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The Reports of the Committees on the Status of Women Faculty demonstrate the power of combining grass roots activism with top-level leadership support and commitment to change. An important key to the success of these efforts is that they adopted a change strategy consistent with the MIT culture. They were research and data driven.
As the Provost's introduction to the reports says, the easy work required to address the problems identified has been done. Salaries have been adjusted where inequities were found and formal policies now offer options for women and men to take time off, including time off the tenure clock, to attend to family needs. But there is still much to be done. The hard work of sustaining the momentum of change remains. This will require changing the culture of MIT to encourage use of these policies without fear of being viewed as a less committed or a less competent scholar. It also will require continuous efforts to overcome the subtle forms of marginalization women in the different Schools report experiencing. Finally, it will require proactive efforts at the department and group levels to make significant progress in recruiting and promoting women across all disciplines. At MIT, the power on these issues lies mainly at the level of the department. Department heads need to be held strictly accountable for making measurable progress toward these ends.
The momentum and progress in addressing the role of women faculty needs to be matched with an equally strong effort to increase the number of under-represented minority faculty. Despite strong support and resources from the President and Provost, progress is slow or non-existent in this area. Instilling commitment to this goal and rigor into the practices and efforts of each department and search committee are both essential to making progress in this area.
We also need to turn our attention to the racial composition of the staff and administration. A soon to be released review of diversity in these ranks will show we have made very little progress in this area over the past decade. This is not an acceptable record for an employer that is as visible and attractive as MIT, both nationally and locally. Perhaps, drawing on the experiences of the women faculty, similar grass roots activist groups need to be created among the administrative staff that work in tandem with Institute leaders to ask what needs to be done to achieve a more balanced representation in these positions.
Finally, each of us regardless of our race or gender, has to take personal responsibility and do our part to make MIT a place that attracts, retains, and learns from the full range of people in society MIT aspires to teach, influence, and lead. My fellow members of the Committee on Campus Race Relations invite you to join us in continuing to work toward these ends. We applaud the steps taken to face and to address the visible and subtle inequities experienced by women faculty. We are proud to work at an institution committed to this ideal for all individuals and groups and especially one that encourages use of grass roots activism, data-based discourse, and creative problem solving to address these issues. Let's keep up the momentum these studies have begun.
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