Thanks to Anne McAuliffe for sending us info from a recent article in the Boston
Globe. I have briefly summarized the article below.
Susan Carter
edequity-admin@mail.edc.org
For more information and the complete article, see <www.boston.com> The
article is usually available on the day the article comes out, and then can be
retrieved from the archive for a fee.
MIT women win a fight against bias
>Fromthe Boston Globe on 3/21/99, written by Kate Zernike
Women professors at MIT went around various offices with a tape measure,
comparing how much space MIT awarded women with what men of equal status got. It
was less by about half.
Salaries, research money given to women, and the numbers of women on committees
that made decisions about hiring and funding were all less, too.
There were no women department heads and never had been. Men who got job offers
at other institutions were offered raises, and women were simply allowed to
leave.
After a history of indifference to complaints, just as many other institutions,
just recently MIT looked at the numbers and did what others had not: admitted
their wrong.
"And in a report that will be presented to the faculty later this month,
MIT's top administrators, all white men, will admit they have
discriminated against women for years, in ways that are subtle and
unintentional but very real."
"Since 4 years ago, when women began to raise the awareness of bias, MIT has
raised women's salaries by 20 percent to equal men's; increased research money
and space for women; awarded them key committee seats; and increased pensions of
a number of retired women to what they would have been paid if the salary
inequities had not existed."
Some national numbers were also cited in the article. Only 26 percent of
tenured faculty nationwide are women [no date given for source], compared with
18 percent in 1975. But in 1995, women filled 43 percent of faculty in
tenure-track positions nationwide, according to the American Association of
University Professors.
The article goes on to describe how a decade of progress came about in one year
at MIT, through a description of the efforts that led up to the decisions.
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