In response to recommendations from their own professors, Duke and Princeton Universities have each pledged to spend millions of dollars to make their campuses better places for female faculty members.
Princeton announced last month that it had appointed a new administrator to oversee gender-equity issues after a group of professors spent more than a year studying the status of female faculty members. The Task Force on the Status of Women Faculty in the Natural Sciences and Engineering also recommended that the university establish a $10-million fund to “promote the recruitment, hiring, and retention of women faculty” members in the sciences and engineering.
Princeton’s president, Shirley M. Tilghman, said: “I fully intend to make resources available to meet the recommendations of the task force. How we do that -- whether we do it by setting aside a specific fund or whether we do it within budgets that already exist within the university -- is something the provost and I are still determining.”
Joan S. Girgus, who came to Princeton as a professor of psychology in 1977, was named special assistant to the dean of the faculty to handle gender-equity issues. She is one of 11 people who served on the panel on the status of women, which Ms. Tilghman, a molecular biologist, created in 2001.
Ms. Girgus, who led Princeton’s psychology department from 1996 to 2002, said she would coordinate Princeton’s efforts to attract and retain female faculty members. High on her list of priorities is expanding on-campus day care for the children of Princeton faculty members -- a service that she said is now “minimal.” She also said the university wants to focus more energy on helping the spouses and partners of professors find work, whether on the campus or in the area.
“When there were very few of us, almost all women in my generation had the same experience of plowing ahead and staying focused on the work that needs to be done,” said Ms. Girgus, adding that she may have ignored discriminatory acts and remarks to avoid sidetracking her career. “I hope that the women of this generation don’t feel they need to put on blinders.”
Impact of the MIT Study
The group on the status of women was created after the leaders of nine research universities, including Princeton, met at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in 2001 and decried the lack of female professors in the sciences (The Chronicle, February 9, 2001). In a report it issued last month, the Princeton panel said that the proportion of female professors in the sciences and engineering there remains small, and that female faculty members in those fields are not as happy as their male counterparts.
The group surveyed professors in the sciences and engineering and analyzed hiring records, salaries, and the rates at which men and women are granted tenure. It found no difference between male and female faculty members in salaries or tenure rates. But it found that while some science and engineering departments had hired more women over the past 10 years, others had not.
Over all, the percentage of female faculty members in the natural sciences and engineering at Princeton increased to 13.9 percent in 2002 from 8.4 percent in 1992. But four departments saw no increase in the proportion of women during that period. And in one department, molecular biology, the proportion of female faculty members declined to 19 percent from 30 percent. In only 2 of Princeton’s 14 science and engineering departments do women make up more than 20 percent of the faculty.
Women are also “underrepresented” in leadership positions, the report says. Only two science and engineering departments have had a female head, and women held only 5.7 percent of the endowed chairs in those fields in 2002.
“As an institution, Princeton is in good shape in some areas, but less so in others,” said Virginia Zakian, who led the faculty group and is a professor of molecular biology at Princeton. “In general, women hired at Princeton have done about as well as men. However, the number of women faculty remains small, and women are not as professionally satisfied at Princeton as their male colleagues.”
Duke University decided to “put our money where our mouth is” to make the campus a more comfortable place for women, said Nannerl O. Keohane, the president.
After a yearlong study by the Women’s Initiative Steering Committee, Ms. Keohane announced last month that the university would spend $1-million per year, indefinitely, to “enhance the strategic hiring of women and minorities.”
The university also plans to support “grass-roots networking activities” that encourage the development of the “personal and professional connections of women faculty across departmental and school boundaries.”
An additional $2-million will go toward expanding Duke’s day-care center, to increase the number of children it can handle to 153 from 76. The center will also be open to the children of graduate students for the first time.
Ms. Keohane said she will also appoint a Commission on the Status of Women, which will monitor conditions for women on the campus and “develop smaller working groups around specific topics of concern.”
A report by the women’s initiative released last month said that contrary to the national trend, the proportion of assistant professors at Duke who are women has not grown much in the past decade. Between 1994-95 and 2001-2, 19 percent of women who sought tenure were denied, compared with 12 percent of men. It also takes women longer to reach full professor -- 6.3 years compared with 5 for men, said the report. And in 2002, only 18 women held the title of distinguished professor at Duke, compared with 166 men.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Faculty Volume 50, Issue 7, Page A12