and staff women on all the campuses;
orientations to inform women of their rights; requiring really effective
sexual harassment and sensitivity training for everyone in authority on a
campus.
The energy manifest on April 19th is encouraging, but at least at UCB,
many of these ideas have been discussed before and still have not been
implemented. Real change will require extensive networking across the
academic class divides. We should start by lobbying for a new position
solely concerned with women's issues. The current system still fractures
responsibility among several overworked offices.
Meanwhile, if you are interested in more detail, written reports of this
meeting's focus groups will be available from your campus CACSW chair or
from De Gallow ( dgallow@uci.edu ). Summaries of this and earlier CACSW meetings are available at the inevitable web site.
The next CACSW meeting will be held at UC San Diego some time this
fall.
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