As America's and the world's pre-eminent scientific and technological university, Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) has long projected an image of geeky masculinity inhospitable to women. Fifteen years ago, a mere 15 of its more than 200 tenured science professors were women, as were only 2 of its tenured engineering professors. So, for a current female faculty member to state that "I feel supported, included, and protected from gross inequities by the network of tenured women faculty and by the now many more enlightened male administrators and colleagues who are aware of these issues" signals "stunning progress" in improving the position of women at the school, according to a recently issued Report on the Status of Women Faculty in the Schools of Science and Engineering at MIT, 2011.
With an introduction by MIT President Susan Hockfield, herself an emblem of the change described, the document updates reports on women faculty in the science and engineering schools issued in 1999 and 2002, respectively. Those earlier reports highlighted the feelings of marginalization and the instances of outright discrimination experienced by the relatively few women who had then attained senior faculty status at MIT.
The current report details such successes as increasing the percentage of women science faculty from 8% in 1995 to 19% today, and of engineering faculty from 7% in 1995 to the current 16%; "removal of the stigma of women bearing children" while on the faculty; "making the use of family leave policies standard practice for female (and male) faculty throughout MIT;" "more equitable distribution of resources and rewards," including appointment of women to leadership positions including deanships and department chairs; and "change in attitudes among some male faculty."
As that "some" indicates, however, the report found that various issues troublesome to women persist. What many women see as removal of bias, for example, appears to at least some men as special allowances for a privileged minority. And many women still feel excluded from various professional circles dominated by men.
Some also find that stereotyping endures, "especially among older male faculty." And, with the empirical acuity so characteristic of a great scientific institution, one faculty member observed that "the biological constraint of pregnancy and childbirth is gender specific" -- an inequity that even MIT's improved family policies cannot wholly erase. Furthermore, the desire to have a female viewpoint represented on most or all faculty committees can impose a serious burden of service on female faculty members, who still constitute only a relatively small percentage of MIT's professors, some women complained.
The report includes a discussion of issues that still need work as well as recommendations for further changes. But as to the progress thus far accomplished, the overall message echoes a comment reportedly made by several senior women (and, by the way, endorsed by this reporter), "Who would have thought it possible in our lifetime?"
