Welcome to the first issue of the WAGE newsletter!
Millions of Taxpayers Dollars Squandered
The money UC squanders defending itself in gender discrimination
cases is astronomical. In two individual cases, UC paid $700,000 and $1,200,000
in just attorneys fees alone. In out of court settlements, Professor Nancy
Stoller
(formerly Shaw)
won
tenure plus $156,500 against UCSC in 1987, and Dr. Rickey
Hendricks
won $183,000 against UCSF in 1992. These are only examples most womens
settlements have been bound by secrecy clauses. Settlements generally include
reinstatement along with attorneys fees, court costs, retroactive salary and
compensation for emotional distress. So why would UC waste so much money
fighting losing battles again and again?
WHAT IS WAGE?
WAGE is a systemwide organization whose official mission, as stated on our
front
Web Page, is to end gender bias and achieve gender equity in the hiring, retention,
promotion and compensation of academic women within the University of California
system. While initially started around individuals at UCB and UCI who had tenure
grievances and legal actions, WAGE has expanded to include all women and men whether
or not affiliated with UC committed to improving the status of UC academic women.
We wish to overcome the decades old pattern of sex discrimination that has pervaded
the entire UC system. WAGE is the first statewide organization not established
by the university but devoted entirely to solving UC systemwide problems.
At the core of WAGE are academic women, representing all campuses of the
University of California, with current or recent gender discrimination cases.
These women are professors, lecturers, librarians, researchers, clinical instructors
and other nonsenate academics. Taken as a group, their cases strikingly illustrate
UC systemic problem with gender discrimination against academic women.
UC employment policies expressly prohibit discrimination by gender or by
sexual orientation as well as sexual harassment; however, UC has a dismal record
of dealing with even the most egregious violations of its own policies.
While they may support cases involving other procedural errors, UC campus grievance
committees rarely rule in favor of gender discrimination complaints. Campus sexual
harassment officers are reluctant to take strong action against male academics who
sexually harass their female colleagues. Campus affirmative action officers possess
only advisory power and upper administrators regularly overrule them. These factors
force women to take their cases into the courts for full hearings.
Dozens of UC discrimination cases have been passing through state and
federal courts during the past few years. UC usually loses or settles out of court,
but only after a protracted and extremely expensive weighted battle in which the
academic woman and her attorney find themselves facing the
UC general counsel of 37
attorneys, supported by additional outside attorneys. UC, in effect, attempts to buy
immunity from enforcing its own discrimination policies by dipping deeply into
taxpayers pockets.
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