Welcome to the fourth issue of the WAGE newsletter!
"White males continue to be the only beneficiaries of affirmative action, the only
group who are hired at rates significantly higher than their proportion in the
available pool of qualified candidates."
Martha West
, Professor of Law, University of California, Davis, School of Law
Temple Law Review, Volume 67, No. 1, 1994
Editorial: Affirmative Action
Affirmative action means taking race or gender as a plus factor when choosing between qualified
applicants for a position in which these groups continue to be underrepresented. However, the women
WAGE represents are not seeking to benefit under an affirmative action program. The women in our
organization who have had problems with the University complain of discriminatory treatment, of
being held to higher standards of academic performance than the men who are promoted ahead of
them. They want equal treatment from UC.
Because it receives federal funds, UC is required to implement an affirmative action plan and
clearly needs this governmental supervision because it participates in discriminating against women.
Those responsible for academic hiring and promotion are uncomfortable with women peers. They find
a woman doesn't "smell like a mathematician" (California Monthly, June 1995) or they say that tenure
is a referendum on collegiality and the woman candidate scored zero. Without the external
examination an affirmative action program requires, the old boys in the power structure can justify
excluding any individual woman. Some authority must say to them:
If you cannot find a reasonable number of women to join you, that is in itself
proof that you are discriminating.
What WAGE asks of UC is not that it prevent all acts of discrimination or sexual harassment. We
realize that these come from a long tradition and cannot be changed by fiat (which fiat UC has in fact
issued). We do ask that UC stop automatically defending the status quo and instead develop a system of
impartial investigation and resolution for discrimination and harassment complaints. The state of
Wisconsin, for example, mandates that tenure cases where discrimination is alleged be immediately
referred to an outside, impartial committee for resolution. We know of three UC women faculty who
were denied tenure and then reevaluated by such a committee, and all three were granted tenure as a
result.
It is time for UC to give equal treatment to women academics, to recruit them, hire and
promote them, and pay them as they do men. If they did so, they might find that nothing more was
needed to achieve an appropriate proportion of women in all departments.
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