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Nancy
Hopkins, Lotte
Bailyn, Lorna
Gibson, Evelynn
Hammonds
for the Council on Faculty Diversity
Abstract
A
study completed several years ago in the School of Science found that
tenured women faculty often experienced marginalization, and with it,
inequities in terms of resources for research and compensation.
Inequities can be difficult to detect in the absence of a systematic
study. To ensure the equitable treatment of women faculty, Provost
Bob Brown asked that studies similar to that in the School of Science
be performed in the other Schools of MIT. Committees on the Status of
Women Faculty, appointed by the Deans, analyzed data and conducted
interviews, and prepared reports on their findings. Edited versions
of these Reports follow this overview. Strikingly, the studies reveal
that the issues that can negatively impact the professional lives of
women faculty are similar in different Schools and similar to those
identified in Science. They include marginalization, which can
sometimes be accompanied by inequities; the small number of women
faculty in many departments; and the greater difficulty of balancing
family and work for women faculty. Despite generic similarities,
specific manifestations of these problems differ among Schools, and
even in different departments within a School. Identification of the
specific concerns of women faculty has led to prompt corrective
actions. It has also led to new policies to facilitate institutional
change to prevent such problems from arising in the future. The
collaboration of tenured women faculty with the higher administration
has substantially improved the professional lives of many women
faculty. If sustained, this interaction should ultimately impact the
continued under-representation of women, particularly in many fields
of science and engineering. Similar efforts may also help to address
the almost complete absence of women of color from the MIT
faculty.
Introduction
In March 1999 an article in The MIT Faculty Newsletter
reported the results of a study on the status of women faculty in the
School of Science. An important finding was that many tenured women
faculty experienced professional marginalization. Often
marginalization was accompanied by inequities, with women faculty
receiving lower salaries, less space, and fewer resources for their
research than male colleagues, and by exclusion from important
decision making roles in their departments. The report highlighted
the small number of women faculty (15 tenured women vs. 197 tenured
men in 1994) and the fact that, contrary to popular belief, the
percentage of women faculty had remained unchanged for at least 10,
and probably 20 years.
University reports can go unheeded and gather dust, but the Report on the Status of Women Faculty in Science was widely quoted in the media and had far reaching consequences, both inside and outside MIT. Within MIT, President Vest set a goal of achieving gender equity in the future, and he commissioned the Provost to ensure that this was the case. Together, with input from women faculty, Provost Brown and President Vest also established a Council on Faculty Diversity to identify fundamental issues underlying marginalization and the continued under-representation of both women and minorities on the faculty, and to try to devise institutional solutions for these problems.
Outside MIT, the Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science resonated widely with professional women. The problems identified in the MIT report proved to be essentially universal for professional women in the U.S. Further, the problem had frequently been ignored or misunderstood. President Vest held a conference of nine university Presidents to discuss these issues, and the Presidents made a commitment to address gender bias at their own schools.
An important observation from the Science Report was that marginalization and the inequities that result from it can be difficult to identify in individual cases at the department level. Careful study is needed to identify problems since these can differ from field to field, department to department, and even individual to individual. In addition, a mechanism is needed to correct inequities as soon as they are identified. In light of these findings, Provost Bob Brown chose to establish committees in each of the Schools of MIT to carry out analyses similar to that in Science and to make corrections of inequities when they were documented. The Dean of each School appointed a committee of female and male faculty, and selected a woman faculty chair in consultation with the tenured women in the School. The reports of these Committees have been completed, presented to the Deans and School Councils, to the Academic Council, and to the faculty. Summaries of the reports are published here.
We are very grateful to the Ford
Foundation and The Atlantic Philanthropies for their support of these
efforts over the past two years.
Findings of the Reports: Generic
Issues, Specific Manifestations
Not surprisingly, the Committees found that most female and male
faculty fully appreciate the many advantages of a faculty position at
MIT, with its access to exceptional students, colleagues, and
resources for research. Nonetheless, across many departments and
probably in all Schools, the experiences of male and female faculty
differ, with women more frequently reporting negative experiences.
The most striking finding from the four new reports is that many of
the issues that differentially affect the professional lives of women
faculty are shared in all five Schools of MIT. This might not have
been readily apparent in the absence of these detailed studies.
Generic issues that differentially
impact the professional lives of female vs. male faculty are:
marginalization; isolation resulting from small numbers of women
faculty; residual effects of past inequities, particularly around
salary and access to resources; and greater family responsibilities.
Marginalization accumulates from a series of repeated instances of
disadvantage which compound over an academic career.
1. Specific manifestations of
marginalization and the inequities that can arise from it
Marginalization can take many forms and can occur for complex
reasons. Marginalization has cumulative and deleterious effects on a
faculty member's productivity. It leads to professional exclusion, a
sense of being under-valued, and accumulated inequities from unequal
levels of compensation and unequal access to resources.
Marginalization and the inequities that accompany it are more likely
to occur in Schools and departments with the fewest women faculty.
Examples of marginalization in
different Schools
In Engineering, the School with the lowest percentage of
women faculty, the report found that exclusion from professional
activities, and sometimes near-invisibility of women faculty were
common, although not universal issues. For example, women faculty in
different departments report being excluded from participation in
group grants. And some report not being invited to serve on the Ph.D
thesis committees of the students of male colleagues. While a single
incident is inconsequential, repeated over time these exclusions can
have important consequences, since some of these interactions
generate new ideas for further collaboration, can result in research
that leads to group research grants, and can generate outside
professional opportunities important to a career in some fields of
engineering. Some of us were present the day the Dean of Engineering,
Tom Magnanti, learned of these inexplicable, to him incomprehensible
exclusions of women faculty. He was almost unable to grasp that this
had routinely happened to women whom he himself knew to be highly
respected members of their departments. He instantly understood,
though, the severely negative professional consequences of this
exclusion. Interestingly, in Science, exclusion from group grants was
also identified as part of the pattern of marginalization, but
exclusion from Ph.D committees was not reported. In contrast, space
was not reported as an issue for women faculty in Engineering at the
present time, but it had been a very significant issue for some women
faculty in Science. In the Sloan School of Management, a startling
manifestation of the consequences of marginalization was discovered
when interviews with senior women faculty and a matched group of men
were independently coded on a number of dimensions of experience.
Among 60 possible comparisons there was no single case where the
woman reported a better experience than did her matched male pair.
And there were 40 comparisons where the man's reported experience was
more positive than that of his matched pair.
In the School of Architecture and Planning, a number of women faculty reported feeling a lack of influence in important decision-making. Some male faculty, on the other hand, reported great influence and inclusion in decision-making. Although women faculty have been appointed as members or chairs of important committees, it appears that some important departmental decisions are not made within these committees, but are made outside of the committee structure.
These examples show the importance of the stories women faculty tell about their experiences in different fields. Only the aggregation of individual stories will point the way to better understanding as well as to concrete ways to improve the situation of faculty women, and undoubtedly of some male faculty as well.
The under-valuing of women and
of certain fields of research
As the report from the School of Humanities, Arts, and Social
Sciences (SHASS) suggests, not only women, but entire fields can be
under-valued in the male-dominated culture of science and
engineering. Thus, in Humanities at MIT, both female and male faculty
in fields without graduate programs often feel under-valued relative
to those in the social sciences. These humanistic fields have a
higher percentage of women faculty and lower salary scales for both
men and women. As one male faculty in Humanities commented, "We're
all women here." This difference in fields extends to the Sloan
School of Management as well, where faculty in areas that are more
quantitative are more highly paid and feel more central than those
who rely on interpretative analyses of field-based data. The latter
include most of the senior women. In Architecture and Planning, too,
many women are in fields with lower compensation. The issue also
arises in Engineering, where women often work in inter-disciplinary
areas and nontraditional niches. This choice may contribute to their
isolation and make it easier for men to undervalue their work since
there may be no colleagues to collaborate with and few who can
comprehensively evaluate them.
Women faculty can often earn
less than male colleagues
As expected from national studies conducted over decades, and
from the School of Science report, three of the four new Reports
document lower salaries for women faculty in the past. In Engineering
many of these were corrected some years ago, although a few
additional corrections were made by Dean Magnanti in response to the
Report. In Sloan, at the time the data were analyzed, women faculty
salaries were lower than those of male faculty when controlled for
field, rank, and past experience. But Dean Schmalensee has recently
taken steps to bring men and women to parity on average. In
Architecture some significant disparities were corrected through the
work of the Committee and Dean Mitchell. Only the SHASS Committee
failed to find evidence of lower pay for women faculty; however, the
committee obtained salary data for only one year, precluding the
possibility of detecting past underpayments and corrections.
Department Heads and Deans probably often correct the lower salaries
of women faculty, since a common finding in all Schools (except
SHASS, see above) is sudden unexplained raises to women faculty,
presumably resulting from previous underpayment. Though very
important, such jumps do not make up for past unequal contributions
to pension benefits. Furthermore, it has been noted that with time,
women's salaries often fall behind again.
Now that we better understand the
marginalization of women faculty, it is easier to see why the
compensation system so frequently results in women faculty earning
less than men. Salaries, it seems, are primarily driven by the market
and respond most robustly to outside offers. In this market-driven
system, therefore, obtaining a high salary requires that women
faculty 1) know how the system works, 2) obtain outside offers as
frequently as men, 3) be as willing and capable of moving to another
location as male colleagues, 4) obtain an equally robust response to
an outside offer from their Department Head or Dean. Marginalization
and exclusion from knowledge, the lower probability of having a
spouse willing to follow you to a new location, and under-valuation
in the eyes of those who make offers and those who respond to outside
offers, make this long standing problem more comprehensible, indeed,
make it almost predictable. Recently, in the School of Science, it is
apparent that women faculty, particularly young single women, have
learned to use outside offers, and thus, some now have among the
highest salaries in the School. Similarly, women hired from outside
in several Schools have high salaries. But for now, the Committees on
women faculty are serving as an additional check on salaries, for
both men and women. We are gradually coming to see that our
compensation system may be both out of date and gendered: it worked
well for a man with a movable wife, but is irrelevant for many
two-career couples and most women. As noted above, in some Schools,
entire departments and fields are under-valued and all faculty have
low salaries. This is not a gender equity issue, although it may
reflect the feminization of these fields, particularly within the
hard-science, male-dominated culture of MIT.
2. Small numbers of women faculty
and the prospects for increasing the numbers
Only 16%of MIT faculty are women. This number is expected to be
lower overall than many other universities since the percentage of
women in science and engineering is lower than in other fields, and
since nearly two-thirds of MIT's entire faculty are scientists or
engineers. By School, comparable field, or by department, MIT appears
to have the same or slightly more women faculty than comparable units
of comparable universities.
Once again, in analyzing the numbers of women faculty, careful analysis of data has proven to be critical for identifying specific issues that need to be addressed. For example, in Engineering, the percentage of women hired in the last 10 years is roughly equal to the percentage of women Ph.Ds produced in the U.S. However, the Engineering Report documents that most of these hires occurred in half the departments, particularly Civil Engineering, Chemical Engineering, and Material Science and Engineering. In contrast, Electrical Engineering and Mechanical Engineering made virtually no progress in hiring and retaining women over a decade. Between 1990 and 1998 Electrical Engineering hired 28 men and 0 women. This was not for lack of trying. Four offers were made to women, but none accepted. This stunning finding reflects a trend in the School: the acceptance rate for women of job offers to join the Engineering faculty was lower than that of men. Furthermore, engineering will occasionally hire its own best Ph.Ds, but the proportion of male MIT-trained Ph.Ds hired was twice that of MIT-trained women hired. Clearly, only by identifying these very specific issues, department by department, can one begin to address them.
In Architecture and Planning, the proportion of women faculty is high relative to other Schools. But in relation to the much higher proportion of graduate students in the School, they could be doing much better. The School has been very successful in recent years in increasing the numbers of women faculty to very high levels, especially by hiring senior women from without. However, at the same time, there have been problems promoting junior women to tenure from within. These important findings point to areas that require further analysis and understanding, and the need for long term commitment in order to truly impact the number of women over time.
Even in SHASS, the number of women faculty is equal to men in only a few fields of Humanities. While there they are 50-50, in fact in these fields the fraction of women Ph.Ds is even higher. So while the 50-50 mix is highly desirable, even this may be an under-representation of the fraction of trained women Ph.Ds in the pool. Interestingly, in Science, the number of women faculty has increased by about 50% since its study was conducted. However, most of the increase occurred at that time, and some of it has been eroded by the departure of 4 tenured women. In Science, as opposed to Engineering, the acceptance rate of job offers for men and women over the past decade has been close to equal. The difficulty has been in making offers at a steady pace over a long period of time.
The important information about numbers collected in these reports points to a critical need for a more detailed study of the number of women available in each field, the numbers who apply for faculty positions, the number interviewed, offers made, and acceptance rates over time. This detailed pipeline study is essential for the important next step, which is to determine where the missing women go, and why. As discussed below, the issue of increasing the number of women faculty is being addressed by the Provost, the Deans, and the Council on Faculty Diversity.
Women of color are the most
under-represented faculty
Although none of the Reports deal specifically with the issue
of the diversity of women faculty this omission in itself reflects a
harsh reality: there are almost no women of color on the MIT faculty.
Nationally, women of color are all but invisible. Their numbers are
hidden in both the numbers of women and in the numbers of
under-represented minorities, but they are almost never seen as a
group in their own right. National statistics of top universities
show that these women exist in single numbers at best. At a recent
conference held at MIT on minority women scientists and engineers in
the academy, organized by Professor Evelynn Hammonds (STS, Director,
Center for the Study of Diversity in Science, Technology, and
Medicine), members of the audience were able to identify – by
name – all the women in the top 50 departments of Science and
Engineering in the United States! This under-representation applies
to African American, Hispanic, and Native American women, and to a
non-official minority group of women, those of Asian origin.
3. Family-work issues for women
faculty, and increasingly for male faculty
Not surprisingly, women faculty often remark on the greater
responsibilities that women shoulder for family care, including care
of both children and aging parents. This issue, also central to the
findings of the Science Report, is similar for women in all Schools,
although the best solutions can be very different depending on the
field, stage of career, and nature of the responsibility. Further, as
in most universities, many fewer of the women faculty are married or
have children. Related to this is the fact that the benefit structure
is still geared to a male earner with a family, and some of the needs
of women faculty are not being met. In some departments male faculty
also cited family-work issues as being of very great concern. This is
increasingly true of junior male faculty. These issues are currently
being addressed by changes to institutional processes.
Progress for Women Faculty at MIT:
Quick Fixes and Long Term Solutions
From these Reports, as from the Science Report, we learned that
female faculty can have different, often less positive professional
experiences than their male colleagues. Painstaking data gathering by
faculty and administrators deep within the institution, including
collecting the important stories of female faculty, have helped to
make this issue visible and thus make it possible to address it. The
MIT administration has made two types of responses to the Science
report and to these four new reports as well: quick fixes to specific
inequities, and efforts at long term solutions including
institutional change.
1. The Committees on the Status of
Women Faculty will continue to monitor equity
When inequities are documented now by the Committees on women
faculty, they are usually promptly addressed by the Deans. The
importance of this cannot be over-estimated, since the studies reveal
the extreme frustration and discouragement that can result from a
feeling that there may be inequities in the system. Furthermore,
realizing that inequities will probably continue to arise and impact
the productivity and quality of life for women faculty, the Provost
and President have requested that the Committees on women faculty
remain in place and continue to monitor equity, including annual
reviews of primary salary data by Committee chairs. However, as
President Vest had noted earlier, important though this is, "fixing
inequities is the easy part " of the solution. The more difficult
part is to understand the reasons inequities arise, the reasons for
marginalization and for the small number of women faculty and to
address these.
In recognition of these complex
problems, President Vest and Provost Brown, in consultation with
tenured women faculty, established a Council on Faculty Diversity in
the fall of 2000. This administrative mechanism allows faculty with
knowledge of an important issue to work hand in hand with
administrators who have both a deep knowledge of institutional
process and the power to impact it rapidly. The first Council on
Faculty diversity has been Co-Chaired by Provost Bob Brown, Professor
Nancy Hopkins (who was Chair of the first Committee on Women Faculty
in Science) and Professor Phillip Clay (previously Associate Provost,
now Chancellor of MIT. Clay has recently been replaced by Professor
Wesley Harris.) In her capacity as Co-Chair of the Council, Professor
Hopkins sits on the Academic Council, the highest committee of
academic administration at MIT. She is one of two women faculty on
the Council, twice the number of women faculty to ever sit there at
one time. In addition to Professor Hopkins and Professor Alice Gast
(Vice President for Research and Associate Provost), the Council
includes four women in positions of administrative leadership (three
vice presidents and the director of libraries).
2. The Council on Faculty
Diversity examines institutional process in light of the findings of
the Committees on the Status of Women Faculty
The Reports from all five Committees on women faculty make
clear that the small numbers of faculty in many departments, and the
greater demands of family are two areas of extreme concern for women
faculty. In recognition of this, the Council on Faculty Diversity has
specifically addressed these two issues.
Policies to address family-work
issues
A Subcommittee on Quality of Life, chaired by Professor Lotte
Bailyn (Sloan), with input from faculty across the Institute,
developed three new policies for family leaves for the birth or
adoption of a child, and for care of a family member or partner.
These policies have been approved by the Deans and by the Academic
Council and have been put into place in the current year. Their use
and effect over time will be monitored by faculty who will report to
the Council on Faculty Diversity, thus setting up a monitored
experiment.
Small numbers of women faculty:
Hiring policies, pipeline
To address the under-representation of women, and also
minorities, on the faculty, Provost Brown worked with the Deans to
develop guidelines for hiring practices. Each School was asked to
develop protocols that could be used by search committees and that
would ensure that tenured women and minority faculty play a part in
all searches. In addition, some Deans have adopted the policy of
reviewing all searches themselves and sending back those in which
potential women or minority faculty candidates were not seriously
considered. To assist these new programs, Professor Gibson (Chair of
the Engineering Committee on women faculty) has prepared a Handbook
on Faculty Search Procedures modeled after one developed by Dean of
Engineering Denice Denton, U. of Washington. The Council on Faculty
Diversity is also in the process of developing new approaches to
analyzing and stimulating the pipeline, both for women, including
women of color, and for minority males, but this work is still at an
early stage.
3. Women faculty in the
administration
A striking finding from the Science report was that no woman
professor had ever been a Department Head, or Center or Lab director
in Science in the history of MIT. In fact, there were no women in the
administration of either Science or Engineering at the time of the
study. This lack of access to knowledge of the system is a serious
source of problems. The absence of women from such knowledge and
positions of power is also found in some departments of other Schools
as the new Reports reveal. Today, six women faculty from Science have
roles in the academic administration (see Update from Dean Silbey for
the School of Science) including women Heads of two labs in Physics
and a Director of the highly prestigious Whitehead Institute, and
three women have line positions in the administration in Engineering,
while four others have non-line positions with substantial
administrative responsibilities. In addition, Professor Terry Knight
(Chair of the Committee on women faculty in Architecture) was
recently appointed Associate Dean of the School of Architecture and
Planning. These appointments have already had a significant impact by
dramatically increasing women faculty knowledge of the system, as
well as further increasing awareness among male administrators of the
problems women faculty can experience. In addition, these women are
beginning to impact institutional processes to make them more
effective for a diverse faculty.
4. A collaboration of committed
administrators and committed women faculty is responsible for the
progress at MIT
Many women faculty have been amazed by the progress and changes
in their own professional lives at MIT as a result of the work
described in this Overview and in the Reports that follow. If one
were to ask what was the most important factor in change to date, it
would have to be the Reports that documented the problems and led to
the engagement of administrators in solving them. This could not have
occurred without two key components: a significant number of tenured
women faculty who worked closely together and were willing to commit
an enormous amount of their time to this issue, and a higher
administration that, given the knowledge of the problems the women
faculty provided, made a long term commitment to work with the women
faculty to address the issues. Initially the Dean of Science fixed
problems for women faculty on a case by case basis. But today, the
Provost, and also Deans, work closely with women faculty within the
administration to address these problems on behalf of the
institution. This is a profound change, probably the most important
to occur for some decades.
5. Why MIT? "Engineers solve
problems"
When the Science Report was published, many people expressed
surprise that analysis of what in the end is really a societal
problem should come from a School of science and engineering.
However, this may in fact be key to MIT 's approach to gender equity.
In a conversation with Provost Brown, in which one woman expressed
her concerns about whether these complex problems were really
fixable, the Provost, an Engineer by profession, seemed quite taken
aback. "This is MIT," he replied. "We're engineers. Engineers solve
problems. " Indeed, , it may be the can-do, entrepreneurial, even
upstart confidence of the engineer that explains in part both Vest 's
and Brown 's commitment to this difficult issue. A confident belief
that data-gathering, analysis, design of goals and development of
metrics can solve most problems may give MIT the courage to try to
change societal problems as elusive even as gender bias.
The Future: Will we be monitoring
equity forever?
But will it work, this engineers' approach to gender equity?
Despite the enormous progress we have made at MIT, there is still a
long way to go. While the findings of these Reports and the
administrative mechanisms they have generated can ensure equity for
women faculty, it will remain hard to solve the marginalization of
women. Many women faculty are still unlikely to have many female
colleagues during their entire professional lives, given the slow
rate of faculty turnover and the small numbers of women faculty still
being hired in some fields. These women will remain at risk to be
marginalized since no matter how many policies one enacts, in the
end, consciousness raising of the entire faculty will be needed to
solve this problem. But would even that be enough to increase the
numbers of women faculty, and solve the family-work issue?
Do we need to change the rules
of the game?
As we have seen with salaries and with the numbers of women
faculty, once the concrete data are available, committed
administrators can make a difference. But lasting equity cannot
depend only on the good will of department heads and deans. So,
despite the important progress MIT has made, there are still
underlying causes that have not been uncovered. There still is very
little awareness at MIT, or elsewhere, of the gendered nature of
academic rules: how criteria of evaluation, timing expectations,
conventions of authorship – to name a few – help men more
than women. Nor is there awareness that reputations are constructed,
and cumulate from slight advantages that favor men, and slight
inequities that disadvantage women. Lasting equity requires
rethinking these institutional rules, which evolved for a different
demographic group, in order to ensure that they do not systematically
disadvantage women, or men in dual career partnerships. MIT has
successfully used the experience of the women faculty in the School
of Science to ensure that women in all the schools are treated
fairly, and that everyone understands the rules. What still needs
doing, and what eventually will be necessary in order to achieve
lasting gender equity, is to question and rethink the nature of the
rules themselves.
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