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Breaking glass ceiling: MSU approaching national average of 33 percent women faculty

Since becoming dean of engineering at Montana State University, Bob Marley has hired two
women for high-profile jobs as assistant to the dean and associate dean.

By GAIL SCHONTZLER Chronicle Staff Writer

A lot of people have praised his choices, Marley said, although he recalls being startled when
an older man advised him, "’You don’t want to get a reputation for hiring all women.’"

Marley shakes his head over the comment.

"I hired the best people I could, and if it sends a message to some people, great," he said of
dean’s assistant Heidi Sherick and associate dean Anne Camper. "These two ladies are setting
the place on fire. I get comments regularly about the energy (the two) have brought to their
jobs. … They make me look good."

Despite a quarter-century of court-ordered affirmative action hiring of women at MSU, men still
outnumber women among tenured or tenure-track faculty by 3 to 1.

Things are especially lopsided in engineering, where there are only three women on a faculty
of 56, and in "hard" sciences like physics (where two of 18 faculty members are women) and
chemistry (four of 21).

When representatives from all disciplines gather at the Faculty Council, it still looks a lot like a
meeting of "the white men’s club."

Among MSU vice presidents, deans and other top administrators, women are still outnumbered
2 to 1. The most powerful group on campus, the President’s Executive Council, was made up
exclusively of white males until President Geoff Gamble added MSU’s spokeswoman Cathy
Conover and attorney Leslie Taylor.

Women have come a long way at MSU since 1976, when five female faculty members won a
class-action lawsuit finding the university discriminated against women in pay, promotions and
tenure, said Corky Bush, human resources and affirmative action director.

On the other hand, there’s still a ways to go.

"These are always ‘The glass is half-empty, the glass is half-full’ phenomena," Bush said.

The good news, she said, is that the percentage of women faculty has increased substantially,
from 23 percent a decade ago to 29 percent today (counting all tenurable faculty, department
heads, Extension agents, Agricultural Experiment Station and library faculty). So MSU is
nearing the national average of 33 percent women faculty, Bush said.

Yet MSU’s employee statistics suggest there is still a glass ceiling — an invisible barrier that
seems to keep women from moving up the academic ladder — "or the remnants of a glass
ceiling," Bush said.

Women make up more than half the ranks of adjunct faculty — who are considered part-time or
temporary — but trail men in the better jobs — tenurable faculty, research faculty and
administration. Among graduate research assistants — the scientists of tomorrow — men
outnumber women almost 2 to 1.

Gamble has put new energy into breaking such barriers.

"I want MSU really to be progressive in advancing gender issues and racial diversity," Gamble
said in an interview. "As an educational enterprise, we owe it to our students and ourselves to
provide as rich and diverse an environment and education as possible."

In addition to adding women to his "cabinet" and bringing in speakers to talk about how
women can advance their careers, Gamble has created a part-time position to focus on
increasing diversity, especially in research, science and engineering.

Adele Pittendrigh, associate dean at the College of Letters and Sciences, said Gamble
initiated a meeting with the campus group Women in Science and Engineering, which
proposed the idea.

"It’s very exciting to have a president interested in diversity," Pittendrigh said. "I think they’ve all
been interested, but President Gamble — it’s near his heart. … There has never been anyone in
central administration whose job is to promote diversity."

Hired for the new job was Susan Capalbo, 48, professor of agricultural economics and
economics, who will start in August.

"The marching orders I have are to try to increase the prominence of women in general in
research and teaching at MSU and to focus on the sciences, where they’re really
under-represented," Capalbo said.

MSU’s effort reflects a push to increase diversity nationwide, she said. The National Science
Foundation last year awarded more than $25 million to eight universities to develop plans to
bring women faculty up to senior and leadership ranks in science and engineering, where they
represent less than 20 percent of U.S. faculty.

One of Capalbo’s tasks will be to seek similar grants. In addition, she said, she’ll be trying to get
women involved in mainstream research and to link them up with mentors, who can help them
negotiate the difficulties of moving up the academic ranks. Increasing the number of senior
professors would also increase the pool of women eligible to move up to administration.

One difficulty in hiring women science and engineering professors at MSU is that Bozeman is
competing with universities and industries that can offer better pay.

Another difficulty is that strong women candidates often are married to well-educated
professionals, and they won’t come to Bozeman unless their husbands can also find good jobs.
So MSU may look into enhancing what it offers spouses, Capalbo said.

One obstacle many women face is that the tenure clock conflicts with their biological clock.
The grueling "forced march" to tenure usually occurs from ages 25 to 35, according to one
study of why there aren’t more women in biological sciences at land-grant universities like
MSU.

If women decide to have children and drop out for a while, Capalbo said, that makes it hard to
catch up.

"I had two children," Capalbo said. "I probably took one or two years longer to get a promotion
to full professor."

The rules were written by men who had wives at home to raise their kids. Now it may be time to
consider rewriting the rules to work for men and women, she said. One possible solution would
be to offer more flexible schedules to all junior faculty as they pursue tenure.

Capalbo said she can also tell women job candidates that one of the advantages of a small
town like Bozeman is that it’s easier here to raise a family and pursue an academic career.

"You can actually do both with some semblance of sanity at the end of it," Capalbo said.

Her office reflects her own efforts to combine the two worlds. While her bookshelves are filled
with hundreds of drab-colored journals on agricultural economics, her walls are enlivened with
children’s artwork and a prairie star quilt she sewed.

Right now, Capalbo is at a four-week institute at Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania that trains
and encourages women to become administrators in higher education. She is the second
woman Gamble has sent to the institute.

"Geoff’s priority is ensuring women and minorities have opportunities that expand their
experience base and leadership so they’re well qualified for advancement when opportunities
open up," Conover said. "I don’t see him doing, ‘Well, you’re not qualified but we’re going to
put you in the job anyway.’"

The choices that women themselves make are another reason there aren’t more women
professors, especially in sciences and engineering.

It often starts in elementary school. Somewhere along the line, a lot of American girls decide
they hate math or they’re no good at it.

In college, those young women don’t pursue math-based fields like physics or engineering,
instead opting for more traditionally female fields like education and English. If they choose
science, they’re more likely to go into psychology or biology than physics and engineering.

To encourage MSU women to major in science and engineering, Pittendrigh worked for several
years on a Science and Engineering for All grant from the National Science Foundation.
Several young women felt encouraged by class readings and discussions about women who
had succeeded in science and engineering.

"I came to Bozeman with the attitude, I’m going to be in engineering, that’s what I want to do,"
one first-year student said. "Nothing was going to come in my way. When I first started, I went
into Roberts (Hall), and I was like, oh my gosh, intimidation right away. I was like, what am I
doing?"

"It’s like yeah, I’m really having a had time," another female freshman said. "I don’t believe in
myself and it’s like, I’m a girl, maybe I shouldn’t be in this major. But then, you’re hearing like, I
can do this. I actually get confidence from it."

Pittendrigh said young women often don’t feel confident in fields where they are a minority.
Having women on the faculty creates role models, proof to young women that they can do it,
too.

If there’s a backlash among men who feel the extra effort to promote women at MSU is unfair,
it’s hard to find.

John Sherwood, Faculty Council chair and a plant pathology professor, said most men he
knows support increasing diversity. He added they’d be "crazy" to admit otherwise.

One male professor, who supports diversity efforts, did admit privately to feeling frustration
when he got his Ph.D. years ago from a top West Coast university. He sent out dozens of job
queries and got zero response, while women he knew got responses to nearly all their queries.
But he ultimately landed a job he wanted at MSU.

Nursing professor Kay Chafey said she has seen positive changes in her 25 years at MSU, but
added, "The wheels grind slowly."

Bush said change doesn’t happen fast because men still seek out careers in math, science and
engineering, and women tend not to.

"Society’s norms and values, its gender definitions, are at the heart of what societies say to
people, what it means to be a man or women. That changes very slowly."

SIDEBAR:

Sharron Quisenberry has made a career of proving the conventional wisdom about women is
wrong.

Encouraged by her mom and uncles to love science, she set her sights on college, became
fascinated with biology and bugs and ultimately earned a Ph.D. in entomology, a field
dominated by men.

She was told she "would never work in a land-grant university. It just wasn’t done." Land grant
schools are generally conservative institutions, created a century ago as practical colleges for
improving the lives of farmers, mechanics and the people of their states.

Not only did Quisenberry become a entomology professor, but three years ago she landed the
job of Agriculture College dean at Montana State University. That makes her one of only three
women agriculture deans at the nation’s 50 land-grant universities — and the top-paid woman
at MSU.

But she has paid a price.

"I’ve made it because I’ve given up everything but work," Quisenberry said. "My whole life
revolves around my job. The reason I don’t have any children is because of that — there’s no
time. I average 60 to 80 hours a week."

Quisenberry’s success in cracking glass ceilings in the historically male fields of science,
agriculture and academic administration has also helped MSU in its uneven progress toward
hiring and promoting women.

The Bozeman campus has come far in the quarter-century since a judge’s ruling that MSU was
discriminating against women faculty.

• Back then, only two women headed departments — nursing and home economics, according
to "In The People’s Interest," the centennial history of MSU. Today, three of Bozeman’s 11
deans are women: Lea Acord in nursing, Marilyn Wessel at the Museum of the Rockies, and
Quisenberry in agriculture. Quisenberry, earning more than $113,000, is one of only three
women in the "$100,000 club," along with Acord and Adele Pittendrigh, associate dean of
MSU’s largest college, Letters and Sciences. At least 22 men are in that top pay bracket.

• Back in the 1970s, out of 144 full professors, only six were women, just 4 percent. Today,
women make up 29 percent of all tenurable faculty, according to MSU’s affirmative action
director, Corky Bush.

• When it comes to tenure, women candidates have been succeeding at a higher rate than
men in the past six years — 94 percent of women compared to 88 percent for men, according to
MSU. However, only 36 women sought tenure, compared to 93 men.

• When it comes to promotions (from assistant to associate to full professor), women faculty are
succeeding at the same 96 percent rate as men. Again, there have been fewer female
candidates, 46 compared to 115 males.

• Women’s pay is pretty close to men’s. Women’s pay averages 85 percent of men’s among full
professors ($64,533 vs. $75,725), 93 percent among associate professors ($53,284 vs. $57,353),
92 percent among assistant professors ($45,156 vs. $48,915) and 86 percent among
professional employees ($41,447 vs. $48,222). Six years ago, the gaps were smaller. Two
reasons for the pay gaps — men generally rank higher and tend to enter fields like engineering
and sciences that pay more than fields women tend to choose, like English and nursing.

• In the past six years, the number of women faculty has grown by 18 percent, faster than the 11
percent growth rate for men.

Among minorities, the news is worse. MSU has 2,038 white employees, and just 23 Native
Americans, 17 Asians, nine Hispanics and two blacks. Among faculty, the number of Indians
has actually decreased from 20 to 18, slipping in a decade from 4 to 3 percent.

One reason things have improved for women is that MSU was forced to adopt affirmative action
after losing the 1976 lawsuit.

Ellen Kreighbaum, one of the original five class-action plaintiffs, said when they won, it was
"wonderful, absolutely wonderful." Today she heads the department of health and human
development.

The plaintiffs proved they were being paid thousands of dollars less than men who held the
same or similar jobs. They also proved that while men earned tenure in an average of seven
years, it took women 17 years. The evidence was "staggering," according to "The People’s
Interest."

MSU was forced to pay more than $400,000 in back wages, give women raises and promotions
and come up with an affirmative action plan. Qualifications for job openings had to be written
up. Search committees had to have at least 25 percent women.

Now if women — as well as racial minorities, Vietnam War vets, handicapped vets or people
with disabilities — become job finalists, those candidates must be granted an interview. Those
candidates don’t have to be hired, but if they aren’t, the reasons must be put in writing.

A common misconception is that affirmative action means hiring quotas, but there are no
quotas, Bush said. Nor does it mean hiring unqualified people.

Even Kreighbaum admits the red tape that resulted from the lawsuit is "a pain in the butt." But,
she said, it ensures decisions aren’t based on whether a male department head or dean
happens to like you.

The days of overt discrimination appear to have ended, said several women at MSU.

Kay Chafey, nursing professor, remembers serving on her first search committee and hearing
one member say, "’People aren’t going to work for a woman.’

"This was 25 years ago," Chafey said. "You don’t hear that anymore."

Quisenberry said she has been "lucky — a lot of people encouraged me," including several
men. Yet until a woman is hired at the vice president level, she said, MSU will have a glass
ceiling.

"It will get better with time," she said, "but it’s still a long way from where it needs to be."

Gail Schontzler is at [email protected]

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