Realizing Gender Equality in Higher Education: The Need To Integrate Work/Family Issues. 1991 ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Report 2 (original) (raw)
Related papers
Gender Equality in Academia: Bad News from the Trenches, and Some Possible Solutions
Perspectives on Politics, 2008
Is there gender discrimination in academia? Analysis of interviews with 80 female faculty at a large Research One university-the most comprehensive qualitative data set generated to date-suggests both individual and institutional discrimination persists. Overt discrimination has largely given way to less obvious but still deeply entrenched inequities. Despite apparent increases in women in positions of authority, discrimination continues to manifest itself through gender devaluation, a process whereby the status and power of an authoritative position is downplayed when that position is held by a woman, and through penalties for those agitating for political change. Female faculty find legal mechanisms and direct political action of limited utility, and increasingly turn to more subtle forms of incremental collective action, revealing an adaptive response to discrimination and a keen sense of the power dynamics within the university. Women attributed the persistence of gender inequality not to biology but to a professional environment in which university administrators care more about the appearance than the reality of gender equality and a professional culture based on a traditional, linear male model. Respondents described heart-wrenching choices between career and family responsibilities, with tensions especially intractable in the bench sciences. They advocated alternative models of professional life but also offered very specific interim suggestions for institutions genuinely interested in alleviating gender inequality and discrimination. the University of California at Irvine (UCI), a major Research One (R1) university, from 2002 to 2006. Analysis consists of five parts. First we clarify that there is, in fact, a problem. We present statistics on salary and employment data for men and women within academia, since job and salary differentials are obvious indicators of Kristen Monroe
New Feminist Solutions, Barnard Center for Research on Women, 2007
It is more than three decades since Congress passed the landmark civil rights legislation that prohibits sex discrimination in education (Title IX, 1972), and since then women have doubled and tripled their representation in virtually all areas of undergraduate and graduate training. Women now earn 48 percent of the doctorates and more than half of all graduate degrees awarded by U.S. institutions. And yet, gender inequities have proven to be stubbornly resistant to change at the level of the professoriate; women continue to be disproportionately employed in part-time and limited-term positions; their rate of advancement through the ranks and their representation at the highest faculty ranks remains below that of men. These differences hold for minority faculty, they are compounded for minority women, and they are amplified at more elite institutions. Why do such large-scale, persistent inequities persist? This conference report explores the implications for equity activism of taking seriously the role of micro-inequities rooted in implicit bias, and models of cumulative disadvantage.
A Neglected Issue: The Problem of Indirect Evaluative Discrimination of Women in Academia
Social and Academic Policies for Women. Proceedings of the International Conference
Are women academics systematically and pervasively undervalued? This question started a very important debate between the scholars concerned to explain the underrepresentation of women or gendered vertical segregation in academia in the developed countries (especially in math intensive disciplines like STEM or in philosophy). However, as I try to highlight in this paper, at least as carried until now by its main contenders, this debate seems not, in fact, a general debate about the question of evaluative discrimination against women in academia, but only a debate about the question of direct evaluative discrimination against women academics. Judging by the evidence they usually invoke, both sides in the debate – or, at least their most visible and prominent advocates – are only concerned to show that women are/ are not directly discriminated in evaluating their scientific merits and professional achievements in peer review, interviewing, hiring, tenure, or grant funding. But what about indirect evaluative discrimination against women academics? If we want a complete answer to the question if women academics are currently systematically and pervasively undervalued, we must answer this question as well. Unfortunately, this is usually a neglected question in the debate about the evaluative discrimination against women academics. This state of affairs creates a very important problem, especially for the scholars who argued against the “systematic and pervasive” evaluative discrimination against women academics hypothesis or for the hypothesis that the undervaluation of women is not a real problem in the current academic landscape. Their argumentation leaves open the possibility that, although not directly discriminated, women academics may be currently more indirectly disadvantaged than men in evaluating their scientific merits and professional achievements (so that this indirect evaluative discrimination can be a significant cause for their underrepresentation or for the gendered vertical segregation in academia).
Gender bias in academe: an annotated bibliography of important recent studies
2016
Academic research plays an important role in uncovering bias and helping to shape a more equal society. But academia also struggles to adequately confront persistent and entrenched gender bias in its own corridors. Here Danica Savonick and Cathy N. Davidson have aggregated and summarised over twenty research articles on gender bias in academe, a crucial resource for International Women’s Day.