Women, Work and the Academy > Executive Summaries > Bernice R. Sandler

Summary of Research and Intervention Strategies

Bernice R. Sandler, Senior Scholar, Women's Research and Education Institute

My work over the last 35 years has focused primarily on pragmatic ways to improve the status of women as faculty, staff and students in colleges and universities. In my writings and in my consulting with universities and colleges I have placed special emphasis on identifying new issues and providing very specific strategies for institutions and individuals to adopt. Almost all of my writings have included such strategies. In recent years I have written short papers (usually given as handouts and eventually to be added to my web site) about subjects such as what questions can search committees be asked so that they ensure that the applicant is "good" on women's issues; how to intervene when faculty and administrators observe sexual harassment; how to warm up the chilly climate; how women faculty are treated differently by students than male faculty; how faculty can warm up the climate for students; and subtle ways in which men and women are treated differently.

Over the years I have seen probably several hundred reports by campus commissions on the status of women and have about 50 of them in my office. They represent hours and hours of work on many campuses, building on the knowledge of experienced and new faculty and administrators, men and women. Although there are differences in the areas they cover - some cover staff and students, others do not - they are nevertheless remarkably similar in the recommendations that they present. They make similar recommendations concerning tenure, hiring, recruiting, family-friendly policies, etc. Essentially, there is a basic body of existing knowledge about what needs to be done on campus to improve the status of women.

No one knows what the rate of acceptance and implementation of recommendations has been. On some campuses the recommendations were presented and never responded to. At other campuses few, or several or many were implemented.

However, even on campuses where recommendations were implemented and changes have been made the pattern of women's employment has remained the same as it is on virtually all campuses, and indeed as it has been for more than forty or more years: the higher the rank, the fewer the women; the higher the prestige of the field, the department or the school, the fewer the women. At virtually every university and college, women, as a group, typically earn less than their male counterparts. Even with decent policies and practices inequities in recruiting, hiring, promotion, tenure and in other areas remain. How are we to explain this? What still needs to be done?

I strongly believe that the bulk of the knowledge we need in terms of recommendations of what to do on a campus to improve the status of women is already known. There are three areas on which I am focusing: empowering women to participate in the campus political process in order to translate the many recommendation into action; providing women with individual strategies to deal with ways in which they may be treated differently; and exploring what other factors may be at work that limit women's opportunities, especially the evaluation process when women apply for positions and when they are considered for promotion and/or tenure.

1. Empowering women to translate policies and recommendations into action. Recommendations and policy changes do not happen because they are "right." It is helpful to be "right" but it is perhaps even more important to understand and become part of the political process that makes it possible for institutions to change for the better. What do women (and men) need to know about how institutions function? What can be done to increase the possibilities that recommendations are adopted? How does one "move" an "immovable" institution?

There are four essential elements of change (somewhat oversimplified):

• Increase awareness of the problem (no one turns over in bed if they are comfortable; the task here is to make the powerful people somewhat uncomfortable so that they recognize the need for change).
• Provide proposed solutions. (We already have most of these solutions on hand.)
• Press for adoption. Who is the person or persons who make the necessary decisions to adopt a new policy. What kinds of influence are they subject to? What is the decision-making process? How can we intervene in this?
• Monitor the implementation of the solution to see if it works, are there unintended consequences, what fine-tuning is needed, etc.

The question, in part, is how do we educate women about the political process so that they can have a greater impact on campus policy and programs? How do we strengthen the political participation of women on campus? (Because much campus change emanates from committees, I have written one paper on "Empowering yourself as a committee member" which includes strategies that help get recommendations from committees adopted.)

2. Providing women with individual strategies to respond to the ways in which they may be treated differently. Women are typically treated differently in many subtle and sometimes overt ways although they may not always recognize that they have been treated differently (one paper I wrote identifies about 50 ways in which women are treated differently). What does a woman do if she make suggestions at faculty meetings and someone else gets the credit for her suggestions? What can she do if her male colleagues have lunch with each other but never with her? What should she do is she raises her hand at meetings but is rarely called upon? How can she react if someone tells a sexist joke or makes a sexist remark? How should she respond if a colleague or administrator engages in sexually harassing behavior?

Several of the papers I have written provide a wide array of strategies which women can use to respond to differential treatment.

Although true institutional change consists of policy and programmatic change and implementation, individual women nevertheless need to be able to identify ways in which they are being treated differently and how to respond.

3. What other factors may limit women's opportunities? The increasing interest in how policies and practices affect women faculty as members of families is one much-needed approach. Certainly to the extent that women's careers are affected by their family role, this new focus can be of much help. Some of my work in the past has focused on family issues and how policies and practices affect family members. One of my fantasies was to take 1-3 institutions and examine every policy and practice for its impact on all family members, whether they be parents, adult children of older parents, siblings, etc. Indeed, everyone on a campus is a member of a family and family life is affected by all kinds of policies. For example, even something as innocuous as a college calendar can cause difficulties for families if spring break for the institution is different from spring break in the local school system.

There is one major area which I believe has been largely overlooked in the exploration of factors which might account for the slow progress of women on campus and elsewhere. That is the general devaluation of women in our society and the way in which devaluation affects women on campus.

There have been numerous research studies which a set of something, such as pictures of works of art or a set of articles are given to two groups to rate. Each article, for example, has either a male or female name attached to it and the gender of the author is switched for each group. What is consistent about this line of studies is that when an article has a male name attached to it, it gets a higher rating from women and men, than when the same article has a female name attached to it.

Even more telling are several studies by Rhea Steinpreiss, at the University of Wisconsin at Milwaukee. In one study she sent identical vitae to faculty members in psychology departments. Half the time the name of the vita was "Brian Miller" and half the time the name was "Karen Miler." Participants were asked if they would hire the applicant, tenure the applicant and what starting salary they would offer. Male and female faculty were very similar in how they ranked the applicant. Brian Miller was more likely to be "hired" than "Karen." From this and other research it is not unreasonable to conclude that although most men and women may hold egalitarian beliefs, those beliefs do not guarantee that they will be able to impartially evaluate others, and that women as likely to show gender bias in evaluation as are men. For example, participants who received Karen's vita in the study were four times as likely to write "cautionary" comments in the margins of their questionnaire, (such as "I would need to see evidence that she had gotten these grants and publications on her own") than those who received "Brian's" vita.

One can see the devaluation of women, in an incident reported to me by a member of a promotion and tenure committee. A man's committee experience was described as follows:

He has served on two departmental committees and on even one institution-wide committee.

Later in the day, a woman's committee experience was described this way:

She has served on two departmental committees but on only one institution-wide committee.

I strongly believe that many of the ways in which women are treated differently occur because of devaluation. Women receive less eye contact; are called by name less often; receive less praise, less criticism and less feedback; are less likely to receive mentoring and encouragement; are more likely to be asked factual questions while men are more likely to be asked open-ended "thinking" questions, etc., because they are devaluated by everyone else. Women and men, working in the same department, even at the same job, have very different experiences.

I have in recent years been focusing on how women are evaluated by their peers, supervisors, and recruiting and promotion and tenure committees. I have also served as an expert witness in tenure cases (as well as in sexual harassment cases) which have given me a comprehensive view of how the process often works to women's disadvantage, and how women are often treated differently in the evaluation process than their male colleagues.

How to make men and women aware of how the devaluation of women affects their own behavior and how they evaluate women candidates for hiring, promotion and tenure is a major task which had not been addressed by any of the campus studies that I have seen. Search committees as well as Promotion and Tenure Committees need specific information and strategies to minimize devaluation. If we are to help women succeed and survive in academe we will need to deal directly with the problem of devaluation.

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