From The Faculty Chair

This report on the work of the Committees on Women Faculty in the School of Science and the response of the Dean to their findings, describes a model that can be used by the Institute as a whole to decrease the inequities that still exist, both in terms of numbers and in treatment. And though these data refer to women, the methods used and recommendations made can and should be adapted to faculty from underrepresented minorities.

The key conclusion that one gets from the report is that gender discrimination in the 1990s is subtle but pervasive, and stems largely from unconscious ways of thinking that have been socialized into all of us, men and women alike. This makes the situation better than in previous decades where blatant inequities and sexual assault and intimidation were endured but not spoken of. We can all be thankful for that. But the consequences of these more subtle forms of discrimination are equally real and equally demoralizing.

The women who worked on these issues over the past five years are all gifted scientists, themselves convinced that gender had nothing to do with their careers: if they succeeded it was on the basis of their competence, and recognition would certainly follow; if they didn’t it was based on something they lacked and rewards weren’t warranted. During their earlier years, this belief was continuously reinforced, but then something seemed to change. It was only when they came together, and with persistence and ingenuity, that they saw that as their careers advanced something else besides competence came into play, which for them meant an accumulation of slight disadvantages, with just the opposite for their male colleagues. Their ability to identify the inequities that resulted and the Dean’s willingness to respond, have changed the environment for their work and enhanced their ability to contribute productively to the institution.

In order to keep the momentum of this effort, and to extend it to other parts of the Institute, we need to implement Institute-wide means of continuously tracking progress and to find ways to keep senior faculty women involved in the process. This is hard work. Our first instinct is to deny that a problem exists (if it existed, it would surely have been solved by now) or to blame it on the pipeline or the circumstances and choices of individual women. None of these, however, explains the inequities surfaced by the Committee. To ensure an equitable faculty environment, we need committees such as these (including also, as in the present case, male faculty with administrative experience) in all Schools of the Institute. Their task is not only to track and monitor, but also to keep underrepresented faculty closely tied to the administrators who make the Institute’s critical decisions. As both President Vest and Dean Birgeneau emphasize in their comments, we have made progress, but there is still a long way to go.