MIT Acknowledges Bias Against Female Faculty Members

Unusually candid report responds to complaints by women on salaries, office size, committee assignments, and awards

Female professors frequently accuse universities of sex discrimination. Usually, the institutions don’t admit it. Last week, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology did just that.

In a surprisingly candid report, M.I.T. acknowledged that it had discriminated against female faculty members in its School of Science. Men not only earned more money than women, but had bigger offices, were given more plum committee assignments, and were granted more departmental awards and distinctions, the report said.

Charles M. Vest, the institute’s president, said the charges made him “sit bolt upright in my chair.” In introductory comments to the report, he said that while he had “always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception,” the report caused him to believe “that reality is by far the greater part of the balance.”

Last week, the report and the administration’s response were published in a special edition of M.I.T.'s faculty newsletter and released on the university’s World-Wide Web site.

“It’s a milestone in gender equity,” said Nancy H. Hopkins, a professor of biology, of M.I.T.'s admission. “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, “A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT,” suggested that the treatment of women on the campus had worsened as their careers had progressed. Female professors felt well-treated as junior professors, the report said, but less so as their careers advanced. “A common finding for most senior women faculty was that the women were ‘invisible,’ excluded from a voice in their departments and from positions of any real power,” the report said.

Work on the report began five years ago, after Ms. Hopkins and two other female faculty members started to talk with each other about what they viewed as subtle discrimination on the campus. Ms. Hopkins said she had started wondering about the treatment of women at M.I.T. when she asked for a larger laboratory space and was turned down. She took a tape measure to individual offices, examined floor plans, and determined that, on average, men in the biology department were given 3,000 square feet of space, while women were given 2,000 square feet.

Ms. Hopkins and the two other female professors, who were not named in the report, decided to survey all of the tenured female faculty members in M.I.T.'s School of Science. Stories of unequal treatment abounded. In August 1994, the women persuaded Robert J. Birgeneau, M.I.T.'s dean of science, to create a committee to look into the situation. At the time, only 8.7 per cent of the 275 faculty members in the sciences at M.I.T. were women, a proportion that had remained the same for at least a decade.

Mr. Birgeneau appointed the committee in 1995, and appointed a second one to continue the work in 1997. The panels issued a variety of reports, including the final one, released last week.

Although the final report did not provide facts and figures, the committee said it had found “serious underpayment of senior women faculty” in some science departments. Men were more likely than women to get substantial pay raises at M.I.T. when they received job offers from other institutions, for example. Men also were given better teaching assignments than women.

Individual female faculty members recognized that they were being treated differently from their male colleagues, the report noted. “But when they spoke up, no one heard them, believing that each problem could be explained alternatively by its ‘special circumstances.’”

The report found that discrimination “consists of a pattern of powerful but unrecognized assumptions and attitudes that work systematically against women faculty even in the light of obvious good will.” It concluded: “Like many discoveries, at first it is startling and unexpected. Once you ‘get it,’ it seems almost obvious.”

The committee presented detailed evidence to the administration, but those facts were omitted from the published report. “We didn’t want to embarrass anybody, and we didn’t want to make trouble,” Ms. Hopkins says. “We want to move forward positively.”

She said people were more willing to listen to the committee than to individual women. “How could they deny it if all their tenured women were saying this?” she asked.

Because the committee made some of its initial findings known to Mr. Birgeneau, he has already taken some steps to improve conditions for women in the sciences, the report said. Since 1995, the number of female professors in the sciences has increased; today, nearly 12 per cent of the 266 faculty members are women. In addition, said the report, more women have been included in “significant departmental activities.” It quoted one senior female faculty member who said women at M.I.T. had made more progress “in one year than was accomplished in the previous decade.”

In a statement he issued along with the report, Mr. Birgeneau declared that more needed to be done. While discrimination against women had been “totally unconscious or unknowing,” he wrote, "... the effects were and are real.”

Lotte Bailyn, chairwoman of M.I.T.'s faculty, said the effort by women in the sciences should be extended to the rest of the institute. “To ensure an equitable faculty environment, we need committees such as these in all Schools of the Institute,” she said in a statement.

M.I.T.'s provost, Robert A. Brown, plans to meet this week with committee members and deans of the institute’s five schools to discuss what might be done to improve the status of women campus-wide.

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