Though the number of female faculty members on Penn's campus is rising, the University remains in the middle of the pack when compared to its peer institutions.
The third-annual Gender Equity Report, which was released last Tuesday, announced that since January 2004, the percentage of female faculty in the University, when including the Medical School, has increased from 26.7 percent to 27.3 percent.
It also mentioned that the overall number of female faculty recruited this year greatly exceeded the number of female professors who "defected" and are no longer employed by the University.
This jump places Penn ahead of some Ivies but behind several others.
In the past year, Cornell University has seen its percentage of female faculty increase from 24 percent to 24.3 percent.
At smaller universities with fewer schools, the percentages of female faculty are higher. At Brown University, the percentage is 30 percent, while at Dartmouth University it is 34 percent.
Associate Provost Janice Bellace said that these figures can be misleading.
"When you compare Penn to Cornell, Dartmouth or Brown, you have to consider the different schools and even the different disciplines" within individual schools, Bellace said. "The percentage of women in the Ph.D. pool varies greatly by discipline."
Bellace said that the approximately one percentage point increase in female faculty at the University is significant given the limited number of job openings every year.
She also said that Penn is unique in publishing such a report annually. Many peer institutions either publish similar reports more sporadically or use other resources, such as data provided by the Association of American Universities, to assess gender equity in their faculties.
Lucy Drotning, director of institutional research at Columbia University, said that the most recent major report on gender equity released by Columbia was in 2001 and dealt with the advancement of women through the academic ranks in its School of Arts and Sciences.
While female faculty members at Penn expressed optimism about this year's gender equity findings, a few emphasized that certain issues, some of which cannot be expressed through numbers, still need to be addressed if the University wants to better accommodate its female faculty.
"The fact that we've institutionalized a gender equity report is good," History professor Ann Farnsworth-Alvear said. "But looking at the rise and fall of retentions through one year and whether the number [of female faculty] is up or down from last year can't capture many larger issues."
Dental School Biochemistry professor Phoebe Leboy agreed.
"You can't glean a whole lot from the data except that the University in its entirety is making a conscientious and apparently effective effort to recruit and retain women," she said.
"But having it published every year and having the administration report to campus means deans and department chairs are more apt to keep gender equity in mind, and it forces the administration to get its thoughts together on the subject every year."
