In the wake of the celebration of the University's 125 years of admitting women students, last week's release of a report on gender equity among faculty affirmed for some that women at Penn are better off than they have ever been.
However, the numbers in the report also raised concerns for a few Penn employees. For some female faculty members, the report confirmed a longstanding feeling that male and female professors are not entirely on equal ground.
Assembled in June 2000 by Provost Robert Barchi and Faculty Senate Chair Larry Gross, a committee on gender equity looked into four components of the "status of women faculty" at Penn, including proportions of women within departments, salary and overall quality of life.
The report showed that while, like most universities since the advent of affirmative action, Penn has seen a marked increase in women faculty -- from 7 percent in 1970 to 23.8 percent in 1999 -- the momentum for eliminating the gender disparity has "levelled off" at Penn over the past five years.
"We knew that there were, in general, inadequate numbers of women on the faculty, because you can't live within the faculty without recognizing that you are one of the few women in the room," committee co-chairwoman Pheobe Leboy said.
In addition to reporting on the numbers of female faculty within schools and departments, the committee looked at the issue of working conditions for women more closely. According to the report, a majority of the women who responded to the survey said they felt that male professors were "more advantaged" than females and described an unsupportive and unwelcoming environment in some departments.
In addition, results of the survey suggested that many women feel that their salaries are smaller than those of men in comparable positions within their departments.
In spite of this feeling, however, the report found no statistically significant difference between the salaries of women and men in most departments. Leboy attributed this to the data population being too low.
"While we perceived a trend, we couldn't say anything really powerful about salary differences based on gender," Leboy said. "It was a source of frustration because the trends suggested that there was a problem."
Barchi and University President Judith Rodin issued a joint response to the report, in which they emphasized the University's advances over the past ten years.
However, the statement also noted that the marked advances seemed to be stagnating.
"The challenge now is that Penn, like most of its peers, seems to have reached a 'plateau' in achieving gender equity among the faculty," the statement read.
"Many academic departments do a superb job of recruiting, hiring, supporting and promoting women faculty, but others -- despite our longstanding institutional commitment -- do not," it continued.
Both Rodin and Leboy attributed the "levelling off" of progress in gender equity over the past few years to administrators deemphasizing the importance of hiring and retaining high-quality women faculty.
"Where there is a leveling off of progress it means the deans and the department chairs are not continuing to pay enough vigilant attention to these issues," Rodin said in an interview yesterday.
Leboy added that "what kind of message the Provost is conveying to the deans, what message the deans are conveying to the departments" is central to the progress of gender equity at the University.
Compared to other Ivies, the committee reported, Penn's numbers are on par with its peers, ranking close to the median for most categories of professors in a survey that was conducted by Harvard University.
Penn fell behind, however, in the category of tenured associate professors, holding the smallest percentage of women with this title in both Ivy medical and non-medical schools.
The reason for these low numbers, according to some, may be that the pool of women completing graduate study and entering academia is small compared to men.
"There's a dearth of women easily available in the Ph.D pool," School of Medicine Dean Arthur Rubenstein said. "What we are missing here is that academia is not finding the right formula for women to be successful in academia."
While they often work nearly 60 hours per week, the report asserted, many male and female professors find it difficult to balance their highly demanding professional lives with their family commitments.
For some women, this presents an additional barrier to entering academia, especially, Leboy asserted, "in a department where most of the men have stay-at-home wives who assume most of the family responsibilities."
But the report suggested that Penn lacks the structural support that might make this reconciliation easier, such as child care facilities on campus.
The report also indicated that of all faculty categories, women are least represented among full professors, attributing this to disproportionately low hiring and retention rates for tenured female professors.
In its report, the committee asserted that the responsibility for repairing the disparity between male female working conditions falls on individual departments rather than on University administrators.
However, the committee also laid out some directives for individual school deans as well, including putting pressure on departments that fail to follow through with efforts to promote equality.
The deans of some schools have already begun to look into ways to help their departments create more supportive environments for women.
"I think the report pointed out something that I was maybe only dimly aware of, which is at the senior level at SAS we have lost more women faculty as a proportion of total numbers than I had been aware of," School of Arts and Sciences Dean Samuel Preston said.
"We will take a look at why that's happened and see if we can't prevent it from happening in the future," he added.
Rubenstein, who was hired as dean of the Medical School only four months ago, said that working to "change the culture of the place in a way that women feel comfortable and supported" would be a challenge.
"I think a good dean would be highly regarded and successful if one made an important contribution to this effort," he said.
