Audit Finds Inequities in UC Hiring

A state auditor’s report on gender and hiring in the University of California found that UC’s efforts to hire more experienced, tenured faculty, and a tendency to hire in disciplines with smaller numbers of female PhDs, largely account for gender inequities in the hiring of professors.

The report found that 29% of new faculty hires in a recent five-year period were women. Women make up 46% of recent doctoral recipients, but they make up only 33% of the pool of people who meet requirements--including years of experience and relevant fields--for the jobs the university has posted.

The report gave fodder to both critics and defenders of the university’s hiring practices. “In a lot of areas, [the university] feels like the story they are telling is pretty good,” said Abby Lunardini, spokeswoman for UC President Richard Atkinson.

But Martha West, a law professor at UC Davis, said the report shows that UC campuses should take more risks and hire younger unknowns as assistant professors, rather than established names, since there are greater percentages of women in the junior faculty labor pool.

According to auditors, 46% of recent doctoral recipients were women.

The university system “plays a game of ‘let’s steal your superstars,’ ” she said. But “the way University of California became great after World War II is we hired young, brilliant faculty and were willing to take risks.”

Auditors found little evidence of gender-based discrimination in hiring decisions or salaries. They did, however, recommend that the university take several steps toward improving its procedures to ensure that sufficient efforts are made to achieve gender parity--appointing more female professors to hiring committees, for example.

“We didn’t feel there were any practices of discrimination anywhere,” said state auditor Elaine M. Howle. But the university could do more to make sure every effort is being made to achieve gender parity, she said.

Gender disparity in faculty hiring and salary decisions has triggered a nationwide debate in academia. Concerns have heightened in the UC system in recent years because the number of newly hired female professors has declined.

The auditors found that UC’s emphasis on hiring more experienced, tenured faculty largely accounts for the gap between the percentage of women receiving doctorates and the percentage that UC hires. Seeking top candidates in a given field often means choosing from a pool of applicants who received doctorates years ago, when fewer women entered graduate school, the auditors said. About 36% of new UC hires over the last four years have been for senior faculty positions.

In addition, the university has been hiring faculty in fields with relatively few female PhDs. Music, for example, has fewer female doctorate recipients than does art history.

Taking all factors into account shrinks the hiring gap considerably but does not make it disappear, auditors found.

To address the disparity, auditors said the university might consider hiring more junior faculty members, as well as examining gender balances on hiring committees and making more consistent use of labor pool data. Two-thirds of hiring committees examined had no female members or only one.

Finally, the auditors suggested that UC consider giving more weight to gender in defining “excellence”--a criterion that is used to guide hiring decisions. “Should it be the best or the brightest professor regardless of gender, or do you want a balance to bring in different perspectives?” Howle asked.

The report was requested by state Sen. Jackie Speier (D-San Francisco) after a hearing two years ago in which UC faculty voiced concern about hiring patterns.

Lunardini said the university is considering a variety of steps to improve its hiring record, including improving outreach, expanding day-care facilities on campuses and trying harder to recruit talented female doctoral recipients from UC’s graduate schools.

The university also will encourage campuses and departments to consider hiring greater percentages of junior faculty, said Sheila O’Rourke, UC’s executive director of academic advancement. But she noted that individual campuses retain autonomy over such decisions.