Gender study finds female faculty ratio lags behind nation; pay also an issue

By Theresa Hogue
Gazette-Times reporter

"I can't say that the college-bred woman is the most contented woman. The broader her mind the more she understands the unequal conditions between men and women, the more she chafes under a government that tolerates it." —Susan B. Anthony

Susan B. Anthony said this more than a century ago in reference to women's suffrage, but the quote can apply just as equally today, even on college campuses, those places where women are supposed to be learning about society's inequalities.

Women in academia face the same struggles of pay disparity, sexism and balancing family and work life that women in most other areas of the United States face, and Oregon State University is no exception.

Last week, a long-awaited parity report was released at OSU, the work of countless hours and piles of documentation. The primary authors were three OSU women who worked 40-hour weeks in addition to the time they dedicated to the project, and it was only through sheer determination that they completed the work.

OSU Women's Center Director Beth Rietveld, Anne Gillies of the OSU Office of Affirmative Action and Moira Dempsey, director of the Academic Success Center, have spent several years on the study. Originally, the report was a follow-up to a 1994 parity report, which gave a limited overview of the status of women on campus in the early 1990s. But the new report expanded to include the voices of many women and their experiences as females at OSU.

"These topics are on every campus," Rietveld said. "We're not unique."

The follow-up report is more extensive, including interviews of women and administrative leaders across campus, and the data collection was so extensive that it took several years for Rietveld, Gillies and Dempsey to compile it and write a coherent report that condensed the data to something intelligible.

"We proceeded slowly," Rietveld said. "There was no way it could be done quickly."

The results reveal that many steps have been taken in the past decade to help women advance at the university, but equality is still far off. For example, since 1993 the university has doubled the percentage of female full professors on campus to 17.5 percent, but it is still almost 4 percentage points behind the national average.

The university also now has a female vice president and five female deans, and women make up one third of other academic and administrative leaders on campus.

Nationally, studies show full-time women faculty are paid nearly $11,000 less than their male counterparts. The OSU parity study did not ask specifically about their salary concerns, but 87 percent of the comments made by OSU women about salary pointed to perceived inequities between what men and women make.

"This is a beginning, not an endpoint," Gillies said. "How do we make this better?"

Some of the concerns raised by women across campus include the difficulty of balancing their workload and their personal lives, feelings of isolation both on campus and in the community, a different value set between men and women on campus, difficulty in communicating, salary inequities and difficulties in navigating the promotion and tenure process.

"Women find that moving into leadership levels previously dominated by men is challenging," the report stated. "They point out that the lack of numbers of top administrative positions often means that women in those ranks have few places to go for support."

In 1994, OSU's administration set a target date of 2015 to achieve parity between male and female employees. To achieve this goal in the next 10 years, a number of top priorities are going to be implemented.

They include requiring each dean and unit leader to address issues of gender in their diversity action plans, creating an upper-level administrative position specifically focused on women's issues, rewarding those who make tangible efforts to build a culture supportive of women, and creating employee development programs that cover gender and cultural competence training, mentoring and power, privilege and discrimination.

"How do we keep this from sitting on a shelf collecting dust? It's one of the challenges," Gillies said. "We know many people care deeply about these issues. It takes somebody saying it's a top priority."

That somebody is OSU President Ed Ray, who has made it clear that gender parity is something the university has to achieve. His support, along with the knowledge that OSU is taking steps to move forward, means the parity report isn't a bleak set of numbers.

"We view it as a hopeful document," Gillies said. "We were so concerned about being true to the voices of the people who spoke to us. It's representative of people whose voices are heard and dismissed."

To see the report in its entirety, go to http://oregonstate.edu/admin/comdiv.