Study Knocks UC for Few Female Hires

Despite the increasing number of women earning Ph.Ds, all UC campuses except UC Berkeley continue to fall behind hiring women to faculty positions, according to a report released by four UC Davis professors last week.

According to the report, "Unprecedented Urgency: Gender Discrimination in Faculty Hiring at the University of California," UC has been steadily increasing the number of faculty hires systemwide, from 362 in 1998-99 to 586 in 2003-04, yet the number of female hires has continued to drop.

"The administration has taken the pressure off of faculty to look for white women and men and women of color while searching for applicants," said Martha West, the report's lead author and a law professor at UC Davis. "Women just tend to be more invisible unless attention is called for the need to hire them."

All UC campuses except UC Berkeley have failed to increase the percentage of female faculty hires past 37 percent reached during the 1993-94 academic year, according to the report.

The report said UC's lag is rooted in policies passed by the UC Board of Regents in 1995 that prohibited UC from considering race and gender in admissions and hiring faculty, in addition to Proposition 209, the 1996 voter-backed initiative that barred public institutions from doing the same.

"After these measures went into effect, people thought they could go back to what we consider white male privilege," said co-author Kyaw Tha Paw U, a professor of atmospheric science at UC Davis.

Though university officials did not dispute the numbers, UC spokesperson Paul Schwartz said comparing the hires to the entire Ph.D. applicant pool is misleading. Because of gender gaps from field to field, the number of female applicants for certain positions is much lower, he said.

The report showed that UC Berkeley was the only UC campus whose percentage of female faculty hires exceeded the percentage of Ph.Ds awarded to women nationally in 2003.

For 2003-04, female faculty hires at UC Berkeley accounted for 48 percent of all hires, largely because UC Berkeley hired more professors at the non-tenured level, West said. According to the report, 54 percent of the assistant faculty hired by UC Berkeley in 2003-04 were women.

West said the campuses must combat male-domination of academic fields by taking the steps to convince female graduate students to apply for faculty positions at the university.

"A lot of women in graduate school look at the lives their female professors lead and decide they don't want that path," West said.

The report suggested that in addition to hiring more applicants at the assistant professor level, other campuses could create faculty equity positions in their administrations like UC Berkeley Associate Vice Provost of Faculty Equity Angelica Stacy, a former chair in the department of chemistry.

West applauded policy changes being implemented at UC Berkeley, such as an extended tenure clock with more flexible maternity leave and more child-friendly programs on campus.

"Men don't have to choose between being parents and being academics," West said. "Women shouldn't have to either."

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