SENATE
Gender
Equity Report of the
Senate Committee on the Faculty
March 4, 2002
I.
Introduction
The
Senate Committee on the Faculty ("SCOF") has read and
discussed the report of the joint faculty/administration committee
on Gender Equity (the
"Report") and the administration's reply to that
report (the
"Reply"), both of which were published in
Almanac
December 4, 2001, at three meetings. Our discussions were
informed by an exchange of views with, and additional information
provided by, Professor Phoebe Leboy, co-chair of the Gender Equity
Committee, Associate Provost Barbara Lowery, the other co-chair,
and Provost Robert Barchi, all of whom met with SCOF.
SCOF
believes that the Report and Reply represent an important step
in ongoing efforts to ensure that gender equity becomes a reality
at the University of Pennsylvania. We commend the Gender Equity
Committee for the immense effort required to gather and analyze
the data underlying the Report and for the serious and balanced
approach taken in its analysis and recommendations, and we commend
the administration for the determination apparent in, and the
comprehensiveness of response augured by, its Reply.
Both
the Report and the Reply quite properly focus on the problems
revealed by the work of the Gender Equity Committee, which are
numerous and some of which are serious, their authors having learned
from the experience that progress towards gender equity--even
substantial progress of the sort we have seen in many schools
and departments at Penn--can be evanescent. The gains made over
a few years, as in entry level hiring, can quickly be undone,
as when tenured women are lured away to other universities. Similarly,
our goal in this brief report is to be helpful to the faculty
and the administration in the critically important business of
solving the problems revealed in the Report. To that end, we have
found it helpful to organize our discussion and recommendations
in the three categories of data, structural barriers and incentives/disincentives.
At
the outset, it is important to state explicitly our premise that
primary responsibility for gender equity at the University of
Pennsylvania, and hence primary responsibility for solving the
problems revealed by the Report, rests with the faculty. The administration
can, and it has clearly signaled that it will, provide leadership
and support, but real progress cannot be made without the substantive
and procedural commitment of the faculty. Indeed, faculty ownership
of gender equity is not only a logical corollary of the faculty's
traditional primacy in academic decisions but also a practical
necessity if that traditional role is not to be impaired.
II.
Data
The
Report raises questions about data of two different sorts: internal
and external. As to the former, our discussions make clear that
a distinction should be drawn between salary/compensation information
available for the non-medical areas of the University and those
available for the various departments within the Medical School.
A.
Internal Data
Appropriate safeguards for the confidentiality of the data aside,
we believe that salary data for the non-medical areas of the University
should be readily available in the future for approved study and
analysis by those with a legitimate institutional interest. Now
is the time to ensure that the necessary data are routinely collected
and stored in a format (or formats) that protect legitimate privacy
interests but that are conducive to the sorts of analysis that
experience has taught us need to be made on a periodic basis.
We understand that the administration is committed to this effort.
The
Gender Equity Committee had serious difficulty obtaining the salary/compensation
data it sought from the Medical School, or at least from clinical
departments in that school. SCOF was told that the data ultimately
provided were so fragmentary and flawed as to be virtually useless.
There has been disagreement about (1) whether it is possible rigorously
and fairly to assess gender equity within clinical departments,
and (2) whether, therefore, attempting to collect and analyze
relevant data is worth the effort. There may also be underlying
normative disagreement concerning the relevance of the enterprise
to the business of treating patients.
We
understand that compensation for clinical work is a very complex
matter that has proceeded largely on a decentralized basis and
that, therefore, the data may not currently exist in a form capable
of analysis that would permit a comprehensive assessment of gender
equity within clinical departments of the Medical School. The
organizational level at which salary policy is set is not our
concern. We are concerned, however, about the unavailability of
the data necessary to determine whether policy yields gender inequity.
Fortunately, we understand that (1) an effort is underway by the
Clinical Practices at the University of Pennsylvania to gather
and rationalize data from the different clinical departments and
(2) the Provost has agreed that his office will independently
collect and analyze data from a much larger sample than was available
for the Report, with the participation of the Senate in the design
of the study. We encourage those efforts. In that regard, so long
as clinical practice is considered part of the academic mission
of the Medical School, we entertain no misgivings about the relevance
of the inquiry, and we would note that gender equity is a matter
about which all employers, academic and non-academic, should be
concerned. Ultimately, we believe, no responsible judgment can
be made about the limits of social science for this purpose until
there has been a serious effort to assemble existing data and
to explore what other data might be made available.
B.
External Data
In
making comparisons with experience at other universities, the
Gender Equity Committee was limited by the data that were available.
As a result, the institutions with which Penn was compared may
or may not be the best frame of reference. We recognize, of course,
that data on this subject are sensitive and may not easily be
obtainable. With the benefit of our own past experience, including
that reflected in the Report, however, we believe it important
that the administration actively seek additional data from other
universities, both as they become available as a result of efforts
already undertaken at those institutions, and in collaborative
efforts that Penn might lead.
III.
Structural Barriers
The
Report "suggests that the problems reside primarily in individual
departments rather than at the University-wide level." That
makes the task of solving them more difficult and suggests to
us that the most promising institutional line of attack
may lie in the direction of identifying and seeking to take down
structural barriers to gender equity. Our discussions attempted
to identify such barriers, both those revealed in the Report and
others that occurred to us, but our efforts in that regard are
simply suggestive. We focused on two groups of structural barriers:
procedural and accountability.
A.
Procedural Barriers
Lawyers
know that procedure is power and that the rules for playing a
game often determine the results. We believe that an important
part of the faculty's and administration's response to the Report
should be a commitment to analyze the procedures currently used
in connection with the appointment and retention of faculty, appointments
to leadership positions, and the selection of those who are to
receive honors and awards, to ensure that those procedures are
so formulated as to serve, rather than frustrate, the shared goal
of gender equity. To us that means, for example, that women must
be adequately represented on standing personnel committees and
on ad hoc search committees. We also believe that, if a school
or department has been identified as having a serious gender imbalance,
any recommendation for the appointment of a male that it submits,
or that is submitted on its behalf, to the administration should
be reviewed on this dimension. Such a recommendation should be
returned if the group initiating it did not include adequate representation
of women. In some situations, this would require the designation
of a member of the faculty from outside the department or school
to serve on the committee charged with primary jurisdiction.1
Procedure
not only can change substance; it can take the life out of it.
Thus, our discussions suggest that at least in some quarters the
current affirmative action process and procedures at Penn are
regarded as a paper tiger, a set of bothersome formalities the
original spirit behind which has been lost and which in any event
can easily be negotiated. We therefore strongly urge a wholesale
reexamination of that process and those procedures, and of the
assignment of responsibility for their implementation, a reexamination
that is in any event warranted to the extent that, as we believe,
some procedural changes are independently deemed appropriate.2
B.
Accountability Barriers
Experience
has demonstrated that accountability is critical to the goal of
gender equity. It is not always easy to obtain; indeed and ironically,
the quest for it may be inimical to the underlying goal. So, for
example, it was suggested to SCOF that a structural barrier to
gender equity reposes in the short terms of department chairs
in the Arts and Sciences. If, however, one were to lengthen those
terms in order to secure greater accountability, there would be
fewer leadership positions available for women faculty. Here,
it seems, accountability must lie with the Dean. We believe more
generally that matters of gender equity should be a serious concern
of every evaluation made of a Dean's performance, whether in connection
with a mid-term evaluation or consideration of reappointment,
as well as of department and school reviews.
IV.
Incentives and Disincentives
As
recognized in their Reply, although the primary responsibility
for gender equity rests with the faculty, the President and Provost
can provide important leadership and assistance, facilitating
efforts to identify problems and to monitor progress, ensuring
that, where central decisionmaking is required, procedures appropriate
to the goal of gender equity are in place ex ante and that accountability
is assessed ex post, and otherwise using the powers and resources
of the administration to encourage progress and discourage behavior
that can cause or exacerbate problems.
As
to incentives, the most obvious and best potential source of central
assistance in the pursuit of gender equity are funds that might
be made available to schools or departments that are seriously
interested in furthering that goal, whatever their record in the
past. As we understand it, from the central administration's perspective,
hiring is not a matter of slots but of resources. Thus, a program
like that used at some other institutions, in which a unit authorized
to hire at a junior level is granted an "upgrade" in
order to attract a distinguished senior woman faculty member,
would not fit our circumstances. But slots are dollars, and the
same functional result could be achieved if consequential funds
were committed to the enterprise on the model of the funds currently
committed to increasing minority presence. We encourage the administration
so to commit central funds.
As
to disincentives, we have already stated our recommendation that
the central administration turn back proposed appointments found
to have been recommended by a process that is not conducive to
gender equity. But we believe that some of the problems revealed
in the Report are sufficiently serious and have proved sufficiently
intractable to warrant a more substantive remedy. Thus, even where
the process has been impeccable, we believe that schools or departments
in which women have consistently and in a statistically significant
way been seriously underrepresented (as determined by comparing
their representation on the faculty with their representation
in the relevant recruitment pool) should bear the burden of justifying
any recommendation concerning an offer of appointment to
a male for a position within an area of such underrepresentation.
We recommend, in other words, a system of pre-offer approval for
such units, the details of which (notably, the precise criteria
that determine whether a school or department must secure central
approval before making an offer) should be agreed by the administration
and the faculty after broad consultation. The criteria finally
adopted should be published, if only themselves to serve as an
incentive for departments or schools to make the progress necessary
to avoid (or eliminate the need for) pre-offer approval.
V.
Conclusion
Gender
inequity is a chronic disease. The good news in the Report is
that, in many schools and departments of the University, the disease
is in remission. But experience tells us that complacency can
quickly lead to relapse, and thus that periodic examination is
in order for all academic units, while vigilant management is
necessary for some. Regrettably, it appears to us that some academic
units require stronger medicine, and in this report we have recommended
a combination of procedural and substantive steps that we believe
are indicated. Our recommendations are preliminary, partial and
only suggestive. Some of them will be distasteful to some members
of the faculty. We hope, however, that all faculty recognize that
this disease can spread and thus that our collective gender equity
health depends on the health of all parts of the complex organism
that we call the University of Pennsylvania.