Senate ad hoc Committee for the Promotion of Gender Equity

Minutes for April 7, 2008 meeting

Noon to 1:30pm in 4127 Sennott Square 

Attending:  Patty Beeson; Sherry Miller Brown; Jean Ferketish; Lucy Fischer; Irene Frieze; Maurine Greenwald; Susan Hansen; Stephanie Hoogendoorn; Consuella Lewis; Kacey Marra; Patti Mathay; Lara Putnam; Caterine Rosano; and Elsa Strotmeyer 

Introductions:

• Introductions of those present.
• Susan Hanson, a member of our committee, is running for Senate Vice President [and was elected].
• There are presently childcare spaces for toddlers from 4 to 6 years of age at CMU’s child care center.
• Other announcements?1,2

 

An analysis of representation and compensation of women faculty.   Report from Patty Beeson [Vice Provost].

• As PACWC Chair, Patty and her staff held a 25th anniversary party for PACWC.  It was well attended and people were generally quite positive about the event.
• Posters were prepared with information about the history of PACWC.  People would like to see this material made more widely available, perhaps by putting it on the PACWC website.  It was also suggested that more efforts should be made to formally document the history of PACWC and women’s activities on campus.
• Several women faculty who had attended PACWC’s 25th anniversary celebration pointed out that  Provost Maher had incorrectly attributed the chairing of a university committee on sexual harassment to Dean Cooper when, in fact, Associate Provost Elizabeth Baranger had chaired that committee and Dean Cooper had served on it.  Several faculty noted the importance of historical accuracy.  Those at the Gender Equity meeting proposed we write a letter to the Provost expressing our concerns about this. [After a draft was sent by email to the entire distribution list, a majority decided that we should NOT send the letter as composed.]
• Patty showed statistics on hiring of women in faculty positions at Pitt.  We have shown clear improvements on this.  Although we have a smaller percentage of tenured women now than our comparison schools, we are better in terms of tenure stream hiring.  This suggests that recent hires have helped to decrease the gender bias.
• In terms of gender equity in salaries, Pitt was not doing well in 1998-1999, but we have improved somewhat now with the 2005-2006 data.  However, we still need improvement here.
• Additional analyses indicated that there is evidence that some of the gender equity is explained by the areas in which women make up a higher percentage of the faculty being lower paid.  We also have a higher proportion of women who have been relatively recently hired.  We also have a higher proportion of women in nontenure stream positions.  When all these factors are controlled, there is still some gender gap in salaries, but it is much smaller.
• The Provost’s Office continues to work on reducing the gender gap in salaries.  Patty has been meeting with individual deans to sensitize them to this issue.

 

Updates from Subcommittees:

• Women and Leadership:  Lucy Fischer. 
• Lucy has formed a committee that is working on doing interviews with women in lower level leadership positions who have not been nominated for  higher level administrative positions.  Themes that will be looked at include negotiation, and how female assertiveness is handled.  The committee is planning on sending out an anonymous survey this summer.
• There are a number of leadership programs now at Pitt including one in Public Health, and in Health Sciences.   There are also a number of academic organizations such as HERS that offer leadership institutes of special interest for women.  The committee was asked to investigate these.
• The Committee is working on developing a list of all the programs that women here at Pitt might find of interest.  They expect to recommend that scholarships be provided for such programs.
• Staff Mentoring:  Patty Mathay
• A large and active committee has been working on this all year. 
• A major activity was a noon-time Spring Assembly event co-sponsored with SAC [Staff Advisory Committee] to look at Mentoring on April 9.  [The session was well attended]. 
• The committee will be meeting to review the feedback from the Spring Assembly on “Staff Mentoring and Career Development” and make formal recommendations.
• Trailing Partner Positions.   Ellen Detlefsen.   Ellen was not available to provide a report.
• Childcare3.  Mecchia.
• Giuseppina was not able to attend the meeting, but sent the attached letter.  Members of the childcare group supplemented the letter, explaining that the committee had developed a benchmarking report with a number of recommendations.  This was unanimously endorsed by Faculty Assembly.
• The committee will be meeting in early May to determine the next steps.
• One of the continuing issues is costs.  There was hope that a donor might be found to help fund childcare.
• Another issue is the lack of space for expansion of the existing facilities in Shadyside.
• The committee has resisted making very concrete recommendations for how to best spend the limited funds now available since any such recommendations would be supported by some, but not by everyone.
• One suggestion was that the committee might review the mission statement of the existing Child Development Center to help make specific recommendations.

 

Future meeting times.  We hope to have reports from all committees early in the fall and will schedule another meeting then.  

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1. Interesting paper:  Bond et al. (2008).  Movers and shakers:  How and why women become and remain engaged in community leadership.  Psychology of Women Quarterly, 32, 48-64.

 

2. For information about the committee and related resources, see the website at:

       <http://www.pitt.edu/~frieze/senate/womenatpitt.html>  .   

3. Childcare committee report available on the website.

 

May 1, 2008 draft prepared by Irene Frieze. 

From:  mecchia+@pitt.edu

Sent:  Saturday, April 05, 2008 11:17 AM

To:    Frieze, Irene H

Subject:  Gender Equity Senate Committee meeting

 
 

Dear Irene, maybe you could read the following statement on my part at the next Gender Equity Meeting:

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The report submitted at the March Faculty Assembly meeting by the Subcommittee on Childcare was embraced warmly by the people present at the meeting.  The recommendations we made were approved unanimously.  I took the liberty to say that, for myself, I see our role in the future more on a continued advocacy front than on a "hands-on" consulting role with the administration. I feel that as faculty I don't have the power, the legal/financial expertise, nor the actual time to engage in micro-managing the issue.  Continued advocacy, in the form of a gathering of signatures and asking for a short meeting with Jim Maher in early fall seem two reasonable steps to me. More concretely, I would like to convince them that this is an issue worthy of a development campaign (find donors for expanding the present facility, because I do think that if there is a will, there is a way).

 

But not everybody agrees with my position and in any case this is not my decision to make, so I am calling for an early May last meeting of the Subcommittee to decide what we should do next.  Any advice that you could relate to us through Irene would be welcome.

 
 

In the meantime, you have probably read the article in the University Times relating our Faculty Assembly meeting, and you will read on the University Times of April 11 a short column that I wrote about the issue.

Hopefully some top administrators will be paying some attention to those articles. But continued advocacy, in my opinion, will be necessary, because unfortunately decisional power on this kind of issues is not in our hands.

 

In our May meeting we will decide first of all if the Subcommittee should go on as such in an advocacy role, or if a smaller group of people might be interested in negotiating with Ron Frisch and possibly other administrators concrete solutions. I am skeptical about the latter, for the reasons that I explained before, and in that case I would be encline to step down from that new body and let other people take the reins for that.

 
 

Do give us your input and suggestions through Irene, we will relate them to the subcommitte at large.

 

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thanks Irene