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Chapter One
THE NUMBERS
Notre
Dame has 107 missing women faculty. (If the actual share of
women in each department represented the share of available
women in the discipline Notre Dame would have 107 more women
on the faculty.)
One
out of five tenured and tenure-track faculty members at ND
are women. (Though women are 26% of all faculty, women are
only 19.5% of tenured and tenure track teaching and research
faculty.)
One
out of five female ND faculty are Full Professors; one out
of two male ND faculty are in that top rank.
Both
the numbers of men and women on the tenured and tenure track
faculty increased from 1988 to 2000 -- there are 78 more female
faculty (now141) and 72 more male faculty (now 588).
Interpreting
an overall increase in the number of women can be tricky.
The number of women could have increased because the University
increased the relative presence of women on the faculty or
the increased numbers could be a by-product of a general expansion
of the faculty.
Thought
Experiment: To have an equal number of women and men on the
tenured and tenure track faculty and maintain the same number
of faculty in the next ten years, 22 women would have to replace
22 men each year. If the goals are smaller and the length
of time longer a smaller number of women have to replace men
on the faculty.
The
University of Notre Dame is among only a few in the country
who are adding significant numbers of faculty. The university's
full-time faculty numbered 530 in 1981 and 42 were added by
1988. In 2000, the university had 729 full-time tenured and
tenure track faculty (Notre Dame Fact Book (NDFB), 2000, Table
11.1: 207). 1991 seemed to be a critical year for faculty
diversity gains. In that year the university gained 9 women
and 6 men. Notably, the College of Arts and Letters took the
lead in this progress, adding thirteen (net) women while losing
one (net) male faculty.
However,
since then progress has backtracked. In 1999, the university
added 13 more men and only 7 women (NDFB 2000: 207). Arts
and Letters exhibited the same reversal pattern and added
9 men and only 4 women in the same year (NDFB 2000: 211).
The report of the Academic Affirmative Action Committee (AAAC)
is a bit more encouraging in its narrative, although the numbers
are the same. The report highlights the English, Government,
and Anthropology departments for having a much greater share
of women in their new hires than their availability numbers
for new PhDs (Academic Affirmative Action Committee's Report,
Notre Dame Report. Nov. 10, 2000: 145)
The
Special Role of the College of Arts and Letters
The College of Arts and Letters can and has played a major role
in adding women to the faculty. Not only because it is by far
the largest college -- 358 tenured and tenure track faculty
compared to the next largest college, Science, which has 145
faculty - but also because the College contains disciplines
that traditionally have more women in them. The College grew
from 256 to 281 faculty between 1983 and 1988, and jumped to
358 faculty between 1988 and 1999.
The
number of women in Arts and Letters grew from 44 or just 16%
of the total faculty in Arts and Letters in 1988 to 101 women
faculty out of 358 faculty (nearly doubling the share of women)
in 2000. Again, the gains came in the early 1990s. The percentage
of new women hires in the College peaked in 1991; 13 women
were added to the T&R faculty in 1991 so that 94 women
were on the faculty in 1992. Just seven more women were added
in the last ten years. (ND Fact Book, Table 11.3: 211)
The
Business School has also made great gains in the last ten years
but they started from nearly zero. In 2000, the Business school
had 12 women out of approximately 61 faculty; Science has 22
out of 145 and Engineering has 4 women out of about 51. If the
number of faculty members stayed the same, adding 13 more women
in the Business school, 3 more women in engineering and 26 women
in sciences would make their share of women on the faculty equal
the percentage available in the those disciplines. (Notre Dame
Report, Nov. 11, 2000 : 150.)
The
AAAC points out that the female PhDs are likely to be much
younger than the average PhD. We conclude therefore, that
the best opportunity to hire women is at the assistant professor
rank. However, attracting excellent female scholars and retaining
them depends, it seems, on having senior female faculty already
in place.
Methods
for Increasing the Share of Women Faculty
Raising
the percentage of women on a faculty takes the same effort as
increasing a grade point average. To raise your average you
have to do BETTER in the future. In order to increase the share
of women on the faculty, women hires have to outnumber male
hires for years to come. We have to get straight A's from now
on.
For
the sake of illustration, let us say ND aims for sex parity
in 10 years. While keeping the number of faculty at around
730, ND would need 224 additional women -- adding about 22
per year. Likewise, the same number of men would have to leave
each year. Many more men are leaving than women. In 1999,
27 men left the teaching and research faculty compared to
9 women. However, those numbers represent 4.6% of the male
tenured and tenure track faculty and a significantly larger
share of the female faculty, 6.7%. Why relatively more women
leave Notre Dame needs investigation. We would have expected
the opposite because, on average, female faculty members are
much younger than male faculty. We would expect the male separation
rate would be higher due to retirement. In sum, if Notre Dame
were dedicated to achieve sex parity in the next ten years,
it would have replaced the 27 men who left in 1999 with women.
We
realize parity may be impractical because in most fields the
percentage of PhDs earned by women is less than 50%. However,
the University does not have the share of female faculty matching
the availability figures in any discipline except two: East
Asian Languages, and Film, Television, and Theatre (Table
3, Notre Dame Report, Nov. 10, 2000: 150). If the actual share
of women in each department represented the share of available
women in the discipline, Notre Dame would have 107 more women
on the faculty (AAAC, 2000: 150).
Despite
the fact we are not adding more women, the University has
recognized that increasing the share of women on the faculty
requires affirmative and deliberative efforts. And those efforts
are being made. For example, the Provost's Distinguished Women
Scholar series brings senior women to campus, not only hoping
to interest them in coming here, but also encouraging their
advising of female scholars already here. The university also
has a policy of adding female faculty when "targets of
opportunity" arise.
The
numbers are plain speaking. We cannot increase the share of
female faculty without more female applicants. An argument
can be made that a disproportionate share of candidates brought
to campus should be women. The university should also continue
to increase the production of female PhDs, and add to availability
by enhancing affirmative action programs in the graduate program.
The
last affirmative action report from the university's Affirmative
Action Committee, chaired by Carol Mooney, is a thorough document
describing the University of Notre Dame's progress in increasing
its faculty diversity in the last several years. The report
also elaborates how much future progress depends on promoting,
retaining, hiring, and mentoring female faculty and graduate
students.
Notes
on methodology for the "missing women" figure
The
Academic Affirmative Action Committee (AAAC) report of Nov.
10, 2000 reports the number of women in each department, what
share of the faculty the number of women represents, and the
percent of female PhDs in each discipline (or other relevant
measures of availability). With this data we calculated how
many women each department would need in order to match the
availability of qualified women in the discipline. The sum is
the number of missing women. Only two departments would not
have to hire any women to meet the availability shares. Unfortunately,
the AAAC does not assess the availability of women in Law or
Architecture, the Library and the Law Library.
Resources:
Academic
Affirmative Action Committee Report, Notre Dame Report. Nov.
10, 2000
Notre Dame Fact Book, 2000, Table 11.1: 207
Some
notes from the AAUP report on Percentages of Women Faculty
at US Universities and Colleges
Reports from the American Association
of University Professors and other professional associations
and universities show that in academic 2000-1, women made
up 31 percent of the faculty at doctoral-level institutions
and 40 percent of the faculty at baccalaureate institutions.
Women did, of course, make up 50 percent of the faculty at
institutions without ranks.
The
numbers are worse in the sciences. A 1999-2000 report from
the Association of American Medical Colleges shows that the
percentage of tenured women on the faculty at medical schools
has stayed exactly the same for several years:15 percent.
At Yale University, only 11 percent of the tenured professors
are women. And a 1998 report from the Higher Education Research
Institute of the University of California at Los Angeles says
that female faculty members "continue to serve in the
lower academic ranks more often than do men" and are
"less likely to be tenured."
Everyone
seems to agree that there are plenty of outstanding female
graduate students. "The problem is not in the pipeline,"
they say. But somewhere between the pipeline and the tenure
track, tons of women get discouraged and bail out.
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