Female Faculty Remain a Minority

Editor's note: This article is part of the Daily Cal's Semester in Review series for the month of October.

In recent years, more female science and engineering professors at UC Berkeley have earned recognition for their work, but many say the campus has yet to achieve faculty equity.

Although there have been efforts to increase the number of female faculty members on campus, disciplines in the humanities—where women make up 42 percent of the faculty—have been more successful than the physical sciences, technology, engineering and math.

Only 13 percent of faculty in these fields are female, according to data from the campus Office for Faculty Equity.

“The problem is, with the tenure system, we have so many senior faculty that if we don’t have a drastic change it could take 1,000 years,” said endowed chair and mechanical engineering professor Alice Agogino, one of four female faculty members in her department.

In 2005, women made up approximately 43 percent of all science and engineering graduate students in the U.S., according to statistics from the National Science Foundation.

Yet women currently constitute less than 25 percent of UC Berkeley faculty members in the same disciplines, according to campus data.

“Berkeley’s numbers look like the numbers of most other major national research universities,” said Marc Goulden, director of data initiatives for academic affairs and a researcher in the Office of Faculty Equity. “But the rate that they’re going up, particularly in the physical sciences and engineering—you’d like to see it go up faster.”

The disparity is even greater when considering the number of female deans on campus: Only two of the 14 total dean positions are held by women.

The pool of potential female faculty members is limited because the campus tries to recruit primarily from prestigious departments of other universities, which may have few women, according to Meg Conkey, anthropology professor and chair of the Berkeley Division of the Academic Senate’s Committee on the Status of Women and Ethnic Minorities.

“We’re sort of dependent on their pipeline problems,” she said.

Goulden said that conflict between the careers and family lives of women in the sciences influence their decision to pursue faculty positions at large research universities.

Faculty said that in most cases, the age at which many people pursue tenure is also the prime period for raising families.

“I believe that at large universities like UC Berkeley, (administrators) do need to understand that tenure track is extremely hard work, particularly with young families,” said nuclear engineering chair Jasmina Vujic, adding that the campus is doing better than other schools in meeting faculty needs.

Vujic is the first female chair of a top-10 nuclear engineering department in the country. Like many of her colleagues, Vujic was on tenure track while raising her family.

To deal with faculty equity issues, Conkey said the campus currently practices cluster hiring, or the hiring of groups of people at a time. She added that there are also plans to promote equity advisors to act as resources to faculty.

Systemwide initiatives such as UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge have introduced programs that provide new parents with teaching relief and more time to achieve tenure.

“I think we’re moving in the right direction, but this type of work takes a long time,” Goulden said.

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