More Than Meets the Eye in Pay, Hiring Disparities

Politically correct to the point of immaculateness, the story, “UC Irvine Medical Faculty Short on Women” (Dec. 18) devotes over a thousand words to the scarcity and lower status of women on the UC Irvine medical faculty. It does so without devoting a single syllable to what faculty at major research hospitals (male or female, black or white, tall or short) are there for in the first place.

Can we get our priorities straight?

Many of us who strongly support women’s rights in the workplace (or anywhere else), who embrace the aims of affirmative action and proselytize constantly for an Equal Rights Amendment would, nonetheless, prefer that UCI find and hire the biomedical brainpower most likely to find cures and effective new therapies for breast cancer, AIDS, Alzheimer’s or heart disease rather than worrying over what kind of gender quota the newly hired are filling.

I suspect that many of those interviewed--Drs. (Phyllis) Agran or (Beverly) Morgan or (Hoda) Anton-Culver--would argue that the two objectives aren’t mutually exclusive. Ultimately, they’re not. But, here and now, the real problems are certainly (as Vice Chancellor Anne Spence points out) that young women are under-recruited into medical schools and that, once admitted, future medical researchers, unlike lawyers or business managers, need a dozen years or more of training before beginning fruitful careers.

Let’s deal, then, with the problems where they are and--in the interests of political correctness and the illusory “quick fix”--not pretend they are elsewhere. Let the UCI medical faculty (free of any journalistic hammerlock) hire as its new professors and associate professors the best people available--today--irrespective of sex. We really can’t afford that they do otherwise.

WALTER WELLS

Irvine