From the President and Provost

Gender Equity:
Update to Second Annual Report

The President and Provost's Second Annual Report on Gender Equity, published in the December 16, 2003 issue of Almanac, noted discrepancies between faculty composition as reported by individual schools during the past summer and as tallied by the Office of Institutional Research and Analysis in September. These discrepancies appeared to result from personnel activity that continued well into the fall semester. That report committed the Administration to making an analysis of faculty composition at the end of January. It was hoped that a comparison between school and central University data at that time would reveal much greater consistency than at the beginning of the fall semester. The January analysis could then be used in the future as a stable platform for year-to-year and longer-term comparisons.        

Reports from the schools as of the end of January have been received and compared, on a name-by-name basis, with the January faculty census made from University records. This comparison revealed remarkably few discrepancies. Moreover, the resolution of almost all of those few discrepancies indicates that the January faculty census made from University records will provide the basis for significantly improved year-to-year comparisons. Accordingly, the January census will be used as the base for the analysis of faculty composition, and future reports on gender equity will appear in the spring semester.

The table shows a comparison between the faculty composition based on the September census as reported in the December 16, 2003 Almanac (in italics) and the corresponding faculty composition based on the January 2004 census (in bold). The latter now includes those new appointments and resignations which had not been formally recognized in September. 

The report in the December 16, 2003 Almanac concluded that significant and encouraging progress had been made since the previous year. These more recent figures do not change that conclusion—indeed, the overall percentage of women on the faculty is slightly higher than in that previous report. We are continuing to monitor searches and appointments very closely, and look forward to reporting further progress in the Third Annual Report on Gender Equity in the spring of 2005.

  Almanac, Vol. 50, No. 31, April 27, 2004