[escepticos] WOMEN IN ACADEME

["Marcela E. Brusa Daly" <medaly@...>]

Esto puede ser de interes, e incluso curioso para los que trabajan en el
nivel universitario en España donde las cosas, al menos aparentemente son un
poco distintas. (creo)
Una vez le comente a un fisico (argentino trabajando en España) que mi
sobrina estaba estudiando fisica y me contesto que lo sentia muchom, porque
ahora como muchas mujeres estaban entrando en las ciencias ahora los
salarios estaban por los suelos (sic)

Saludos
Marcela

-----Mensaje original-----
De: owner-tomorrows-professor en lists.Stanford.EDU
[mailto:owner-tomorrows-professor en lists.Stanford.EDU]En nombre de Rick
Reis
Enviado el: Thursday, October 21, 1999 9:28 AM
Para: tomorrows-professor en lists.Stanford.EDU
Asunto: Tomorrow's Professor(SM) Msg.#166 WOMEN IN ACADEME


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Folks:

The posting below is an excerpt from a longer message forwarded to me by
Robin Erbacher who points out that the information should be of interest
to all academics and future academics (not just female).  The author, Ann
Douglas, teaches cultural history at Columbia University.

Let me know if you would like an e-mail copy of the full article that runs
about 3,000 words.

Regards,

Rick Reis
Reis en stanford.edu
UP NEXT:  Beyond Discovery (TP): The Path From Research to Human Benefit


	----------------------- 1,274 ------------------------
			   WOMEN IN ACADEME

Excerpted by R. Reis from Salon.com. October 11, 1999.

Columbia University historian Ann Douglas says that contrary to
popular belief, female academics are actually losing ground

Crashing the top

Women at elite universities may have broken the ivory ceiling, but they're
still battling old-fashioned discrimination.  When MIT posted its "Study on
the Status of Women Faculty in Science" on the Internet in March 1999, it
made the front page of the New York Times under the headline, "M.I.T.
Acknowledges Bias Against Female Professors."

Since then, Nancy Hopkins, the professor of biology who chaired the report,
has received an outpouring of e-mails, faxes and phone calls from female
academics, confirming her contention that gender discrimination is still
commonplace in top-flight universities at every level of institutional
life.
---------------
Some of the critics of the MIT report argue that what gender inequality, if
any, remains in the academy merely reflects women's personal choices --
perhaps they wanted to be less career-driven, to take time off to raise
children. But that doesn't explain why the women who have pursued full-time
careers still meet discrimination. There are many factors at work in
today's sometimes embattled, ever more profit- and prestige-conscious elite
universities, factors that shape women's (and men's) careers in a variety
of ways. Yet among them is surely the old gender pattern sociologists
identify as "feminization," the shift from a largely male to a largely
female work force, and its consequences. Greater numbers do not necessarily
spell increased equality, especially when the group in question is female.

When "feminization" has occurred in the past, notably in elementary school
teaching, the result has been a loss for the occupation in pay and status.
Women move into male territory only to find that its occupants abandon it
rather than share it with women, and they take their privileges with them.
In such situations, female failure becomes a consequence of female success.
A feminist journal of the 1970s summed up this dynamic: "Women Get a Ticket
to Ride After the Gravy Train Has Left the Station."

The elite academy, however, presents a critical new variation in the
feminization pattern. Gifted 19th century male elementary and high school
teachers, unhappy with the growing number of women in their ranks, could
aspire up to the all-male world of the richest private colleges and
universities. But if the elite institutions are themselves overrun with
women, where can the most distinguished men go? The backlash today against
women in the top-level universities is intense, though unacknowledged,
precisely because the stakes are so high. And if obvious discrimination is
in theory prohibited, mistreatment less accessible to legal remedy can
accomplish the same end.

Nancy Hopkins' awakening didn't come when she discovered how much lower her
salary was than those of her male peers ("it was my fault," she remembers
thinking; "I'd never asked about salaries"), but when a male colleague in
effect took over a course that she had been teaching. She sought redress,
only to realize that the rules were one thing, the practice something else.
As Anne McClintock, a pioneer in gender studies at the University of
Wisconsin, told me, "The decisions that really matter are made outside the
democratic process."

The right of faculty women to be in the elite academy is no longer at
issue. But their authority, their ability to lead in both the scholarly and
administrative realms -- particularly in areas that have traditionally been
all-male preserves -- is on occasion not only challenged but actively
undermined. One female professor quit her tenured job at an Ivy League
university after watching two female colleagues of unimpeachable
intellectual and moral standing in important administrative positions be
stripped of their power and accused of unethical conduct. Watching this
"torture," as she put it, brought her to "a level of despondency about
which I could do almost nothing." "I don't want to do bitter," she told me.
"Not if I have a choice. So I ran away." She was fortunate enough to be
offered a post at another top university.

Another scholar was forced out of a departmental chairmanship by an
all-male administration that sided with a hostile male colleague, who had
campaigned to turn her colleagues and students against her. Despite the
fact that the male scholar was widely recognized as unstable, she says, the
administration treated her adversary like "a sick but brilliant brother
they were going to take care of at all costs."
-------------

In my own department at Columbia, though there are significantly more women
than men at the graduate-student and junior-professor levels, tenured men
still outnumber women by over 4-1. Behind the surface rhetoric of equality,
old attitudes lie in wait, and sometimes manifest themselves in ugly and
disturbing forms. A personal example:

Last winter, I was asked to poll my department as part of the process of
electing our next chair. The results, which favored a brilliant and
feminist candidate, were unwelcome to a small group of senior men who had
the (all-male) administration's ear in a way that the departmental majority
(which in this instance included most of the department's women, minority
group members and faculty under 40) did not. One of these male colleagues
accused me of falsifying the polling; the poll was declared invalid, and,
for various reasons, the female candidate withdrew.

I was devastated. How could men who had worked with me for a
quarter-century not know that I would never tamper with the democratic
procedures on which all my hopes for progress depend? Success, it turns
out, seldom shields women from injustice, though it sometimes protects
their male colleagues from the consequences of unjust acts.

There are, of course, women at Columbia and elsewhere who believe that
gender is not a decisive factor in their careers, and certainly not a
reliable basis of identification among complex and varied human beings.
This is a respect-worthy position, one that the academy -- like many
workplaces -- often rewards highly. Nancy Hopkins remembers avoiding one
early feminist organizer lest she anger the men in her department or be
distracted from her research. Yet ultimately, the burden of "living alone
with discrimination" proved too heavy for Hopkins. After years of silence,
she began to talk to other faculty women about how she felt. When they
said, not, as she feared, "You're crazy!" but rather, "Me, too," her life
changed, and she took the actions that led to the MIT study. The task force
succeeded, Hopkins believes, because the women involved operated like "a
school of fish, doing everything by consensus."

Today, MIT's administrators are justly proud of the steps they have taken
to end gender discrimination, which include equalizing salaries and hiring
nine new faculty women in the School of Science. In fact, what these women
asked for was good for their institution as well as themselves. As Susanna
Cole, a senior at Brown, observes, when universities recruit female
students and faculty, they usually "promise them an environment in which
women will be equal. If it's not there, they're lying," and sooner or
later, lies have consequences.

When I asked the faculty women I interviewed what motivated them today,
they spoke of their work and their teaching. Research in biology remains
"the most interesting thing in the world" to Nancy Hopkins. "The students
make my heart sing," Elaine Combs-Schilling said. But they also spoke of
the challenge of still feeling like pioneers in mostly male worlds. "These
institutions are still a frontier for women," said Jean Howard. "Someone
has to fight the battle in the Ivy League."

For me, it's worth fighting. I still believe with all my heart in what my
great Harvard teacher Perry Miller called "the life of the mind," the
gold-rush kingdom of first strikes and second chances. Its sole
prerequisite is freedom; its only law, democracy.


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