Since January last year, the percentage of standing female faculty at the University increased from 26.7 percent to 27.3 percent. When the School of Medicine is disregarded, the percentage grew from 28.7 percent to 29.8 percent.
Associate Provost Janice Bellace attributed the slight increased to a number of factors, including improved recruitment and retention of female faculty and increased vigilance in ensuring that department job searches are broad, rigorous and fair.
According to Bellace, the Medical School has a very large faculty that is unique in composition, thus skewing the overall data somewhat.
"Both the provost and myself are heartened by the fact that progress is being made, even over the course of one year," Bellace said.
The Gender Equity Report, which will be released today by the president and provost for the third straight year, was initially conceived after a committee in 2001 identified a number of areas in which the University could improve its responsiveness to female faculty concerns.
As a major sign of progress, Bellace pointed to the fact that the number of female faculty members recruited over the past year is significantly higher than the number who have "defected" and are no longer at the University.
"In the School of Arts and Sciences, the number of women faculty has increased from 130 to 137," Bellace said. "But 13 women, not seven, have been hired, and six have left. Since women often leave at a faster rate than men, recruitment has to be ratcheted up and departures have to be pushed down."
Bellace added that the "burdens of motherhood" are frequently cited as the main reason that women tend to depart from universities more often than men.
To help keep female faculty numbers up, the report announced that a fund -- which was established three years ago to give Penn's schools a monetary incentive to retain and recruit tenured female faculty -- has been increased for fiscal year 2005 by about $160,000.
The report also says that for nearly all schools in the 2003-2004 academic year, more females were offered jobs than their presence in the applicant pool would statistically suggest.
Bellace said that one of her new obligations this year is to check in with departments conducting job searches when the applicant pool is particularly small, when there is an unusually small number of female applicants or when internal candidates are being selected.
"If the number of women is low in light of what we're told the percentage in the pool should be, I would say, 'How come?'" she said. "We also want to make sure that with internal job searches, there isn't an 'old-boy network' going on."
The report also announced that two ad hoc committees are currently meeting to discuss different aspects of the "leaky pipeline," a term describing the phenomenon by which women are least represented in higher-ranking academic positions.
The first committee, according to Bellace, will focus on "the issues doctoral students may face trying to combine parenthood with their careers."
The other committee will examine "the family obligations that place time burdens on faculty members on the tenure track," Bellace said.
Many times, women must decide whether to seek tenure during the same years in which they wish to have children.
While Materials Science and Engineering professor Dawn Bonnell expressed satisfaction and optimism about the report overall, she said that some issues raised by it must mainly be solved through outreach or questioning of societal norms.
"We can't determine how many third graders that are female are going to like math and science," she said, alluding to the fact that there are some things over which the University has no control.
