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Women in Academe:
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
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VI. Women's Careers in Context
Historically, academe has been an inhospitable place for women. Indeed, one of the reasons psychology can be found in so many diverse employment settings is because women who earned their psychology doctorates found the halls of academe closed to them (Russo & O'Connell, 1980). Psychology emerged at a time of great social and economic change. Women's participation in psychology reflects a myriad of interwoven social and economic factors that have shaped American culture over the past century, including the expansion of higher education, women's suffrage, the rise of professionalism, the progressive education and child welfare movements, two world wars and their social and economic aftermath, and the civil rights and women's movements (Russo, 1983, 1988). Appendix A delineates the history of women's roles as faculty of psychology.
Today, women are more active participants in the academy. Further, they have a new consciousness about the impact of stereotyping and discrimination and understand the need to join with like-minded men and women to foster gender equity in academe. The aim is not simply to help women succeed in obsolete patriarchal institutions. We have gone beyond simply trying to level the male-designed playing field. Institutional values, priorities, and practices are being challenged. This is occurring at a time when academe is undergoing scrutiny from a variety of sources, for example, as public universities explore new relationships with their communities, and traditional academic procedures, including tenure, are under scrutiny.
Yet, discussions about the definition of scholarship (e.g., Boyer, 1990; Halpern et al., 1998) may lead to important changes that will benefit women and ethnic minorities in the academy. Moving beyond the traditional definition—that only original research constitutes scholarship—to a more inclusive definition that includes the scholarship of integration, application, and pedagogy, will benefit all academicians whose work is currently marginalized by traditional standards. It is too early to evaluate the impact of these changes on women faculty in general, let alone on women psychologists. However, it continues to be important that women psychologists take leadership roles in institutionalizing academic power bases for women's issues, including campus commissions on women, women's studies programs, faculty women's associations, and administrative positions devoted to equity issues. The health of these power bases is critical to the status of all women on campus, and such bodies play an active role in evaluating proposed changes in academic policies for their impact on women.
Institutions differ in their rates and responses to pressures for change, and the diversity in institutional climate for women across the country means that strategies for changing life in one's institution must be specifically tailored to that institution. Models for how to conduct salary equity studies have been effective, but they do not provide a full picture of the inequities women experience. The report of the Committee on Women Faculty in the School of Science of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) demonstrates the effectiveness of a sophisticated equity study and reveals the importance of providing support over the course of a woman's career (see
http://web.mit.edu/fnl/women/women.html). That study found that junior women faculty felt supported but concerned about the impact of family and work conflicts on their careers. In contrast, senior women faculty felt marginalized and excluded from significant roles in their department. The women's marginalization was associated with gender differences in compensation, space, awards, resources, and responses to outside offers. This pattern repeated with successive generations of faculty, with new generations perceiving the problems as "solved" and paying a high personal and professional cost in learning otherwise. In implementing the recommendations of the report, the collaboration of the science faculty and administration at MIT provides a model for others. There is a need to identify such models and to disseminate information on a wide variety of strategies for change that can be tailored to particular settings. Too many women who raise objections to unequal treatment are met with intense ostracism. Clearly, there are some places where women thrive in academe, and many women can point to clear evidence of success for women faculty in psychology. Such success provides a foundation and source of support for both redressing the imbalance in equity found across institutions and fostering institutional and cultural change reflective of the humanistic values and social concerns that women faculty believe are important.
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