Universities Tackle Equity For Women 9 top schools pledge better treatment, pay

Kate Zernike / New York Times 31jan01

Acknowledging that women face hurdles in the fields of science and engineering, presidents and provosts from Harvard, Stanford, the University of California at Berkeley and six other top universities have vowed to work together and individually toward "equity and full participation" of their women faculty members.

The university leaders made their statement after gathering yesterday at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, where a group of female professors became folk heroines of a sort two years ago after producing a detailed analysis of inequities that prompted the institution to admit that it had unintentionally discriminated against women.

That widely publicized admission prompted women at other universities to say they had been reporting the same problem -- to deaf ears -- for years.

A statement issued after yesterday's meeting of university provosts and presidents promised that the institutions would work toward faculty diversity, equity for women in compensation and resources and policies that do not unduly burden women who have families. They also promised to produce and share annual reports on salaries, resources and hiring, and to include women in their analyses.

"We recognize that this challenge will require significant review of, and potentially significant change in, the procedures within each university, and within scientific and engineering establishments as a whole," the statement said.

Charles Vest, president of MIT, said, "This is a clear and unambiguous recognition that there do remain barriers, that we face significant issues in getting the full participation of women."

The meeting included presidents, provosts and a handful of faculty members from Yale, Stanford, Princeton, Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, the University of Michigan, UC Berkeley and the California Institute of Technology.

Simply requiring the sharing of data on salaries, hiring and resources is an accomplishment for the equity advocates. When the women at MIT began to work on their report about bias in 1994, several administrators initially blocked their efforts to get the information they requested.

Vest acknowledged that yesterday's one-page declaration did not contain many specifics. But the group has promised to share details of what each campus does to address the problem in the next year. "If you think about where we were a year ago," he said, "when we were worried about whether other institutions would recognize there is a problem, this is a pretty good piece of work."