Universities Must Change Faculty Atmosphere for Women and People of Color

January 15, 2004

The Ole' Boy's Club is alive and well in academia.

Forty years after Title VII of the Civil Rights Act established a national goal of non-discrimination and 32 years after the equally important Title IX of the Education Act Amendments mandated equal opportunities for women in education, we are confronting a report of pervasive discrimination in our major universities.

Dr. Donna Nelson's study, which documents the dearth of women and people of color in the hard sciences at major research universities, is both discouraging and motivating.

We are discouraged that the apparent patterns of behavior that exclude women from tenured and tenure-track faculty positions still persist after so many decades. Dr. Nelson's findings strongly suggest that the exclusion has nothing to do with their educational attainment or experience—and everything to do with the Ole' Boys Club.

When women are not being encouraged by positive mentoring in graduate school or provided equal access to desirable teaching positions, lab space, appointments to committees, and access to important research and publication opportunities, advancement through faculty ranks, tenure, salary and recognition for their successes and ideas—it is understandable that they will seek success elsewhere.

And this leaves us with fewer role models and mentors for the women who come after them.

Our country suffers from this rejection of the creative, problem-solving talents that women can bring to the toughest challenges of an ever-evolving technological future. Universities must take leadership to establish an improved environment where women and people of color will know that they are wanted and valued.

Because virtually all the universities surveyed in this study receive federal funding, it is incumbent upon those schools to meet the spirit and the letter of Title IX law . . . and to do it now.

With Dr. Nelson's ground-breaking study, we know what needs to be achieved and the National Organization for Women—along with many of our allied women's advocacy organizations—is highly motivated to see that these numbers for women and persons of color in the academy are changed for the better.

We urge each university to:

• Adopt an extensive and candid program of accountability, requiring that departments collect and report statistics on faculty members recruited, interviewed, hired, and promoted, as well as those leaving (including reasons for leaving and where they subsequently were employed).
• Publish the results of annual diversity surveys on a web site readily accessible to anyone, including prospective students and faculty.
• Include vocal and knowledgeable women faculty members and administration officials on task forces and committees to help identify barriers to hiring, promotion, retention and important academic activities . . . and then propose effective solutions.
• Allow women faculty members and administration officials release time to study these problems in depth, especially addressing the more subtle barriers to female faculty satisfaction and retention such as sexual harassment and the frequent labeling as "troublemakers" of professors who try to initiate discussions about barriers.

As we begin a century where scientific and technology gains are more critical than ever, we can't afford to lose another generation of bright, talented, well-educated women and people of color.