Good Morning Madame Chair, members of the committee.

I want to thank Senator Speier for inviting my testimony on this important topic.

I am here today to try to represent carefully and with reflection the circumstances that the University of California finds itself in with regard to the hiring of women faculty.

Some of those who have testified today are my friends, and all are my colleagues.

It is not my intention to offer an apologia for UC, but I would like to call attention to the substantial progress achieved in a variety of venues at UC in the past ten years.

For the record, I have spent my entire career working for the advancement of women in academia, and in the sciences in particular, and I am on record in a number of forums regarding the need to identify and promote women leaders in academia. Although much remains to be done, those at the forefront today should also value the hard work of those before them by acknowledging that some things have indeed changed.

Also for the record, although I believe that my qualifications as Chancellor are essentially as prestigious as those of my male colleagues, all of whom are extraordinary individuals with great talent, I still believe that I would not be here today if it were not for 1) the policies of affirmative action which provided me with opportunities for personal achievement that were not available to women in earlier generations and 2) the goodwill and actions of individuals and institutions that have supported my career.

I have a good career, I love what I do, and I am very proud of our institution. But still, in another role, I would have my own tale of frustrations; perhaps not so different from some you will have heard in the course of this hearing.

Nonetheless, I am here today to lay out the good news, bad news, current actions and proposed solutions as the University faces a decade of growth and an ever-accelerating need for new faculty.

As in the political and corporate spheres, women in academia have never had, and continue to lack, proportionate representation. Despite the fact that UC has outpaced most of the higher education institutions in its peer group in the hiring of women faculty, the administration recognizes that much more needs to be done to promote equity and is actively working on solutions to address this serious issue.

SOME GOOD NEWS: UC'S TRACK RECORD:

UC has registered a steady and substantial increase in the number of women faculty hired over the past few decades and has consistently matched or outpaced other major universities in female faculty hiring.

According to recent data, the University of California has hired a greater percentage of women faculty (34.5%), than the average of its eight comparison institutions (31.5%) (Figure 1).

The overall percentage of female faculty at University of California (23.5%) is nearly double that of such esteemed institutions as Harvard University (12.9%) and substantially better than MIT (14.5%) and Stanford University (17%) (Figure 2).

Hiring of female faculty has progressed from the situation in 1977 when there was approximately one woman faculty member to every nine men. This was the situation when I personally was up for tenure. Now the ratio is one woman to every three men. This has changed higher education in many ways and is also reflected in the data that today in the University of California 22% of department chairs are female. That on the surface sounds like progress. So why then is there a problem?

THE BAD NEWS:

The problem is that in the several years post - Prop. 209, we have seen an overall decrease in the number of newly hired women faculty at several UC campuses (Figure 3). Three campuses -- Santa Cruz, Santa Barbara, and San Diego -- showed no or very little change. There are as one might expect given the different constellation of programs at our campuses, even those whose hiring pattern was not affected, differences among them with respect to the percentage of newly hired women.

For example, Santa Barbara and Santa Cruz each hired approximately 38% female faculty while UC San Diego hired 33% in the non-tenured ranks and 25% in all appointments (Figures 4-6).

In addition, throughout the university, the post-Prop. 209 effects were seen disproportionately across fields.

For example, while the humanities/arts fields actually increased the hiring of assistant professor women faculty from 50% to 54% in the post-Prop. 209 era, the social sciences fields dropped from 45% to 34%. Life sciences and health sciences dropped from 37% to 28-29% and physical sciences dropped from 26% to 10%. Computer sciences/engineering while already at the lowest percentage (11%) actually rose to 13% (Figure 7).

What all this means is that we have a potential post-Prop. 209 hiring issue but it is neither simple nor clear in all fields or on all campuses.

In short, although we may have our individual views of why this has happened, the fact is that the University doesn't know why it has happened. In my view one should be cautious about attributing any single causal factor until we understand the whole picture more clearly.

The good news is that we noticed this drop in the hiring of women faculty, and that every campus whether directly affected or not, has either done or has begun an analysis of this issue.

ASSESSING THE POOL PROBLEM:

As has been discussed one of the ways to assess an institution's progress toward equity in female faculty hiring is to compare the hiring rates to "pool" availability. For federal "underutilization" studies the pool is often designated as the availability of recent Ph.D. candidates in a field. There are some problems with this as a reasonable standard for the university. Probably, the most prominent concern relates to job qualifications. It is not sufficient to simply HAVE a Ph.D. In most cases, in addition to some teaching experience, publication in generally recognized as excellent journals, a well-advanced book project, a juried performance or show or independent research funding would be expected. Furthermore, candidates would be expected to have excellent references from established scholars and teachers in the field. In some fields, postdoctoral (that is, post- Ph.D.) training and publications would also be necessary.

In addition, the university's hiring fields may be narrower than the overall national Ph.D. pools. A good example of this might be psychology. In the general field of psychology 65% of the graduates nationally are women, however, about 60% of these doctorates are awarded in clinical and counseling fields where women comprise 70% of the graduates. UC does not have large programs in these areas and a perusal of our hiring needs from recent advertisements shows that we are hiring in cognitive psychology, developmental psychology and neuroscience consistent with our research and teaching programs. Thus, our hiring in the social science (psychology) field should be compared to the availability of women in the non-clinical and non-counseling areas.

If the university were to propose a plan for a real assessment of progress with female hiring we would need to define the more realistic pool by field.

Perhaps some insight could be provided by the following comparisons. We should look not only at the national Ph.D. pool but since we tend to hire our own faculty from graduate programs of high quality like our own we can make an initial comparison. For example, in some fields UC does better than one might expect (Figures 8 & 9).

• IN THE ARTS POST-PROP. 209 WE HAVE HIRED 65.5% FEMALE FACULTY. THE NATIONAL 1995-97 doctoral degree recipient pool was 46.3% and our own graduates of arts programs were 47.1% females. Thus in this case we are hiring at a rate higher than would be suggested by the national availability pool.
  
• In letters and languages, UC hired 46.9% female faculty, the national pool was 49.3% and we graduated 48.5% females in these fields. These are both fields in which postdoctoral work is less frequent and much less likely to be expected prior to hire and our pool while still somewhat narrower is clearly closer to the national Ph.D. pool availability.

In other fields the picture is much less clear and we may have an endemic problem that needs new approaches. These fields tend to be in the sciences and it is much harder to evaluate how far we are from equity in the actual pool. Let me illustrate.

• In engineering and computer sciences UC hired 13.5% females. For reasons that have to do with the hot commercial market this is also a field where postdoctoral study is less frequent than in many scientific fields. The national Ph.D. pool was 12.7% female and UC itself produces 12.9% female graduates. The national postdoctoral pool is just 12%. In this case, it would appear that UC hires at an equitable rate. The problem here begins earlier and will require us to focus on attracting more women into this field. I know that a number of you on the committee understand this problem. It begins in K-12 and is at least a partial consequence of the science and math programs that need considerable improvement.

Potentially more difficult to evaluate are the other fields of science in which the post-Prop. 209 drop in hiring was most marked. Let me illustrate with life sciences, physical sciences, and mathematics.

Let me reiterate that these are fields in which postdoctoral training, first-class journal publications and some strong indication of independent funding is expected. Thus it is harder to look at the national Ph.D. pool as the appropriate pool for direct comparison. There are no databases that I know of that accurately compare publications or funding. There are however some data on the 1997 postdoctoral appointee pool. This pool is comprised of officially appointed fellows (e.g., NSF, NIH, NASA, etc.), thus it does not include all possible postdoctoral appointments. Be that as it may, it is still illustrative.

• In the life sciences, UC hired post-Prop. 209 29% females; the national Ph.D. pool is 39.3% female and UC produces 42.7% female Ph.D. graduates in these fields. In this case we also have data on our comparison eight institutions that indicate they also produce approximately the same percentage of female Ph.D. graduates. Now we also have the national postdoctoral pool. As expected, it is smaller than the Ph.D. pool overall and its percentage of females is slightly lower than the percentage in the Ph.D. pool alone. Even so it is 7% points higher than our hiring rate of female faculty. Could the other job requirements affect the percentage of women in the real pool? Perhaps, but as a percentage almost as many women were in the postdoc pool. I don’t know of any quantitative data that women are less represented with regard to publications or funding.
• In the physical sciences, the picture is even muddier. UC hired 13.2% female faculty while the national doctoral pool was 22.5% female, and UC itself produces 22.6% female Ph.D. graduates. A look at our comparison eight institutions shows UC in the very favorable light of producing nearly 2 times the percentage of female Ph.D. graduates that those institutions produce, a dismal 10.2%. As with the life sciences the percent of females in the postdoctoral pool was less than in the Ph.D. only pool but still substantially higher than UC's hiring rate. So, what’s the reasonable pool here? Since we hire most of our new assistant professors from institutions of comparable quality, it is probably somewhere between the 10.2% female Ph.D. graduates produced at other peer institutions and a little lower than the postdoctoral pool. A hopeful sign here is that UC should put more focus on hiring our own graduates since we seem to have a relatively rich pool. This may be difficult, since there are faculty mores and conventional wisdom that graduates should go to institutions outside of the ones from which they graduate to seek their careers. However, in a nine, soon to be ten-campus system much more effort can be put on campus-to-campus graduate and postdoctoral recruiting, a point I will come to later.

I must be honest and tell you that I have no rational explanation for the data on UC's mathematics hires.

• In mathematics, UC hired 5.4% female faculty, the national Ph.D. pool is 22.1%, UC graduates 18.4% female Ph.D., our comparable institutions graduate 19.6% women Ph.D.s and even the postdoctoral pool (which in mathematics is highly competitive and is an indication of potential for future funding) has 13.2% females in it. Issues such as the attractiveness of non-academic careers to women may be a factor here as many industries have a current need for first-rate mathematicians such as our own graduates, but I know of no adequate data to address this right now.

I hope what I have convinced you of with all of these details is that while in some areas we have a record to be proud of and are national leaders in our current hiring practices in some areas we have a problem which is going to require both campus and field specific solutions. I know that some of our proposals will seem "same-old"-"same-old" but I will remind us that we have made progress and I believe that with renewed vigilance we can define progressive goals and meet them lawfully.

I would like to make the point here that UC’s faculty hiring processes are systematic and involve the participation of many people. Though there are some local differences in process at each of the campuses, this flowchart of the ladder-rank faculty recruitment process at Santa Cruz illustrates my point (Figure 10).

At every stage of the process -- from the Dean’s approval to initiate a search, through the solicitation of a candidate pool and the search committee’s screening of this pool, through the departmental interview process, to the identification of a final candidate to whom employment will be offered – there are standards that apply and reviews to ensure that the requirements of each step are met. Perhaps it is the close adherence to this process that has helped Santa Cruz attain the measure of success in diverse faculty hires that we have.

Although the original hearing invitational letter focused on the hiring practices, you also asked about the overall gender balance on the faculty. I'll talk a little about the distribution within ranks. There are only two ways to become a full Professor at the University of California. One is to be promoted through the ranks and the other is to be hired in that rank. For most, it takes 15-18 years to become full Professor, approximately seven years at Assistant Professor and six to eight years as Associate Professor before promotion to full Professor. Thus, only those who were in the pool of Assistant Professors in 1985 could be expected to have reached the rank of full Professor through the promotion process by now.

In 1985, the number of female Assistant Professors at all steps was 305. The number of female full Professors in 1999, fourteen years later, is 811. If one subtracts the 315 female full Professors that existed in 1985, some of whom may have retired, one still has a cadre of 500 new full Professors, as a conservative estimate. Does that mean that most of the female Assistant Professor were promoted or does it mean that many more were hired from outside? Or is it a combination of both?

I cannot definitively answer that question today because I do not have the year-by-year longitudinal data necessary to do so but I can tell you that between 1993-1998 of all female Assistant Professors considered for tenure 85% received tenure, as did 84% of the males considered (Figure 11).

So, while the percentage of female faculty at the full Professor level is only 17% it may not be too far from what could be predicted from the pool of Assistant Professors here. Is that equitable? Only if the pool of Assistant Professors reflected the reasonable pool and as I've discussed that may not have always been true.

Another issue, addressed by many studies of the academic success of women faculty, is the institutional climate. You have heard here numerous anecdotal examples why it is that even though the "numbers" show progress in some fields especially, there persists a deep-seated concern by women faculty that they are treated poorly. Some of these issues, such as equitable access to space, equipment, library resources, and research money need to be systematically addressed and corrected where discrepancies are found. Correcting such discrepancies could be expected to have a beneficial institutional impact, as it apparently had at MIT. There should be no fear of retaliation just for asking honest questions, and the concerns and needs of all faculty deserve equal attention by all campuses and all departments. Recent anecdotal reports have suggested that in some departments, individuals have voiced the view that no attention needs to be paid to diversity and that they want to return to less vigilant standards, that is, the so-called “old boys” network.

THE REAL POINT:

Sometimes this issue of what we have done to improve hiring, retention, or career satisfaction is cast in "redress language", from a perspective of righting the wrongs of the past. I don't want to dispute that there has indeed been a need to correct mistakes, but as a Chancellor now facing the formidable challenge of building a University campus and continuing UC's tradition for excellence, it is not just a matter of repairing the errors of the past, but of the survival of the University. The fact is that the only pools of potential faculty that are actually increasing are qualified women, qualified minorities, and international scholars. I believe that the University of California will be best served by an all-out effort to hire the most qualified candidates from our national pools, which include these increasing numbers of women. If we are to sustain the "best public research university in the world” on which our state and national brain trust and economy depend we have to hire not only at parity, in some fields we will need to exceed those goals.

WHAT UC IS DOING TO COMBAT THE PROBLEM TODAY:

Although faculty hiring is decentralized within UC and originates in individual academic departments, the University is taking steps to continue to improve the ratio of women faculty at the campus level. The UC Office of the President has and will continue to strategize and work with the Academic Senate and UC Affirmative Action Administrators to develop and extend best practices in hiring.

• In 1999, the Office of the President issued Affirmative Action Guidelines for Recruitment and Retention of Faculty in order to provide campus faculty and administrators with clear information about practices that are required and practices that are permissible to promote diversity and equal opportunity in academic personnel practices.
• President Atkinson has initiated discussions with each campus Chancellor to review faculty recruitment procedures.

I’d like to cite also a few selected examples from among the campuses, and let me begin with my own.

• UCSC’s use of legal strategies and best practices in achieving faculty diversity include the following:
  • We make academic administration accountable at all levels for affirmative action efforts by including diversity efforts in performance review of deans, and make diversity a mandatory element of short and long term planning.
  • We provide financial incentives in the form of supplemental funding for searches to enhance good faith efforts to increase the diversity of faculty applicant pools.
  • We conduct focus groups, campus climate surveys and exit interviews.
  • We have conducted a faculty salary equity study and are developing a process for salary adjustments and future monitoring to avoid salary inequities.
  • We track hiring results by gender and race and make the information readily available to faculty involved in hiring and to the campus community.
  • The Chancellor’s Statement on Diversity is a link on the campus’ home web page.
  • We examine hiring practices to optimize diversity by focusing hiring at the Assistant Professor level where the pool is more diverse; utilizing opportunities for cluster hires; including a statement regarding our interest in faculty who have experience with or interest in working with a diverse student body; encouraging faculty inside and outside the department to contact colleagues at other institutions for the names of potential candidates; providing resources for competitive offers in terms of salary, attractive mortgages, and research support.
  • We have established a Dual Career Service to assist faculty spouses and partners in their search for employment both on and off campus.
  • We conduct fair hiring/ affirmative action training for deans, chairs, and search committees, including identifying and addressing best practices in search and recruitment activities.
  • Finally, at UCSC, we have established the California Curriculum Initiative (CCI) aimed at defining a curriculum that deals with present-day societal issues related to gender, ethnicity and culture. We believe that, through the implementation of this initiative, we will position the campus to respond creatively to the challenges presented by an increasingly diverse student body and increasingly diverse state.

    The Initiative calls for eight ladder-rank faculty FTE hired in key academic areas over a three-year period, in thematic areas that our faculty identified as particularly valuable for the campus to develop as significant undergraduate and graduate areas of study over the next decades. These themes, broadly described, are 1) Indigeneity, Diaspora, and Comparative Culture Studies, and 2) Studies in Difference, Justice, and Citizenship.

    At UCSC we believe that we should not only attract highly qualified women in fields already existent at our campus, but also we should create new, curricularly relevant positions that we hope will have great appeal to women scholars.

    President Atkinson shared the CCI report with the Chancellors in a recent letter, citing it as “an excellent example of a campus effort to ensure that the diversity of our state is reflected strongly in the campus’s teaching, curriculum, and research.

• UCSD has been addressing the issues in a number of ways.

  In 1998, a list of “best practices” was developed, culled from successful practices at other institutions, for diversifying applicant pools for academic positions. This information is widely distributed and is posted on the web. The Director of Academic Affirmative Action meets with Deans, Department Chairs and Search Committee Chairs prior to the beginning of the recruitment process each year to tailor the best practices to their discipline and particular searches.

  In the 2000/01 recruiting year, a new step has been added to the “best practices.” Prior to the development of a short list of candidates for ladder rank positions, a Recruitment Assessment Review is done by General Campus Deans to ensure that the applicant pool for each search is representative of the pool of recent doctoral awards in the discipline. .

  A campus-wide Task Force has been established to conduct a gender equity study related to the recruitment, compensation and retention of female academic senate faculty. One goal is to develop an annual process for reviewing gender equity in UCSD’s hiring and advancement practices.

  The Divisions of Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities are currently undertaking a major new campus-wide research, teaching and service initiative - California Cultures in Comparative Perspective. This initiative is also aimed at defining a curriculum that deals with present-day societal issues related to gender, ethnicity and culture. It will focus on broad implications of the expansion of the state’s native minority and immigrant populations. The initiative calls for thirteen ladder rank faculty FTE over the next three-year period.

• UCLA's Gender Equity Committee released a report and series of recommendations on the status of female faculty hiring and salaries in August of 2000. The report recommends among other things increasing openness regarding salary data, clarification of maternity leave policy, increased childcare and educational support for faculty, and more equal distributions of academic responsibilities (such as faculty committee memberships) among women and minorities. All of the recommendations are being followed up and acted upon by UCLA's administration.
• UC Davis has actively worked through the Chancellor and Provost's Task Force on Faculty Recruitment to address the equity issues for female faculty. For instance, UCD has gone so far as to restrict faculty hiring last year so that the problem could be addressed.

  At UCD, the Chancellor appointed a campus-wide Task Force to address faculty recruitment with a special focus on improving success in attracting highly qualified women and underrepresented minorities.

  The Task Force looked at five primary issues: 1) best recruitment practices at UCD that are in place or planned for; 2) best recruitment practices at other institutions; 3) special issues in recruiting minorities and women; 4) hiring data analysis and interpretation; and 5) campus climate.

  The campus redoubled efforts to bring diversity issues to the forefront for Deans, department chairs and recruitment committee members. Doing so brought immediate results (Figure 12). For ladder rank faculty, the hiring of women increased from 17.2% in 1999 to 28.4% in 2000. The hiring of people of color also increased, from 19% in 1999 to 27% in 2000.

  Among the recommendations for change, many of which are being implemented, are hiring predominantly at the junior level where pools of candidates are more diverse, holding everyone accountable at all levels for their diversity efforts, and rewarding efforts made toward hiring for excellence and diversity.

• UCSF Chancellor's Committee on Diversity recommends specific actions to increase campus diversity such as the Chancellors Award for the Advancement of Women. UCSF's efforts are confirmed by impressive statistics, including the fact that the number of female faculty in the School of Dentistry is 44% higher than the national average.

NEW ACTIONS:

Let me present some new actions that should, and can, be undertaken both Universitywide and at the campus level.

• President Atkinson will ask each campus to establish a new millennium goal for the number of ladder-rank women faculty for defining the pool and achieving equity.
• Each campus will conduct an analysis of the future demand for faculty by discipline and sub-discipline and estimate the pool of candidates nationally who are expected to be available for faculty positions by sex and ethnicity.
• UCOP will identify crucial points in the academic career development process from graduate school admission through tenure that affect the composition of the faculty and then specify lawful programs, best practices, and policies that have demonstrated the capacity to enhance progress in achieving faculty diversity. This might be particularly important in the physical sciences.
• The President should ask each Chancellor to submit a campus plan for achieving the campus goals either directly, through hiring, or, in those disciplines where women are few, by increasing the number of women in the Ph.D. pipeline at the graduate and undergraduate levels, or by undertaking initiatives such as the CCI.
• Resources should be allocated to help support campus plans.
• The Chancellors should be held accountable by the President for accomplishing their campus' plans and reporting the results.
• Each Chancellor, Provost, and Dean will demonstrate her/his commitment to faculty diversity by embracing the campus goal and engaging the entire campus community in efforts to develop strategies for reaching the goal.
• UCOP will also establish a systemwide database of dissertation-stage UC graduate students so that we can more effectively “mine” our own pool of potential faculty, in addition to producing faculty for our peer institutions. A quick review of the 411 active ladder-rank faculty at Santa Cruz, for example, shows that 128 or 31% received their terminal degree from a UC campus. We should use our intercampus pool as effectively as possible.

CONCLUSION:

In conclusion, while there has been significant progress in the hiring and retention of women faculty at UC, there has been a disturbing decrease in the hiring of women post-Prop. 209, which we are carefully examining. This decrease varied by campus and varied substantially by field. Our ability to recruit the best women candidates is critical to our success as a university. We take this seriously and both systemwide and campus efforts to move forward to improve our success are ongoing.

In this period of significant growth, the University has an exceptional opportunity to make changes in our practices that will make a difference. And I personally do not underestimate the value of leadership at the top in making this happen. You have my personal pledge that these issues are important to me and that I will continue to address them.

Thank you for this opportunity to share this perspective with you today.

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