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". . .I’ve just read The New York Times report as well as browsed through your Web report on discrimination against women in academia. Most interesting! As a junior female faculty member, I am especially intrigued by the statement that while junior women feel well-protected, the feeling dissipates over time.
Thanks for taking the initiative to do this, and I applaud MIT’s openness to this issue."
". . .Our institute offers programs of English language study to non-native speakers. At the upper levels of the program, students are assigned novels. This semester, students in the low advanced level of our Integrated Skills course are reading the novel Menachem’s Seed and the MIT study documented in this report addresses a number of the major themes of this novel. We would like, therefore, to offer the newsletter as a supplementary reading assignment."
"...You are right on the mark. [our university] should be added to the list of prestigious institutions that have not made any effort to address subtle gender discrimination. Senior women on the faculty are almost non-existent."
From an editorial in the San Francisco Chronicle, March 24, 1999:
"But for one significant difference, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology study confirming discrimination against women faculty members would probably have been ignored by college administrators across the country – like so many similar reports before it. The difference this time, however, is that the respected president of MIT – one of the most prestigious universities in the nation – not only did not ignore the report, he acknowledged existence of the discrimination and took steps to redress it. “I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception,” MIT President Charles Vest said in comments to be published in the faculty newsletter. “True, but I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance.”
The reasonableness of Vest’s conclusion is seen in differences in salary, space and resources available to men and women faculty members.
...Since the report on the “exclusion and invisibility” of women was first issued four years ago, the school has increased salary, space and resources for women. MIT’s experience is hardly unique. The study and Vest’s willingness to admit discrimination – however subtle – should serve as a catalyst for colleges and universities throughout the country to seriously re-evaluate treatment of women faculty members."
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