When Associate Prof. Rae Moses went in search of a bathroom at Harris Hall in the early 1970s, she saw a door simply labeled “faculty.” Inside she expected to find a faculty lounge with restrooms for both sexes, she said.
Instead, she saw a row of urinals.
Moses and other women faculty banded together to write a letter to then-Provost Raymond Mack, requesting that the university re-label the door.
“We told them that if it still said faculty after one month we were going to hold a cocktail party in there,” she said. “There was just this unconscious feeling in those days that all the faculty were men.”
The climate for women faculty at NU has changed a great deal since Moses came here in 1965. More and more women serving as department chairwomen, associate and assistant deans, deans of undergraduate schools, university vice presidents and associate provosts.
Although women have made many gains in higher education over the years, about 23 percent of tenure and tenure-track faculty members and 15 percent of full professors at Northwestern are women — numbers that mirror the national trend.
University Provost Lawrence Dumas said he revived the Faculty Diversity Committee in 2000 and acts as its chairman because he believes increasing the number of women and under-represented minorities in faculty positions should be a priority for NU.
“There’s still urgency, and there are still many gains to be made,” he said.
The Changing Face of faculty
Inadequate child care accommodations. A shortage of qualified women applicants for top academic positions. An increasing reliance by universities like NU on full-time lecturers and instructors.
Administrators and faculty members identify these as reasons for the tenure disparity, but no one can explain completely the continuing dominance of men in tenure positions.
While women at NU remain under-represented at the tenure and tenure-track levels, they comprise 56.1 percent of the university’s full-time lecturers.
The abundance of women lecturers is most apparent in departments with a significant number of women professors, such as foreign languages and the humanities, Dumas said.
NU was expanding its course offerings in those areas at the same time more women with advanced degrees were entering the labor market, he said. At that time, NU and other universities hired more lecturers because lecturers command lower salaries and do not receive compensation or support for research.
“Universities face issues of growth and complexity in the curriculum,” Dumas said. “You’re balancing those who are required to teach with those who are hired to teach and do research, the latter of which are more expensive.”
University President Henry Bienen said NU’s increasing focus on research naturally leads to the employment of fewer women professors because fewer women earn Ph.D.s in engineering and the sciences.
“At a research university, unlike a liberal arts college, you’re going to have fewer women faculty members,” he said.
He added, however, that improvements to the imbalance of men and women professors will come over time, as assistant and associate professors — 33.6 percent of whom were women in 2001 — get tenure consideration.
Data from the most recent report of the university’s Committee on Women in the Academic Community shows that women and men who are considered for tenure receive it at about the same rate.
But Psychology Prof. Alice Eagly said those figures do not tell the whole story.
She would like to see the number of women and men who leave the tenure track before coming up for tenure consideration.
Tenure clock versus biological clock
The structure and demand for tenure may deter women who want to have families from reaching tenure-track consideration, said Susan Herbst, a political science professor and associate dean for faculty affairs in Weinberg College of Arts and Sciences.
“That’s something that men will never face,” she said. “This is the kind of challenge that women have that’s tied to the biological clock. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with women trying to decide what’s the best year to have baby No. 1 or baby No. 2.”
Tenure, according to NU’s faculty handbook, “signifies an appointment for an indefinite period.” Professors with tenure can be removed by the Board of Trustees only for “grave misconduct or neglect of duty.”
The stability of tenure positions, however, comes with the responsibility to conduct research and publish academic papers or articles, Dumas said.
University policy also sets a strict timeline for tenure consideration. Assistant professors, who are taking the first step on the tenure track, must be considered for promotion to associate professor within three years of being appointed. Associate professors are considered for tenure positions within six years.
This timeline often overlaps with the time that women are looking to settle down and start families, said Herbst, who previously has served on COWAC. Some women can do both, but some must make a choice, she said.
And the issues of child-bearing and child care, said Wendi Gardner, a psychology associate professor, still affect men more than women, especially in the academic profession.
“Getting tenure is hard enough without also being a full-time parent,” she said. “No matter how egalitarian a woman’s husband is, women still carry the brunt of the child care burden.”
Despite NU’s announcement this fall of a partnership with the McGaw YMCA to provide early child care, NU remains the only Big Ten school without an on-site child care facility.
Eagly, who worked on a child care report for the General Faculty Committee, said the university has historically responded inadequately to the child care concerns of faculty and students.
“The administration has not placed a high priority on these family issues,” she said. “It’s very difficult to know why Northwestern is so very late to do what other universities, even sort of conservative universities, have done.”
possible Proactive policies
But child care addresses just one of many factors that contribute to fewer women in tenure and tenure-track positions.
In addition to recruiting more women undergraduates, administrators are working on mentoring programs for both women and under-represented minorities among the university’s graduate programs.
When the Faculty Diversity Committee report was released in October, Graduate School Dean Richard Morimoto said mentoring opportunities for graduate students will encourage more to pursue careers as professors, increasing the pool of applicants available to NU and other schools.
Like graduate students, women professors need strong mentors, said Phyllis Dennery, a Stanford University associate professor who is the chairwoman of a subcommittee on recruitment, promotion and retention.
“Overall it’s really a constant challenge for women to find the appropriate mentorship and to find folks that are going to give them the chance to see that they’re able to succeed as well,” Dennery said.
She said universities should help establish formal mentoring programs as well as encourage informal mentoring relationships between professors. Since a small number of women hold senior positions, they may feel overwhelmed by the need for advising younger faculty members, she explained.
Some universities have developed spousal hiring policies that offer comparable faculty positions to the husbands and wives of professors.
Experts say women are more likely to make professional sacrifices for their partners. In the academic world, that tendency translates into the trailing spouse syndrome — when women take less prestigious positions to follow their husbands who receive tenure or tenure-track positions.
Gardner, whose husband works at the Un
iversity of Chicago, said she feels lucky that she and her spouse both landed tenure-track positions in the Chicago area. They lived apart for a year after marrying until her husband was hired at Chicago.
“Usually women are much more willing to step off the tenure track,” she said. “That’s one of those cultural phenomena. For women, it’s a balance between career and family.”
Another policy gaining attention is the part-time tenure track, which a very small number of universities are implementing.
Joan C. Williams, a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C., said part-time tenure may allow women — and men — to carry half the usual academic workload and advance proportionately.
“Obviously you need to change the time demands of the academic career to fit with the time demands of being a parent who is involved with children’s lives,” she said. “One way of doing that is the part-time tenure track.”
Forward Focus
Nationally, the areas where women are least well-represented, such as physics, electrical and computer engineering, and mechanical engineering are also the areas where the fewest women earn PhDs.
Prof. Katherine Faber, chairwoman of NU’s materials science and engineering department, said the university now has enough women professors in engineering to maintain a sense of community and make recruiting more women easier. Women account for slightly more than 10 percent of tenure and tenure-track professors in the McCormick School of Engineering and Applied Sciences.
“Although it’s not representative of the general population, it is a critical mass,” Faber said.
A growing number of women pursuing undergraduate degrees at McCormick, she said, is cause for optimism. Twenty-nine percent of McCormick’s undergraduate students are women, above the national average of 20 percent.
An increase in the number of women in decision-making positions at the university may also contribute to a sense of community among women faculty members and help younger women move up the tenure-track ladder, said Lydia Villa-Komaroff, vice president for research.
But Villa-Komaroff, the third Mexican-American woman in the United States to earn a doctorate degree in science, said more women must rise to the rank of full professor before women can be fully represented in NU’s administration.
“You can’t have a woman president until you have a woman full professor,” she said. “It’s kind of a chicken and egg issue.
“People in positions of power — university presidents and provosts who are still predominantly male — are very aware that this is a problem. I think that the university community was much more complacent about the issue 15 years ago. There were fewer of us to complain about it.”
Despite the gains NU has made since Moses joined the university in the 1960s, future changes will depend on societal pressures that are out of administrators’ and professors’ control.
“Much depends on how society handles a lot of other issues,” she said. “There are issues that have to do with the way families handle the distribution of labor, and I’m not sure how fast that will change.”
