UCI Gets Grant to Hire, Retain More Women

UC Irvine announced Tuesday it had received a $3.45-million grant over five years from the National Science Foundation to increase the hiring and retention of female professors in the sciences, engineering and the school of management.

UCI is one of eight universities to receive a grant, and the only one in California.

Statistics show UCI can use the help. The number of women in tenure-track positions in science and engineering at the university is 20%; the national average is 29%. Since voters banned affirmative action in 1996, only 18% of the science and engineering hires at UCI have been women.

Susan V. Bryant, dean of the School of Biological Sciences, who will oversee the grant program at UCI, credited her move up the academic ladder to her persistence. “I’m haven’t become easily discouraged,” she said. “I put up with things.”

Bryant, 58, was hired by UCI in 1969, during the first wave of interest in hiring women, as feminism came to the fore. Since then, she said, the number of people teaching biological sciences has risen sharply, but the percentage of women hasn’t kept pace.

UCI was one of 76 universities to apply for the science foundation grants, which were awarded for the first time this year. Others receiving grants ranging from $3 million to $4 million are New Mexico State, University of Wisconsin, University of Puerto Rico, University of Colorado, University of Michigan, University of Washington and Georgia Tech.

Alice Hogan, the NSF program manager of the grants, said the theory used to be that if women could be “fixed,” then they could compete on equal footing with men in academia.

“We’re saying we don’t think there’s anything wrong with women,” Hogan said. The grants are intended to help study “the institutional setting that science and engineering takes place in, [and to ask] what are those things in those settings that are particularly working against women,” she said.

Hogan said a key event occurred in 1999 when MIT issued its study of Women Faculty in Science. MIT president Charles Vest wrote, “I have always believed that contemporary gender discrimination within universities is part reality and part perception. True, but I now understand that reality is by far the greater part of the balance.”

The study found “inequitable distributions” of space, teaching assignments, awards and membership on important committees. The study also found that senior female professors felt they were excluded from decision-making and had no voice in their departments. The study did not include much data on salaries.

UCI’s program will try to set up mentoring and networking programs to help female professors.

Priscilla Kehoe, a neuroscientist who will direct UCI’s program, said opportunities to encourage women are especially great today since they constitute the majority of students in the nation’s colleges.

“We could be a model for achieving gender equity,” she said.

Bryant said that each discipline will have to tailor a program to its specific situation. Some areas, like the physical sciences and engineering, aren’t attracting enough women, she said. Others, such as the biological sciences, produce plenty of female scholars in graduate schools, but few move into academia.

UCI’s program will name two professors who have shown excellence in scholarship and a commitment to gender equity to new department chairs. The appointments will come with $50,000 they can use for research and to pay themselves during the summer months.

In addition, a senior faculty member in each of UCI’s eight schools will receive $1,500 a year to increase female hiring by establishing mentoring programs and finding job candidates instead of waiting for them to apply.

“That’s where we have the biggest problem,” Kehoe said. “Convincing good scientists and engineers, the women, to come here, why it’s a good place to be.”

The university also will sponsor conferences so women can spotlight their research and make sure search committees seek out women candidates.

“The big barrier is getting in the door,” Bryant said. “I don’t think there are very many people who are overtly discriminatory against women. It’s just more comfortable to hire men.”