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MIT has been co-ed longer than most institutions of higher learning in the U.S., since 1876, in fact, when it opened the first Women's laboratory in chemistry. (Ellen Swallow Richards was admitted as a special student in chemistry in 1870.) Indeed, the Cheney room was established to provide overnight accommodations for female students who were working around the clock and couldn't leave campus to get home to bed in the middle of the night. Nevertheless, for 140 years MIT has been dominantly male: its personnel, its student body, its faculty, its architecture, its administrative structures, its hierarchies, its ethos, its organization, its rhetoric, its traditions.
That is why the Reports of the Committees on the Status of Women Faculty, published last week from all five schools, are so revolutionary. From the process generating the methods of investigation to the publicity about the findings, no other study of gender bias conducted at the university level has been so thoroughgoing, so democratic, so respectful of the experiences of all women, or so well publicized. No other institution of higher learning has had the nerve to conduct such a study honestly and openly.
By empowering senior women in each school to investigate gender equity, the administration ensured that each study would be conducted by those who knew what to look for, where to look for it, and who would be able to recognize what they saw. In my school, SHASS, the senior women had many meetings to decide, in the first place, whether or not such a study was worth doing; what data we wanted and how to gather it; and finally, how the committee was to be constituted and who should head it. In the School of Architecture and Planning, for example, there were so few senior women at the time (6), that all of them were invited to be on the committee. But in our school, with its grand total of 30 senior women, the committee was elected.
Predictably, gender bias manifested itself differently in each of the five Schools of the Institute. In Science and Engineering, women were excluded from participation in group grants and from graduate students' thesis committees. In Sloan, women were promoted to full professor more slowly than men, with resulting salary differentials. In SHASS, which has the highest percentage of women faculty at the Institute, these greater numbers seem to have had the adverse effect of depressing overall salary levels (even below levels for those fields at peer institutions) and lowering the School's prestige. Even at that, the proportion of women in the School is far less than in the pool of Ph.Ds in the fields we represent.
These material conditions have been and will continue to be rectified. But the maleness of MIT, and the way women feel marginalized by its internal processes and its hierarchies, its way of doing business, is another matter. The top-down administrative style at MIT, with its ad hoc rather than codified systems, leaves a lot of freedom for the entrepreneurial-at-heart but does not foster community among faculty members. At the faculty meeting on March 18, the head of a unit in SHASS remarked that she thought that too much power was vested in heads at MIT, because they make both budgetary decisions and carry forward promotion and tenure cases. Can you think of a single male head at MIT who would lament this concentration of power?
Twenty years ago, senior women at MIT argued that we needed to socialize our female graduate students to be more like men so that they would succeed better in the workplace. But today the senior women are asserting that our Institute needs to make room for people from other traditions of socialization, with other repertoires of social behaviors, other vocabularies, and other life experiences. Women do not make very good men (and vice versa) – nor should they have to. But because men are more comfortable with other men, because they understand one another better than they do women, they exclude women socially and professionally from the working networks of the Institute. Men know how to read the body language, the verbal cues, the social positioning, the sizing-up rituals of other men better than they know how to read these same cues for women. They bond and identify with other men more easily than with women. When women across the Institute say that they feel isolated in their departments; that they feel marginalized and unappreciated; that their male colleagues do not treat them respectfully; that they feel silent pressure not to speak out at meetings; that they feel excluded from conversations that have obviously taken place outside of committee rooms – whether on the squash court, the locker room, or the men's bathrooms; that their comments in meetings are ignored or interrupted or suffered but quickly dismissed; that their contributions to the Institute or to their respective fields are not recognized here; that they do not know what resources are available to faculty or even who to ask about them; that there is a locker-room atmosphere at MIT that they are always up against; that they have to second-guess their male colleagues, to watch for clues as to what decisions have been taken; that they feel fundamentally that they are not full members of MIT – these are signs of gender bias as it plays out in the administrative structure and organizational style of our institution.
Hiring more women, including women of color – changing the race and gender demographics of the place – will help. Placing women in administrative leadership positions will help. Recognizing women's special contributions to the Institute will help. But the good will of our male colleagues as they notice the ways in which maleness is privileged at MIT and then try to open the institution up more to women – that will help most of all.
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