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When I read The Boston Globe article about the Reports of the Committees on the Status of Women Faculty my immediate reaction was that it was presenting the same problems that activist women academics discussed in the 70s. Now that I have read the Reports, I know that I was partially correct; the issues raised remain substantially the same. However, I was also wrong, because the Reports present a picture of considerable change. The most striking difference is that there are now enough women on the MIT faculty that clear patterns of problems emerge, and they can no longer be dismissed as scattered individual difficulties.
Attempts to increase the participation of women on the faculty began in the Wiesner presidency. The first wing of McCormick had been completed, the number of new women undergraduates was no longer restricted to 15 per year, and with sex-blind admission their numbers at MIT were climbing. Wiesner told the department heads that there should also be an increase in the number of women on the faculty. In some departments this allowed their members to push for the appointment of women they thought qualified, sometimes successfully. Other departments remained captive to their prejudices. I was one of the women who was made a faculty member during this period, becoming the fifth woman full professor at MIT.
At the end of the 60s and during the 70s women were active at MIT. Women undergraduates worked to increase their number, and women staff and support staff met to consider their problems. The women faculty formed groups to urge recruitment and to try to support the junior women faculty in their careers at MIT. Federally mandated Affirmative Action came into force, and more departments hired women faculty, while others insisted there were none to hire. The newly appointed women sometimes encountered overt resentment as well as the problems discussed in the Reports , and many left.
But the numbers did go up. When I wrote an article for Physics Today at the end of the 70s, I was able to report that although only 2.7% of the professors in the top 10 U.S. physics departments were women, 7 of those 11 women were at MIT forming 7% of our department [1]. Then the increases slowed and in some cases stopped. This year's MIT Bulletin lists five women in the Physics Department, although due to its decrease in size they still constitute 7%. However, departments which once claimed that there were no women suitable for their faculty, now have one or more.
Another thing that has changed is the language of the discourse. The kind of negative remarks that were made to me when I chaired the first APS Committee on Women in Physics in 1971-72 [2] were no longer common in the 80s, and a comment in the Reports indicates that they have been silenced at MIT.
The very good news is that there is a new generation of women academics, like Nancy Hopkins, who are willing to push for solutions to the enduring problems, and that men in positions of authority, like Bob Birgeneau, are willing to support them. And, finally, now that all the Reports are in, that the top levels of the administration, from President Vest down, are putting suggested remedies into action.
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1. Vera Kistiakowsky, "Women in physics; unnecessary, injurious and out of place?", Physics Today (February,1980); reprinted in "History of Physics", (Spencer R. Weart and Melba Phillips, editors), 149 (American Institute of Physics, New York, NY 1985).
2. Ibid.
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