U. faculty is 27 percent female

Roughly 27 percent of the University’s faculty members are female, the Chronicle reported. Columbia and Yale led the percentage counts with 38 percent and 37 percent female faculty members, respectively. Harvard and Cornell shared the second-lowest rate, with 31 percent.

These numbers are reflective of larger national trends that persist despite initiatives on the part of institutions like Princeton to encourage and make accommodations for female professors who struggle for representation.

“The 27 percent number in the Chronicle has to do with their way of counting,” Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin said in an e-mail. “In addition to faculty, they are including researchers who do not have faculty appointments in their count. This is the way the IPEDS does its counting, for better or worse.”

Dobkin added that the percentages could be calculated in many ways. As of Oct. 15, women held 25 percent of tenure-track faculty positions, 28 percent of full-time faculty positions and 31 percent of full- and part-time faculty positions at the University, according to statistics provided by Dobkin. Those numbers have not changed significantly in the past year, he added.

The University has an interest in recruiting a diverse group of professors, Dobkin explained, adding, “We have in recent years run a Target of Opportunity program aimed at identifying potential faculty who will diversify the campus either in terms of gender in fields where women are underrepresented or in terms of race or in intellectual fashion. This program provides incentives to departments to work with us on such appointments while not compromising our core values of having an excellent faculty.”

Director of the Women’s Center Amada Sandoval said she was “surprised that we are not on par with our peers,” adding that she thinks the gender gap is a significant problem at the University. One of the biggest obstacles for women is the way the timeline for the tenure system is structured, she explained.

“The way the tenure system works, if you were hired in the tenure track, you would first be an assistant professor,” she said. “After six years, your position would be associate professor if you received tenure, and after a certain amount of time after that, you might be promoted to a full professor. This tenure structure is really hostile to people who anticipate having a family or people who are trying to have a family.”

The tenure system is not keeping up with social changes that have occurred in the past several years, Sandoval noted.

“I think the tenure system really hasn’t changed since most of the tenured faculty were men and most of the women stayed at home with the children,” she said. “That’s not the kind of world that we live in any more … I would say the system needs to get more flexible. It’s not just women that want to spend time with their children. It’s men, too, and they’re getting more and more able to admit that as our gender norms are softening up a bit.”

She added, though, that the University is making progress on the issue.

“In 2005 or 2006 … Princeton agreed to stop the tenure clock in some cases,” she said. “You can get a year … off if you’ve adopted a child, given birth to a child or if your wife gave birth to a child.”

Sandoval cited the arrival of President Tilghman as an important factor in this progress. “Lately, definitely since President Tilghman arrived, the administration has really been looking at the institution from every direction. It’s not a coincidence that the rule for stopping the tenure clock for an addition to the family happened recently.”

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Dobkin said the University recognizes these concerns and is actively trying to respond to them.

“We have paid careful attention to issues that are family-friendly with the goal of making it easier for women with families to be on our faculty,” he said. “Among these initiatives are automatic extensions of the tenure clock in response to a new child by birth or adoption, support for child care when at a conference … [and] support for child care in difficult situations.”

Civil and environmental engineering professor Maria Garlock, who is a mother of four and has given birth to two children during her time at Princeton, said the University has been supportive of her choice to have children, though she chose to not take maternity leaves.

“I never really stopped working. I came back at my own pace, and they were very flexible,” Garlock said. “I had to recover from everything for about a week, of course, and I didn’t teach, but most of my job is research and working with graduate students and advising students writing theses. You can’t really just stop working for a month.”

Though women are underrepresented across the board at the University, in Princeton’s science and engineering departments, the percentage of female faculty members is even lower — typically around 10 percent. In the Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE) department, which was formed in 1999, professor Birgit Rudloff is the only female faculty member out of the 14 listed on its website. Rudloff is currently on maternity leave.

“The University is very supportive of female professors,” Rudloff said. “My department is always looking for increasing the percentage of female professors. When they hired me, I know they were looking to hire a female. I mean they’re still trying to, but it’s sometimes hard to find good people.”

Rudloff noted that the Graduate Women in Science and Engineering (GWISE) group was an “important support network” and helped her meet other female professors in the sciences.

Rudloff, whose husband also teaches in ORFE, said there are particular barriers for female professors who are married to fellow academics. “It’s the two-body problem. When you’re married and both you and your husband are working in academia, you have to find one university where both of you can work,” she explained.

Dobkin also said the University has made efforts to solve this “two-body problem,” including creating task forces to examine “the status of women faculty in the natural sciences and engineering at Princeton” and for women in the social sciences and humanities. In 2003, these task forces published reports that sought to examine and address many of these concerns.

The goals and recommendations made by the natural sciences and engineering task force included making the University more “family-friendly” for professors and reducing obstacles to hiring women such as the “two-body problem” through methods such as “networking with alumni for professional opportunities for spouses.”

With 37 percent female faculty, however, Yale appears to have set more concrete goals for increasing the number of female faculty.

According to the website of Yale’s Office of the Provost, between 1984 and 1990, the number of tenured women in the arts and sciences faculty at Yale doubled. Between 1999 and 2005, that number grew again by 43 percent. Yale is currently in the middle of a seven-year initiative aiming for a 20 percent increase in female faculty overall and 83 percent in “the departments in which they are underrepresented.”

Steven Girvin, deputy provost for science and technology at Yale, said in an e-mail that Yale focuses on actively recruiting women and underrepresented minority professors.

“We have a number of mechanisms in place to help us improve the diversity of our faculty,” he said. “Every search committee has a designated diversity representative, and the committee is required to document the methods it used to actively identify women and underrepresented minority candidates.”