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When I read the report from Sloan, my inclination is to attribute the tone to differences in outlook. Some people view a glass as 80% full. Some view a glass as 20% empty. The report seems to be on the side of 20% empty. The negative tone of the report has important implications, because the negative statistics seems to be all that the outside world notices. (This ironically leads to both praise and criticism.) Outside papers do not mention progress at Sloan or at MIT. At best, they may mention that other places have the same problems.
The first striking statistic is the change in women senior faculty since 1990. In 1990, Sloan had one woman on the senior faculty and 33 men. Of the faculty tenured at Sloan since that time, 18% have been women, which is slightly lower than the rate (23%) at which women have been hired as junior faculty. Had one more woman received tenure, the percentages would have been very close to being the same. This strikes me as remarkable progress. Yet the report writes "Even after accounting for age distribution of full professors, there is still evidence that the proportion of women declines after one moves up the career ladder." It makes no comment concerning progress.
The report then comments on salary. Again, the report focuses on the few inequities that exist. (The report does add parenthetically that there was some improvement in 2001, but ignores the incredible improvement from 1990 to 2000 compared to the previous decades, with much of the improvement over the past few years.)
The report then comments on promotion. It finds that the promotion rates are comparable for men and women over the past decade, and notes that women typically take two years longer to get promoted to full professor. The tenure issue reflects amazing progress for women. Perhaps the full promotion delay reflects some issues to be resolved, but it does not seem overly serious, especially since associate professors choose their own timing as to when to come up for promotion, and no faculty member has been turned down in promotion to full professor over the past decade. Nevertheless, in his statement about the report, Dean Schmalensee refers to this time delay for women coming up for promotion as "the most disturbing quantitative result" of the report. It seems to me that if the most disturbing quantitative result of the report is that women delay promotion to full professorship by two years, then we have made very good progress indeed over the past decade.
While I may view the glass as 80% full in terms of substantial progress, I also view the remaining 20% as important. Most signficantly, the report emphasizes (quite correctly) that women faculty do not have as positive an experience at Sloan as do men faculty. The reasons for this may be complex and subtle (and sometimes not so subtle), but they are worth exploring. Moreover, Sloan should strive to make the experience of being a faculty member a positive one for both women and men.
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