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Senate ad hoc

Committee for the Support and Advancement of Women at Pitt

January 8, 2005 Minutes

1. Introductions.

• Those attending were Patty Beeson, Sherry Miller Brown, Lisa Brush, Heidi Feldman, B. Jean Ferketish, Pat Friedman, Irene Frieze, Megan Kilpatrick, Randi Koeski, Consuella Lewis, Maureen Porter, Ellen Olshansky, Josephine Olson, Lorie Osho, Ann Ostroski, Lisa Parker, Esther Sales, Emily Schweiger, Amy Wagner. Each person briefly introduced herself.

2. Minutes of the November 22, 2004 meeting were approved and will be posted on the committee website.

3. Announcements

• See Committee website at http://www.pitt.edu/~frieze/senateplenary.html for information about our Senate ad hoc Committee. Irene Frieze suggested that we might want to post subcommittee reports on the website.
• Emily Schwieger, President of the Campus Women’s Organization (CWO), discussed some of the activities of CWO. On February 17-19, they will be presenting the Vagina Monologues, which is open to the public. About 300 people are on their mailing list and normally about 40 people attend meetings, although this varies. Activities are funded from allocations from Student Government Board.
• Pat Friedman of the Health Sciences Library announced that the National Library of Medicine will be bringing an exhibit on women in medicine to Pitt sometime in the next few years. The exact date is not yet known. For more information about the exhibit, see http://www.nlm.nih.gov . When the exhibit comes to Pitt, our committee will be involved in helping to organize a series of related events.
• Maureen Porter reported that CMU’s campus women’s organization will again be hosting their annual conference on women’s issues, called MOSAIC, on Sunday, February 20. Gloria Steinem will be the keynote speaker. Maureen is organizing a panel and asked for volunteers to join her on the panel.

4. Report from the Mentoring Committee. Chairs are Heidi Feldman and Ellen Olshansky. Other members are Sherry Brown, Consuella Lewis, Ann Ostroski and Amy Wagner.

• Heidi Feldman presented a power point presentation, prepared by Ann Ostroski, and edited by the committee. The presentation included definitions of mentoring, and some of the requirements for good mentoring. The Committee feels that there should be a stronger institutional commitment to mentoring of faculty, students, and staff. Better mentoring can be evaluated and should result in a lessened gender gap in institutional success and satisfaction. The presentation included a brief overview of some of the existing mentoring programs at Pitt. A copy of the presentation will be made available to members of the Senate women’s committee.
• The Committee was thanked for all their hard work and excellent ideas. A lively discussion followed the presentation.
• Irene Frieze asked about definitions of mentoring and asked if it was really necessary that all the of mentoring functions identified by the Committee be done by the same person.
• Randi Koeske described a mentoring program for undergraduates that she has been involved with and pointed out that in this program, a group of people was available to provide needed mentoring. Sometimes, it works better to let several people share mentoring responsibilities rather than asking one person to do everything.
• Consuella Lewis argued that anyone involved in a leadership role needs to be accountable for mentoring.
• Ellen Olshansky pointed out that the Committee is suggesting that we need to expand our ideas about how institutional success is defined. These new definitions need to be incorporated into the evaluation process.
• Irene Frieze suggested that issues involved in mentoring may be different for faculty, for students, and for staff. She described some failures in instituting mentoring programs in the Department of Psychology.
• Patty Beeson described some mentoring activities in the Economics Department for faculty. She feels that important mentoring functions can be done by advisors, especially for undergraduates, and mentioned that the Psychology Advising office does a good job of this. She also argued that often successful mentoring is one-on-one and is not a formal program.
• Heidi Feldman said that in her experience, people who are assigned as advisors can eventually become mentors, but this does not always happen. It is important that mentoring relationships be reciprocal and lateral.
• Maureen Porter pointed out that even though the Committee was arguing for lateral mentor-protégée relationships, most of the presentation was on responsibilities of mentors and benefits to protégées. Perhaps we need to think more about the benefits to the mentors?
• Ellen Olshansky argued that we do need an infrastructure to support mentoring activities. Training and other benefits to mentors such as released time were included in the Committee report.
• Maureen Porter pointed out that sometimes specific types of mentoring are needed for a short period and that mentor-protégée relationships do not have to be long term. Sometimes the ideal mentor is someone in a different field, while at other times it should be someone in the same field as the person.
• Heidi Feldman argued strongly that the individual should not have to ask for mentoring. It should be provided for everyone, and the institution should ensure that this happens.
• Jean Ferketish pointed out that matching between mentors and protégées depends on chemistry, something like a blind date. Often other people at the institution help in suggesting possible matches.
• Lisa Brush described a matching program developed by her professional organization, the Sociologists for Women in Society, where people attending meetings for the first time are matched with “old timers.” There is also a more long term, formal program where junior faculty are matched with an established person in the field to help them work on publication of their work. She further suggested that perhaps our committee can serve a mentoring function and can match mentors and protégées.
• Members of the Mentoring Committee expressed concern about this idea and pointed out that we would not have institutional support for doing this.
• Lisa Brush asked if the type of long term extensive mentoring activity proposed by the Committee could really be done effectively as a formal institutional policy.
• Irene Frieze asked if we wanted to continue the discussion past our usual ending time. Committee members decided to ask the Mentoring Committee to consider the feedback and to continue to develop their ideas.
• Consuella Lewis suggested that one thing the Committee can look into is what the current institutional expectations are about mentoring.
• Esther Sales asked that the Committee consider in more detail what types of mentoring programs are now being conducted and to do some informal evaluations of these.
• Ann Ostroski pointed out that she had been doing some research on mentoring programs at other schools and provided us with some handouts about this.
• Jean Ferketish volunteered to have students in her class help in examining current mentoring programs at other institutions, as part of a benchmarking assignment. They will prepare a report on this in consultation with the Committee. She pointed out that no matter how good the goals and design, the most difficult part of any program is the implementation.

5. A brief report was made about other sub-Committee activities.

· The Sexual Harrassment Committee [Randi Koeske, Lorie Osho, and Irene Frieze] are continuing to work on the web-based training for sexual harassment, as well as other activities.

· Lisa Parker has volunteered to work on developing a new policy for consensual relations between faculty and students. She would like others to work with her.

· Patti Beeson reported on a committee looking into developing a fund for the support of women and women’s projects. Kathryn Flannery (Women’s Studies Program), Irene Frieze and Kathie Wisner will work with her on this.

6. Plans for future meetings? After some discussion we decided that we should have a meeting of the whole committee in early March. The subcommittees will be meeting before this.

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Committee Liaisons and Advisors

• B. Jean Ferketish. Chancellor’s Office
• Patricia Beeson. Provost’s Office and PACWC
• Kit Ayars. Provost’s Office.
• Barbara Barnes. Center for Continuing Education in Health Sciences.
• Paula Davis. Health Sciences
• Kathryn Flannery. Women’s Studies Program
• Ann Ostroski. SAC
• Emily Schweiger. Campus Women’s Organization.
• Jen Stephan. Pitt News columnist.

Submitted by Josephine Olson [with the assistance of Irene Frieze]