Climbing the Academic Ladder Doctoral Women Scientists in Academe: A Report to the Office of Science and Technology Policy (1979) / Chapter Skim
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INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
Pages 1-10
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Scientific manpower has been the subject of many analyses since World War II; scientific womanpower -- about one-tenth of the scientific doctoral labor force -- has received little attention until recently, when equal opportunity legislation required employers to perform utilization analyses of their labor force. Data on doctorate production by sex and field have been published since 1920r but detailed employment information on a national sample of all science and engineering Ph.D's has been available only since 1973.
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Concurrently, demands from employers, particularly academic institutions, for better information regarding women scientists arose in relation to their affirmative action obligations. Scope of the Study To assess whether and to what extent earlier patterns of faculty appointments have changed since the advent of affirmative action regulations, we will be examining extensive trend data on the production and employment of men and women doctorates.
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While academic institutions cannot be charged with responsibility for either the problems or solutions that women face in this connection, they should avoid compounding the problem and should share responsiblity for exploring the development of solutions within the academic framework that would help meet the conflicts. For example, a quarter of a century ago New York Medical College took the pioneering step of offering parttime psychiatric residency for women physicians with young families.
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to cover institutions of higher education, which were previously excluded, and four years later the Office of Civil Rights issued its Guidelines for Affirmative Action in Higher Education to implement Title VII. Also in 1972, Title IX of the Higher Education Amendments specifically addressed the provision for
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Since affirmative action guidelines require utilization analyses based on appropriate statistical information, there has been a natural tendency, for purposes of both general discussion and the establishment of legal evidence, to argue for or against the existence of discrimination on statistical grounds. Any discrepancy between the percentage of women or minorities qualified by training and experience to hold a given type of position and the percentage actually employed has been taken as legal evidence of discrimination, purposeful or not.
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Legal Definitions Regardless of the basis for limitations on the status of women in academe, equal opportunity laws do not distinguish intent from historical accident; they deal only with end results. If women or other "affected groups" appear in a given employee category in proportions lower than their representation in the appropriate availability pool they are assumed to be victims of discrimination in the first instance.
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Any conclusions regarding the effectiveness of affirmative action policies unfortunately will be clouded by the widely acknowledged capriciousness of enforcement efforts, the sometimes highly localized interpretations of regulations by enforcement officers, and the frequent problems which have been generated by these actions. Unresolved Issues The questions we have posed, and addressed throughout this report, deal with the opportunities afforded to individual women scientists (although they must be framed in terms of groups of individuals)
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The numbers in the tables from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients represent the sample weighted to yield an estimate of the doctoral population in the national labor force. In addition to these two major sources of statistical data, numerous individual studies and reports have been reviewed, and reference is made to these throughout the report.
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In the absence of systematic sex discrimination in academic appointments, however, the sum of such individual decisions as reflected in aggregate statistics should not show bias but reflect the sex distribution of the available scientists of comparable quality. A further limitation in examining statistical data, however disaggregated, is that they cannot tell us much about the flow of individuals through the various professional levels.
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