UCI’s Hiring, Promotion Bias

There seems to be some confusion about the history and nature of sex discrimination at the UC Irvine College of Medicine. Young women are not under-recruited as students at the College of Medicine.

In fact, because of the leadership of Stanley van den Noort, former dean of the medical school, women and men have been admitted as medical students on an equal basis and in roughly equal numbers since the early 1970s. That battle was fought--and won--20 years ago.

But women have been--and continue to be--victims of persistent discrimination in faculty hiring and promotions at UCI, and specifically at the College of Medicine. How else do you explain more than a decade of no progress toward gender equality on the faculty?

Only a cultural dinosaur would assert that women are less ambitious or less qualified than men to become biomedical researchers or tenured medical school faculty.

For too long, this kind of self-serving and discredited argument has been used by some people to explain the lack of women in journalism, in law, in medicine and, yes, in the United States Senate.

PHYLLIS F. AGRAN

Associate professor, Department of Pediatrics

UCI Medical Center