Yale Bulletin and Calendar

April 13, 2007|Volume 35, Number 25

No matter what their discipline, female scholars and researchers "live in a world in which gender affects opportunities," notes Professor Judith Resnik, co-chair of the Women Faculty Forum.

In Focus: Women Faculty Forum

Group working to address the impact
of gender on university life

In just six years since its founding, the Women Faculty Forum (WFF) at Yale has grown into a thriving University-wide organization with over 800 members and a long and wide-ranging list of programs.

Its mission is three-fold: to promote scholarship on gender and research about and by women; to foster gender equity throughout the University; and to encourage collegiality and networking on these issues.

"We are focused on women as scholars; on scholarship about women, gender and sexuality; and how universities (and especially Yale) are affected by and in turn affect ideas about gender," says WFF co-chair Judith Resnik, the Arthur Liman Professor of Law.

To achieve those ends, the WFF operates simultaneously on several fronts. It conducts and disseminates research about gender through seminars, conferences, lectures and publications. It reviews existing policies and recommends changes to improve equity in such areas as hiring and tenure, day care and family leave. And it encourages women at Yale and beyond to work together to achieve their professional and personal goals.

"In some departments at Yale, as at peer institutions, women faculty can be scarce," says Meg Urry, the Israel Munson Professor of Physics and Astronomy, WFF co-chair. "The WFF connects those women and creates a valuable sense of community."

According to Resnik, "Across a range of ,disciplines and very different forms of scholarship, women faculty continue to find that we have a good deal in common, in that our workplace, our academic disciplines, our students all live in a world in which gender affects opportunities. While both women and men 'have gender,' women and men do not experience the burdens of gender in the same way, and therefore we need to understand the work that gender does and how it affects the institution of which we are a part."

With strong backing from President Richard C. Levin and Provost Andrew Hamilton, the University gives institutional support to the WFF by providing office space, professional and support staff, and funding for programming. Much of the work is done by faculty members who want Yale to focus on how curriculum, scholarship and policies relate to gender. The WFF works closely with the Program on Women, Gender and Sexuality Studies (WGSS) in Yale College, as well as with programs on women and health at the School of Medicine.

Yale's WFF is a model among organizations of its kind, spanning the entire University in both its leadership and its membership, which includes not only faculty, but also administrators, students and alumni/ae -- mostly, but not exclusively, female. The Stanford Report noted that its own Faculty Women's Forum, established in 2004, was deliberately based on Yale's WFF.

The WFF's academic accomplishments include a series of seminars, workshops and conferences, including "Gender Matters," "Gender, Sex and Science" and "Citizenship, Gender and Borders," as well as a book contract for a collection of essays based on the interdisciplinary conference "Migrations and Mobilities." The book will be edited by Resnik and Seyla Benhabib, the Eugene Meyer Professor of Political Science and Philosophy and director of the Program in Ethics, Politics and Economics.

In addition, the WFF participated in the first-ever "Women in Higher Education," a global conference held at Cambridge University in September 2006. This was a project of the year-old International Alliance of Research Universities, which includes the Universities of Cambridge, Oxford, Peking, Tokyo, Copenhagen and California-Berkeley (UC-Berkeley), as well as Australian National University, National University of Singapore, ETH in Zurich and Yale. Plans are under way for a major collaborative project on the role of women in higher education globally that will be discussed at a conference hosted by Yale in 2008.

Locally and on a regular basis, the WFF offers lectures and panels on research related to gender, such as the April 4 panel "Working Lives/Lives that Work: Research Perspectives from the U.S. and Asia," featuring Frances Rosenbluth, professor of political science at Yale, and other scholars. This month, the WFF will host Alice Agagino, professor of mechanical engineering at UC-Berkeley, speaking on "Women and Men in the Academy: Beyond Bias and Barriers." In May, the WFF will join WGSS in hosting Juliet Mitchell, professor of psychoanalysis and gender studies at Cambridge University, who will lecture on "Future Formations: Gender as an Analytic/Women's Studies as a Location in the Academy."

In addition to generating and disseminating intellectual content, the WFF is concerned with effecting practical changes. The organization has taken as one of its priorities the challenge of helping to establish "Lives that Work" through advocacy on increased provision of childcare at Yale, including emergency backup care. By conducting research on how other universities provide parental leave, the WFF helped revise Yale's policy, which now permits a faculty member, regardless of sex or marital status, to take a leave of absence if he or she is the substantial caregiver for a newborn or newly adopted child. The WFF is now looking into how universities support educational opportunities and care for children through the age of 21.

One key element to enhancing the role of women in the academy is mentorship, according to the WFF leadership, noting that upper-level students, experienced faculty members and senior administrators are often in a position to encourage and guide less experienced women in their professional pursuits. Yale has several such programs. The Graduate School of Arts and Sciences offers Women Mentoring Women, through which graduate students organize workshops and programs to encourage cross-disciplinary mentoring between female students and faculty. This program, under the auspices of Graduate Career Services, is a spin-off of the WFF. Women in Science at Yale (WISAY) brings together over 250 undergraduates, graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who are interested in issues that pertain to women in the sciences. Other campus-based mentoring and advocacy organizations include Yale Law Women, the Office for Women in Medicine, Women in Management at the Yale School of Management (SOM) and the Yale Divinity Women's Center.

Yale women are also active in organizing mentoring beyond the campus. Two SOM professors -- Sharon Oster, the Frederic D. Wolfe Professor of Management and Entrepreneurship and director of the Program on Social Enterprise, and Judith Chevalier, the William S. Beinecke Professor of Finance and Economics -- serve on the American Economic Association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession and participate in mentoring workshops dedicated to subfields within their disciplines.

Mentoring is necessary, but not sufficient to achieving gender equity and improving the lives of women on campus, note WFF leaders. To establish what else needs to be done, the WFF is updating its seminal study: "Women and Yale University: A View from 2002."

The original report examined the changes in the status of women at Yale between 1982 and 2002, including the distribution of women faculty; the number of women holding endowed professorships, heading departments, programs and research institutes; the number of women in senior administrative positions; and the number of women who have received University awards and honorary degrees.

The 2007 report is being compiled by Cindy Tobery, director of programs and projects for the WFF, with student research assistants Jessica Svendsen and Lisa Campbell.

"Comparing the numbers of women currently on the faculty with the numbers five years ago helps us mark progress," Tobery notes. "We are even more interested in how these numbers represent new hires versus retention of the women already at Yale, as both are important variables not captured by current numbers alone."

Among the preliminary findings: Women comprised less than 20% of the faculty in 1982, 25% in 2001-2002 and 31% by 2006-2007. Over the last 25 years, the total number of women on the faculty has increased by 50%. This year, women comprised 21% of total tenured faculty, up from 17% in the earlier report. In 2006, women made up 41% of the total term (non-tenured) faculty, compared to 37% in 2002.

A recent report titled "Beyond Bias and Barriers" from the National Research Council (NRC), the research arm of the National Academies of Science, describes a very similar picture across the nation.

WFF member Joan Steitz, a member of the study committee that produced the report and the Sterling Professor of Molecular Biophysics and Biochemistry at Yale, says: "I am convinced that under-representation of women in scientific disciplines stems largely from unconscious bias, on the part of both women and men. The challenge is how to change University structures so that more women are encouraged to enter and stay in academic positions in these fields. This will require attention from University administrators and faculty, as well as professional societies, and from government and other funding organizations."

Urry, the incoming chair of the Department of Physics, who reviewed the report for the NRC, notes: "The report explains how bias affects the status and career progress of women in male-dominated fields like science, and at the same time it describes successful strategies for mitigating the effects of bias. Until we understand these subtle effects it will be difficult to eradicate them." Steitz, Urry and Deputy Provost Kim Bottomly described the report and its ramifications at a well-attended WFF event last December.

The WFF is interested in a variety of metrics by which to assess whether women and men are full participants in universities. "We need to ask 'where are the women?' as a matter of the demographics as well as a matter of the analytics," said Resnik. "In addition to understanding who among us are professors, administrators and staff, we also need to know who among us are the invited speakers, the authorities cited and the authors read, and how the curriculum and the scholarship of universities have (or have not) changed, as the question of gender comes to be engaged from the sciences to the humanities, from engineering to law, medicine and architecture. And, we have a lot to learn before we can answer these questions."

In 2005, responding to the goals of the WFF and others around campus, Yale appointed Bottomly -- an active member of the WFF -- as deputy provost for faculty development as well as science and technology. Bottomly is professor in the Departments of Immunobiology and Dermatology at the School of Medicine, and in the Department of Molecular, Cellular and Developmental Biology. In addition to her role in shaping and implementing academic, administrative and budgetary policies for science departments and programs, she is involved in initiatives focused on increasing faculty diversity across the institution -- especially in improving recruitment and retention of women and under-represented minorities.

Bottomly says, "The great strength of the WFF is that it unites women across disciplines. There are a number of centers around the country specifically devoted to scholarship related to women and gender studies, and they accomplish wonderful things, but they don't fully engage that great number of women faculty who don't themselves do gender research.

"The WFF," she continues, "draws in women from all parts of the University and unites them in a close community, women who have in common only the simple fact that they are all women existing in a broad institutional and organizational realm that presents particular difficulties to women. It helps them not just to understand and discuss how gender affects opportunities, but also lets them work closely in partnership with the Yale administration in thinking about needed changes in policies and procedures that differentially affect women."

-- By Gila Reinstein

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Charlie Rose of PBS to present Fryer Lecture

Study: Early estrogen therapy may reduce cardiovascular risks

In Focus: Women Faculty Forum

Exhibit celebrates centennial of Yale benefactor Paul Mellon

Three congregations to demonstrate ancient tradition of line-singing

Geologist Jun Korenaga is honored for his research on the Earth's mantle

Alumnus describes how life's challenges have also been a 'gift'

Vivian Perlis honored as chronicler of American music

Three award-winning alumni writers will read from their works

Yale Opera to stage classic operetta in a new style

Homage to director Rossellini will highlight program on Italian cinema

'Biodiversity and global change' are focus of Peabody event

Traditional calligraphy by Chinese student featured in benefit exhibition

Kristin Savard wins this year's Hockey Humanitarian Award

Campus Notes