Reports on Equity at UCLA and in Academia
Achieving gender equity for women in academia is an ongoing component of CSW’s mission. The research listed here provides some recent research on the issues. Also provided here are reports related to UCLA initiatives to promote gender equity on campus.
If you have a question or concern about gender equity at UCLA, contact the office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion:
Website: https://equity.ucla.edu
Email: WeListen@equity.ucla.edu
Phone: (310) 794-1232
No Room of One’s Own
Colleen Flaherty
April, 2020
It was easy to foresee: within academe, female professors would bear the professional brunt of social distancing during COVID-19, in the form of decreased research productivity.
Now the evidence is starting to emerge. Editors of two journals say that they’re observing unusual, gendered patterns in submissions. In each case, women are losing out.
Editors of a third journal have said that overall submissions by women are up right now, but that solo-authored articles by women are down substantially.
Women’s research plummets during lockdown - but articles from men increase
Anna Fazackerley
May, 2020
In April Dr Elizabeth Hannon, deputy editor of the British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, noticed that the number of article submissions she was receiving from women had dropped dramatically. Not so from men.
“Negligible number of submissions to the journal from women in the last month,” she posted on Twitter. “Never seen anything like it.” The response was an outpouring of recognition from frustrated female academics, saying they were barely coping with childcare and work during the coronavirus lockdown.
Labor inequities for faculty and GE caregivers during COVID-19: A call to action
June 8, 2020
Dear Colleagues:
We are writing with an urgent request to university leadership, the United Academics, and the UO Senate, deans, and department heads. COVID-19 has uncovered many aspects of our institutional practice that have historically rendered certain labor invisible and left others more vulnerable. Historically, the ivory tower was designed for monastic, solitary contemplation wherein great thoughts were debated and passed down to a few selected students who were fortunate to be admitted. As such, higher education’s research expectations have favored men who have wives or domestic partners to perform childcare. Of course, there have been changes, but the structure and expectations of research productivity overwhelmingly privilege those who can defer child and elder care.
UW System Women’s & Gender Studies Consortium (WGSC) Statement regarding caregiving recommendations for Fall 2020 return to campus
June 23, 2020
Dear Campus Leaders,
We are writing today to encourage each campus to design a clear, campus-wide policy on
caregiving which offers the utmost flexibility for faculty, staff, and students in navigating the
simultaneous responsibilities of caregiving, healthcare needs, and work responsibilities during
the coming academic year. Not only does the UW System employ a great deal of parents with
children, but many families, and a disproportionate number of first-generation students of
color, will also need to care for grandparents, younger siblings, partners, and other family
members as part of the COVID-19 landscape in the coming year. The UW System Women’s and
Gender Studies Consortium (WGSC) is a network of Women’s and Gender Studies (WGS)
Programs and Departments across the state, and we work closely with faculty, staff, and
students on issues relating to gender equity and intersectional inclusivity across the UW System
and beyond. We have recently heard many concerns regarding childcare plans and caregiving
demands for the coming academic year, including concerns about the lack of a clear policy on
how faculty, staff, and students will balance these realities against in-person and online
instruction, student advising, and other professional responsibilities in the fall and spring.
MY 79 CENTS: THE PRODUCTIVITY GAP BETWEEN MALE AND FEMALE SENIOR FACULTY AT UCLA
Olga T. Yokoyama
2016
This analysis of the publication records of 10 senior professors uncovers one parameter that reveals a striking gender inequity between male and female senior faculty at UCLA. It shows that the higher women professors rise in their steps, the greater their scholarly productivity. Their male colleagues, by contrast, continue to advance in step virtually without increasing their productivity. The issue is not about equal pay at a given step, but about the amount of work a woman must put in to reach that step, compared to her male counterpart.
FACULTY SALARY INEQUITY, 1992‒2010
Rebecca Jean Emigh, Kate Norberg, and Vilma Ortiz
March 22, 2016
This report presents the results of an analysis of ladder faculty salary equity at UCLA from 1992‒1993 to 2009‒2010 using data drawn from the Longitudinal Electronic Academic Database (LEAD) and provided by the UCLA Office of Analysis and Information Management. Unfortunately, as we understand it, the decision was made by the UCLA administration not to continue to update the LEAD database after that date, so we have no way of updating these analyses. We focus on salary inequities in departments because academic evaluations that lead to salary decisions typically originate within them. We assesses two types of salary inequity: 1) systematic salary inequity, when faculty of a particular gender and/or ethnic origin have salaries that are on average lower than the salaries of their white male colleagues and 2) individual salary inequity, when some faculty of a particular gender and/or ethnic origin category have salaries that are lower than their white male colleagues.
UCLA DIVERSITY STATISTICS, REGULAR RANK FACULTY, 2014
UCLA Office of Diversity and Faculty Development
UCLA Faculty Diversity Statistics Monograph was published annually and provided a snapshot of the regular rank faculty with respect to gender, race, and ethnicity in the schools, divisions, and departments on the UCLA campus. The David Geffen School of Medicine also publishes a separate monograph of their faculty.
UCLA GENDER EQUITY SUMMIT REPORT
UCLA Office of Faculty Diversity
May 17, 2004
During the weeks of April 19 and May 3, individual faculty from 20 different departments and professional schools met in workshops to exchange ideas about addressing gender equity in recruitment, promotion and leadership. Over 100 ideas were floated, many of which appear in the appendices to this report. A set of these were selected (largely by consensus) as having the potential to achieve concrete results in either the short or long term. In choosing which strategies to develop for presentation at the Summit, participants took into consideration prior work done by the Gender Equity Task Force and the Gender Equity Committees, the recent addition of an Office of Faculty Diversity, and current resource constraints.
This report reflects the deliberations of the two separate workshop groups. These workshops were made possible through the efforts of the Associate Vice Chancellor for Faculty Diversity Rosina Becerra, the Gender Equity Summit Committee (listed below), workshop facilitator Linda Garnets and Center for the Study of Women Manager Regina Lark. Any inconsistencies or errors in distilling and reporting are, however, the sole responsibility of the author.
PROMOTING FACULTY DIVERSITY AT UCLA
Promoting Faculty Diversity at UCLA
Chancellor’s Advisory Group on Diversity
April, 2002
In setting out a “Strategy for a Great University” (1998), Chancellor Albert Carnesale identified diversity as one of the areas demanding our immediate and long-term attention. Clearly, faculty diversity is essential to achieving our goals in teaching, research, and service and meeting our responsibilities as a public land grant university located in the State of California and the City of Los Angeles. Clearly, too, recruiting and retaining a diverse faculty requires strong academic leadership and broad participation by faculty colleagues. In recent years we have taken a series of actions that, together, provide the framework for a campuswide initiative promoting faculty diversity.
REPORT ON UCLA’S EFFORTS IN AID OF DIVERSITY IN FACULTY HIRING AND ACHIEVING GENDER AND MINORITY EQUITY
Office of the Chancellor
May 1, 2001
This is a report prepared in response to the request contained in President Atkinson’s letter of February 8, 2001, asking for a description of UCLA’s efforts to promote diversity in faculty hiring and to achieve gender and minority equity on this campus. The many different activities that we have undertaken in this sphere are detailed below. Some of the items in this report are similar to the recommendations contained in Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood’s recent testimony before the Senate Select Committee that was cited in President Atkinson’s letter.
GENDER EQUITY ISSUES AFFECTING SENATE FACULTY AT UCLA
Gender Equity Committee
October 10, 2000
In January 2000, Vice Chancellor Norman Abrams appointed a committee to examine gender equity issues for Academic Senate Faculty at UCLA. We were asked to provide a preliminary report by June 1, 2000. This report represents the response to our charge. We present some preliminary conclusions based on the available data, suggest directions for future research, and propose that a restructured committee carry forward the investigations that our committee has initiated.
DANCING BACKWARDS IN HIGH HEELS: FEMALE PROFESSORS EXPERIENCE MORE WORK DEMANDS AND SPECIAL FAVOR REQUESTS, PARTICULARLY FROM ACADEMICALLY ENTITLED STUDENTS
Amani El-Alayli, Ashley A. Hansen-Brown, Michelle Ceynar
Sex Roles 2018, Vol. 79(3-4) 136-150.
Although the number of U.S. female professors has risen steadily in recent years, female professors are still subject to different student expectations and treatment. Students continue to perceive and expect female professors to be more nurturing than male professors are. We examined whether students may consequently request more special favors from female professors. In a survey of professors (n = 88) across the United States, Study 1 found that female (versus male) professors reported getting more requests for standard work demands, special favors, and friendship behaviors, with the latter two mediating the professor gender effect on professors’ self-reported emotional labor. Study 2 utilized an experimental design using a fictitious female or male professor, with college student participants (n = 121) responding to a scenario in which a special favor request might be made of the professor. The results indicated that academically entitled students (i.e., those who feel deserving of success in college regardless of effort/performance) had stronger expectations that a female (versus male) professor would grant their special favor requests. Those expectations consequently increased students’ likelihood of making the requests and of exhibiting negative emotional and behavioral reactions to having those requests denied. This work highlights the extra burdens felt by female professors. We discuss possible moderators of these effects as well as the importance of developing strategies for preventing them.
FEMALE MANAGERS AND GENDER DISPARITIES: THE CASE OF ACADEMIC DEPARTMENT CHAIRS
Working Paper by Andrew Langan
November 2018
Appointing female managers is a common proposal to improve women’s representation and outcomes in the workplace, but it is unclear how well such policies accomplish these goals. Using newly-collected panel data on academic departments, the author exploits variation in the timing of transitions between department chairs of different genders with a difference-in-differences research design. For faculty, they find female department chairs reduce gender gaps in publications and tenure for assistant professors and shrink the gender pay gap. Replacing a male chair with a female chair increases the number of female students among incoming graduate cohorts by ten percent with no evidence of a change in ability correlates for the average student.
SEXUAL HARASSMENT OF WOMEN: CLIMATE, CULTURE, AND CONSEQUENCES IN ACADEMIC SCIENCES, ENGINEERING, AND MEDICINE
National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine
January 2018
Over the last several years, revelations of sexual harassment experienced by women in workplace and in academic settings have raised urgent questions about the specific impact of this discriminatory behavior on women and the extent to which it is limiting their careers. Sexual Harassment of Women explores the influence of sexual harassment in academia on the career advancement of women in the scientific, technical, and medical workforce. This report reviews the research on the extent to which women in the fields of science, engineering, and medicine experience sexual harassment and examines the existing information on the extent to which sexual harassment in academia negatively impacts the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women pursuing scientific, engineering, technical, and medical careers. It also identifies and analyzes the policies, strategies and practices that have been the most successful in preventing and addressing sexual harassment in academia.
GENDER DIFFERENCES IN RECOGNITION FOR GROUP WORK
Heather Sarsons
December 3, 2015
This paper explores whether bias arising from group work helps explain the gender promotion gap. Using data from economists’ CVs, I test whether coauthored publications matter differently for tenure by gender. While solo-authored papers send a clear signal about one’s ability, coauthored papers do not provide specific information about each contributor’s skills. I find that women incur a penalty when they coauthor that men do not experience. This is most pronounced for women coauthoring with men and less pronounced the more women there are on a paper. A model shows that the bias documented here departs from traditional discrimination models.
GENDER, JOB AUTHORITY, AND DEPRESSION
Tetyana Pudrovska and Amelia Karraker
Journal of Health and Social Behavior 2014, Vol. 55(4) 424 –441, DOI: 10.1177/0022146514555223
Using the 1957–2004 data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study, we explore the effect of job authority in 1993 (at age 54) on the change in depressive symptoms between 1993 and 2004 (age 65) among white men and women. Within-gender comparisons indicate that women with job authority (defined as control over others’ work) exhibit more depressive symptoms than women without job authority, whereas men in authority positions are overall less depressed than men without job authority. Between-gender comparisons reveal that although women have higher depression than men, women’s disadvantage in depression is significantly greater among individuals with job authority than without job authority. We argue that macro- and meso-processes of gender stratification create a workplace in which exercising job authority exposes women to interpersonal stressors that undermine health benefits of job authority. Our study highlights how the cultural meanings of masculinities and femininities attenuate or amplify health-promoting resources of socioeconomic advantage.
PLAYING SOCCER ON THE FOOTBALL FIELD: THE PERSISTENCE OF GENDER INEQUITIES FOR WOMEN FACULTY
Christine M. Cress and Jeni Hart
EQUITY & EXCELLENCE IN EDUCATION, 42(4), 473–488, 2009
Sports metaphor is employed as an epistemic tool for describing psychological, sociocultural, and organizational factors that contribute to enduring gender bias, inequalities, and discrimination faced by women faculty at colleges and universities. Quantitative and qualitative data from two comprehensive institutional campus climate studies show that women and men faculty experience their work lives differently. Based upon our analyses, we argue for restructuring the embedded normative values and processes that inform the academic playbook.
DEMOGRAPHIC INERTIA REVISITED: AN IMMODEST PROPOSAL TO ACHIEVE EQUITABLE GENDER REPRESENTATION AMONG FACULTY IN HIGHER EDUCATION
Robyn Marschke, Sandra Laursen, Joyce McCarl Nielsen and Patricia Rankin
The Journal of Higher Education, Vol. 78, No. 1 (Jan. – Feb., 2007), pp. 1-26
Progress toward equitable gender representation among faculty in higher education has been “glacial” since the early 1970s (Glazer-Raymo, 1999; Lomperis, 1990; Trower & Chait, 2002). Women, who now make up a majority of undergraduate degree earners and approximately 46% of Ph.D. earners nationwide (National Center for Education Statistics [NCES], 2003), rarely make up more than 30% of faculty at Research Extensive universities. Although the total number of tenure-track women faculty in higher education has increased steadily for the past 35 years, this increase and women’s advancement through faculty ranks are described as excruciatingly slow (Valian, 1999). (Contains 7 tables, 2 figures, and 3 endnotes.)
WOMEN, WORK, AND THE ACADEMY: STRATEGIES FOR RESPONDING TO ‘POST-CIVIL RIGHTS ERA’ GENDER DISCRIMINATION
Alison Wylie, Janet R. Jakobsen, and Gisela Fosado
©2007 The Barnard Center for Research on Women
This report is based on the Virginia C. Gildersleeve Conference at the Barnard Center for Research on Women, with keynote speakers Nancy Hopkins, Claude Steele, and Virginia Valian. The participants in this conference have all made significant contributions to our understanding of the situation women currently face in academia, highlighting the effects of a diffuse set of barriers to women’s participation: small-scale, often unintended differences in recognition, support and response that can generate large-scale differences in outcomes for women. This conference was organized so as to take stock of the extant research and interventions and to chart a course forward.
DOES GENDER MATTER?
Ben A. Barres
Nature, Vol. 442 (13 July 2006), pp.133-136
This commentary responds to claims by high-profile scientific researchers that women are inherently unsuited to careers in math and science. The author draws on recent studies to refute these claims.
