Nannerl O. Keohane: The Womens Initiative

Women at Duke today

So what is Duke like for the women students of today? There are, of course, plenty of good things we can say about women at Duke in the present. Yet overall, too few elements of the Woman's College experience are still part of the Duke experience.

One element of Duke today that truly does recall the special spirit of the Woman's College is the Women's Center on West Campus, created by several indomitable students, alumnae and faculty members in 1989. Another is the Women's Studies program, launched six years earlier. The Women's Center, directed by Donna Lisker, helps restore, preserve, and connect to what was best about the Woman's College'"for the few hundred who find and work with it every year. And Women's Studies, ably led by Robyn Wiegman, is one of the best such programs in the country, continually validating the multifaceted lives and contributions of women across history and around the world.

One thing that has changed for the better is the distribution of women across various disciplines. Twenty-three women earned their B.S. in engineering in the 28 years between 1946 and 1974; at this very moment we have ten times that number of female undergraduates in the engineering pipeline.

Today's engineering school dean is named Kristina Johnson, and the chair of Electrical Engineering is named April Brown. Both these women are brilliant leaders, and there are many others across campus, including Brigid Hogan, the new chair of Cell Biology, the first woman ever to chair a basic sciences department in the Medical Center. During the time of the Woman's College dissolution, there was a fear that no powerful female role models would be available; in fact, there has been visible progress in hiring smart, high-achieving women as deans, faculty members, and administrators'"though we still have some distance to go to achieve anything like parity.

As far as leadership opportunities for students are concerned, they are fewer than when men and women each had their own organizations and clubs. There have been quite a few Duke student women in big ticket positions'"undergraduate and graduate student government president, Union president, editor of the Chronicle, young trustee. Still, those high-profile positions continue to be filled disproportionately by males.

There are also women who do lots of crucial work behind the scenes; they're the ones that make things happen, though they're not necessarily the ones whose name is on the marquee. This isn't by any means an unusual thing in our own society or any other -- but it bears pondering. In a few campus organizations, including sororities, women get significant leadership experience, and there are many women in leadership positions in less visible organizations across the campus. I'd say the record on this is mixed, but guardedly positive.

All of this is fairly impressionistic. However, we are in the midst of an exciting initiative that is giving us a much better, clearer and more accurate picture of what life is like for women at Duke today, women across the whole university. The best way to tell you about Duke women of the present generation, and the challenges and successes on campus, is to describe the ongoing work of that initiative

The Women's Initiative

When I brought together a group of Duke faculty and administrators for the first time last May to begin the work of our newly appointed Women's Steering Committee, I was not prepared for the overwhelming response. There was an eagerness to be part of the work that reinforced my own desire to take up the topic of gender more systematically; I found an atmosphere receptive to discussing even the toughest issues and a willingness to examine the core values of our University. Literally hundreds of women -- and a number of enlightened men -- across the university came forward to offer their enthusiastic help and support. University leaders showed a readiness to turn knowledge into action, jump-starting the collaboration and data-gathering efforts of the Steering Committee's various constituencies.

It has been six years since there was an active group at the administrative level focused on the status of women at Duke. In the interim, we significantly improved our capacity for data collection, analysis and information-sharing with regard to gender. But there has been little sustained attention to issues of gender in those years.

Last winter, I had dozens of long conversations with Duke women, usually one-on-one, mostly over breakfast or lunch. I asked their impressions of the status of women at Duke, and asked their help in raising the profile of this topic. These fascinating and profoundly rewarding conversations taught me much about the lives of women at Duke. They uncovered a deep reservoir of interest and concern about women's issues and about the "absence of conversation" about these issues on campus. There was also a great deal of positive feeling about our ability to make changes, and about the timeliness of this topic.

So last May I created the Women's Steering Committee, to provide guidance for the initiative. The committee, which I chair, includes 16 people, representing all the constituencies on campus. Members have not only a commitment to the cause, but also the ability to make a difference; they are in positions of top responsibility and can make change happen. Our goal is to gather information, asking a carefully considered set of manageable questions, share information with constituencies, make policy proposals and policy decisions, and help with implementation of those changes. Our steering committee is responsible for shepherding, directing and keeping track of multiple efforts across the university, both in groups that we have as a committee created, and in others that spring up because people are eager to make their voice heard.

The work of the committee includes activities relevant to undergraduate students, graduate and professional students, faculty, house staff, post-docs, employees (both monthly and bi-weekly), trustees and alumnae. We try to think broadly about where we want to go as an institution, and how we as a steering committee can ensure that we get there. An executive group represents those constituencies, provides ongoing coordination, and suggests appropriate agenda items for our larger group. Psychology Professor Susan Roth, who by good fortune is spending a year in the provost's office as a special assistant to decipher the mysteries of university administration, chairs that executive committee, and her leadership has been indispensable in making all this happen.

We are alert to important differences among women within constituent groups. For example, separate studies are being done on faculty in Arts and Sciences and the Medical Center, given the particular challenges and opportunities women face in these venues. Sorority status, racial and ethnic background, sexual orientation and athletic participation are important markers of diversity in the studies with students. Staff people of color are a unique and particularly important group at Duke, and are receiving special attention in our studies.

Work underway

In our initiative, much has already been accomplished, or at least well-launched. We already have a complete set of quantitative data on the effects of gender in Duke Ph. D. programs, including information on composition, completion rates, time to attainment of Ph.D. and job placement. In the majority of disciplines at Duke, women are well represented, with an overall rate of 44%. Percentages of enrolled women range from lows of 26% and 30% in Engineering and the Physical Sciences to highs of 50% in the Biological Sciences, Humanities and Social Sciences. However, in some sub-fields within Physical Sciences and Engineering the proportion of women enrolled in Ph.D. programs appears to be decreasing.

Fortunately, there are no overall gender differences in completion rates, time to attainment of degree, or job placement. We are currently expanding our studies to include Duke's eight professional schools, and to gather further information on the experience of our graduate and professional students as well as their career choices.

The Deans of all our schools are compiling both hard and impressionistic data on women faculty recruiting, departures, promotion, leadership, salary, climate and lifestyle. For our regular rank faculty across the University, the Office of the Provost, in collaboration with the Women's Steering Committee, has undertaken a broad quantitative study that is nearing completion.

Within Arts and Sciences, in the past decade the percentage of women at the rank of Full Professor has doubled in the natural sciences, and more than doubled in the social sciences. In the humanities, there have also been substantial increases at the upper ranks, contributing to a total of 43% of the regular rank faculty in the humanities being women. The natural sciences continue to suffer from a small number of regular rank women faculty, totaling only 17%. Our most recent salary equity studies show no evidence of gender discrimination, although women faculty do suffer a clear disadvantage owing to the relatively small number of women holding named chairs.

One problem that has come to light, confirming the expectations of many observers, is that women take longer to move through the ranks '" from Assistant to Associate, and Associate to Full Professor. Interestingly, natural science is the only area where there is no indication of a "disadvantage" for women in time through the ranks. But in general, we have a problem here: we can all speculate about the reasons for it, but we want better, more precise and comprehensive knowledge before we devise strategies to solve it.

Comparing ourselves to our peers, by far our most disturbing '" and unexpected '" challenge is the relatively low percentage of Assistant Professors who are women. Including all schools except Nursing, there have been few or no gains at Duke in the number of assistant professors over a ten-year period from 1991 to 2001. None of us knew this before we started doing our research, and we need to take aggressive steps to improve this situation.

Of the administrative and support staff and service employees at Duke, 12,581 of 17,917 are female'"about 70%. Most of these employees are in our health system -- a very big and important part of the university. Staff women are a large, diverse population. Our Steering Committee staff work group is creating a profile of the current workforce at Duke, and has convened five separate focus groups.

Our vice president for institutional equity, Sally Dickson, has been having conversations with groups of women of color, mostly bi-weekly staff, from departments throughout the university and health system. These conversations have focused on the participants' experiences and their suggestions for policies and practices that they believe would improve the climate for women at Duke. Human Resources is preparing options for adding maternity benefits for staff '" faculty already enjoy them '" and for improving our childcare benefits.

In these discussions, and in my conversations last spring, staff women spoke about patterns of patronizing and demeaning treatment by their bosses, including professors, with little recognition of their professional skills or contributions to the enterprise. While staff issues will undoubtedly be complex, we are firmly committed to finding ways to address this fundamental and pervasive issue of disrespect.

And what about alumnae? Three of our administrative committee members will be conducting focus groups with alumnae of different age cohorts in Chicago, Los Angeles, New York, the Triangle, San Francisco, Atlanta, and Washington, DC. If you are called upon to participate, we hope you will say yes... continued

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