Female professors confront inequity

It isn't every day that distinguished educators gather to question their success and rank in academia. But on Thursday, in a two-hour-long talk titled "Women in Academia: The Effects of Gender Equality at MIT and Penn," female professors and other academics related their experiences of discrimination at some of the most prestigious American universities to a mostly female audience in an event organized by the Trustees Council of Penn Women in Houston Hall. The discussion centered on a landmark report published in March 1999, by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in which the university acknowledged unintentional, institutionalized discrimination against female members of the faculty. The controversial document was penned by a panel of academics who felt they had been discriminated against because of their gender. "I had to claw my way to the top," recalled JoAnne Stubbe, a professor of Biology and Chemistry at MIT and a member of the committee that drafted the document. Nancy Hopkins, an MIT professor of Molecular Biology and a prominent figure in the events which led to the report, offered further insight into the findings. "As women progressed along their career paths, they were marginalized. Women had less laboratory space and fewer resources; they made up for this loss by working harder and harder." According to data contained in the report, women never comprised more than 8 percent of the faculty of the School of Science at MIT from 1986 to 1994, which suggests that they were underrepresented as a whole. According to several of the speakers, a key finding of the study was that the number of women steadily declines as they progress along a career path -- in part because of discrimination. For example, in 1994, 147 women were enrolled along with 142 men in MIT's undergraduate Biology program, 27 women and 57 men in the postdoctoral program and seven women compared to 42 men on the faculty itself. Penn women also expressed their findings because the University created a similar task force to study patterns of discrimination in June 2000. The study is still a work in progress. Penn Biochemistry Professor Phoebe LeBoy, a contributor to the report, mentioned trends similar to those discovered at MIT. "Overall, 35 percent of all associate professors, 23 percent of associate professors and 15 percent of full professors are women," she said. Moreover, only 24 percent of associate deans and 8 percent of department chairs are women. "A major contributing factor is that we tenure directly from outside which means that a disproportionate number of faculty members are men," she added. When asked about trends in representation of women in Penn's faculty, Microbiology Professor and moderator of the talk Helen Davies said, "There has been very little change in all of the schools at Penn, except the School of Nursing which is 100 percent women faculty." "We need more such talks," said Lynn Green, a Sociology graduate student at Penn. "Keeping this voice alive is absolutely critical."