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I spoke at the faculty meeting [March 18] after the reports on the experience of women faculty had been presented and I pointed out that if we wish to achieve our (modest) goals for the number of women faculty, we would have to appoint women at a substantially higher rate than we have been used to. I also exhorted the Institute to set some ambitious goals and get on with it. This Faculty Newsletter gives me the opportunity to elaborate a bit on those comments and to add a few more.
I have had a good deal of experience with admission of students – (I've served on CUAFA twice, looked at undergraduate admissions policies and results fairly carefully as chair of the faculty and as dean for Student Affairs, and managed the graduate admissions process in a large department for over 25 years.) That experience guides my comments although I realize that the analogy between admissions and faculty hiring is not perfect.
I would note that our success in changing the composition of the undergraduate population was aided by the fact that the population turns over at a rate of 25% per year.
Faculty turnover is much slower, perhaps 5% per year, and as a consequence, to achieve a significant change in a decade, we will have to hire at a rate substantially above the steady state rate that would maintain a given distribution. I leave it to those who like to do such things to do the numbers but I expect that the provost, deans, and department heads have evaluated specific models for the various segments of the Institute and it could be useful to share those broadly with the faculty.
If we substantially increase the rate at which we hire women faculty (while keeping the overall rate fixed) that will raise some faculty concerns. In my experience with admissions, there are two recurring reactions to proposals for such a change. One is "The pool is limited – only 20% of the Ph.Ds in our field are women. So we shouldn't try to hire at a rate of 50%." Percentages often mislead – we are not hiring the whole field, only a few women a year. A statement more like "There are several hundred women Ph.Ds in our field and we only need to hire three this year." would be more useful. There is a pool-based limitation - how many of the qualified women are applying for our positions? We need to work on that and on the related problem of why our offers are not accepted.
The other common reaction is "Let's increase the numbers but we must be sure not to sacrifice quality." My admissions experience suggests that this concern can be overdone.
When we were not increasing the numbers of undergraduate women, those women we had admitted were statistically outperforming the men academically in measures like the fraction who graduated and their grade average at graduation. That suggests that we were not being sufficiently ambitious in our pursuit of change. I also know that, at the graduate level, while we only admit excellent applicants, not all of the students who come are successful. It is hard to measure quality at the time of admission or employment, and excessive concern about maintaining quality can be a substantial impediment to progress.
One of the strengths of MIT is that we have been very successful by selecting able young faculty and giving them the opportunity to grow and flourish. The administration has been extremely effective in providing resources to the faculty and the senior faculty have provided an atmosphere in which young faculty can achieve. I think this aspect of the Institute is more important in determining the quality of our faculty than any ability to judge talent at the outset. If I am correct in this assessment, then the perceptions of our women faculty that they have less access to resources and receive less attention from their senior colleagues become even more disturbing.
Finally, it seems to me that achieving the sort of change that is being considered requires a commitment to change on the part of those responsible for selecting new faculty – that's us. Let's get on with it.
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