The Massachusetts Institute of Technology has issued a report containing an unusually frank acknowledgment that it discriminated against female faculty members on salary and a range of other issues.
In a special edition of its faculty newsletter released on the university’s Web site, officials admitted that “many tenured women feel marginalized and excluded from a significant role in their departments,” in part because of “differences in salary, space awards, resources, and response to outside offers between men and women faculty.” Evidence gathered by a group of female professors, whose efforts prompted the statement, the report said, shows that women are “receiving less despite professional accomplishments equal to those of their male colleagues.”
In response to criticisms first aired five years ago, M.I.T. has already increased women’s pay, in one department by an average of 20 per cent, and eliminated for women the requirement that professors raise part of their salaries through grants. It has also tried to recruit women more aggressively. As of 1994, only 7 per cent of tenured professors in M.I.T.'s science departments were women, a proportion that had not changed in at least a decade, according to the report. That proportion has now edged above 10 per cent for the first time.
The process that culminated in this weekend’s report began in 1994, when Nancy H. Hopkins, a tenured biology professor and noted DNA researcher, decided to quantify her impression that tenured women weren’t getting a fair shake. She and a handful of female colleagues surveyed their female peers and compiled data on inequities. They even walked from office to office with tape measures, finding that women had been given less than half the space of male professors with the same level of experience.
Confronted in his office by 15 female professors armed with such data, Robert J. Birgeneau, M.I.T.'s dean of science, agreed to study the problem. After five years and two reports, the university has now essentially issued a full mea culpa.
“It’s a milestone, a major event in the whole long process of gender equity,” said Ms. Hopkins. “I think it’s unique in the history of universities. They knew it was the right thing to do, and they acted immediately.”
The report not only confirmed many of the professors’ findings, but also found that the inequity sometimes extended to faculty committee assignments, teaching assignments, and departmental awards and distinctions. But the report committee was unable to confirm widespread differences in pay; citing the need for confidentiality, the administration refused to provide information on individual salaries.
“I believe in no case was this discrimination conscious or deliberate,” said Mr. Birgeneau, in an introduction to the report. “Nevertheless, the effects were and are real. Some small steps have been taken to reverse the effects of decades of discrimination, but we still have a great deal more to accomplish before true equality and equal treatment will have been achieved.”
According to Ms. Hopkins, the committee found that the gaps in pay and other resources could be attributed at least in part to disparities in the way that the university reacted to professors wooed by other institutions. M.I.T. officials would typically offer pay increases and other inducements to keep sought-after male professors from leaving. But they did not tend to make such counteroffers to female faculty. That opened up a gender gap in compensation.
