Women’s History Month

IUB’s dean for women’s affairs considers the status of women on campus, in the academy

By Susan Williams

‘We are doing a better job at hiring and retaining women faculty—especially in the sciences, but really, across the campus. That is good not only for those women, but for the whole institution and for our sons and daughters.’

‘One of the biggest challenges is the glass ceiling. This is true for both staff and faculty women. We need to find a way to get more women moving up the career ladders. This will be good for the institution, good for the women who move up and encouraging for the rest of us!’

‘I personally celebrate that we have fewer “first woman to do X” because most of the barriers have been broken by the courageous women who people our campus.’ —Jean Robinson

Photos by Paul Martens

In July, Jean Robinson will step down as dean for women’s affairs on the IU Bloomington campus and, as professor of political science, will return full time to the classroom. An award-winning teacher, Robinson joined the IU faculty in 1977 to conduct political science classes on women’s issues, feminist theory and Asian politics. Her current research involves women’s policy agencies in France, China and Poland.

Last September, under Robinson’s direction, the Office for Women’s Affairs (OWA) released its Report on the Status of Women. Its findings were harvested from a study launched in 1998 under then-Chancellor Ken Gros Louis and continued with the support of Sharon Brehm, Bloomington’s current chancellor.

In this, Women’s History Month, IU Home Pages spoke to Robinson regarding women at IU, the gains that have been made and the challenges ahead.

Q: Why is it important to have an Office for Women’s Affairs on campus?

A: There are important issues of participation and representation of women that affect the education and work of both men and women. The Office for Women’s Affairs is the sole unit with responsibility for advancing and advocating for women on campus, whether they are faculty, staff or students. Through OWA, we try to help individual women redress inequalities they encounter; resolve problems related to sexual discrimination, assault and harassment; provide education to help prevent sexual assault and harassment; and advocate policy changes that will address imbalances and promote equity. 

Q: Would you talk a bit about the issues women face on campus now?

A: The biggest issues involve numbers, salaries, opportunities and personal safety. First, women are more than half the population and, at IU, more than half the undergraduate student body. But, we are still a significant minority of faculty and administrators—around 28 percent of tenured and tenure-track faculty—and a small proportion of administrators, whether faculty or professional. Also, women are seriously under-represented among faculty and at the graduate level in important disciplines and areas of study, such as economics, chemistry, computer science and business.

Next, women are highly likely to earn less than men. Whether we look at faculty or staff salaries, there remains a salary or wage gap. While we have maintained parity of salary in general for junior faculty, there is still a high likelihood of male faculty earning more than female faculty at the upper ranks.

And, there are fewer and fewer women the higher one looks at the administrative structures of this campus and the university. And while the undergraduate student body is majority female, women are in small numbers in some fields.

Undergraduate women also face the possibility, like undergraduate women on campuses across the U.S., of sexual assault, date rape or sexual harassment—all of which can affect and impede chances for success.

If we believe that women should have opportunities to learn, to study and to work in similar conditions to men, then we have to pay attention to the ways in which women’s opportunities are slighted or diminished.

Q: In your forward to the “Report on the Status of Women,” you mentioned a study done at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that showed that “some of the challenges and problems that women faculty faced were not the result of their own inadequacies—as each had thought individually.” Could you elaborate on that a little and suggest what you and your colleagues learned from that study?

A. I think women, or perhaps it is all underrepresented groups, tend to have less confidence in themselves and are quick to assume that any failures in their work are always attributable to some weakness of their own. We know that one of the transformative moments of the women’s movement in the U.S. was when women began to realize that discrimination was not an individualized phenomenon, but rather it was a group phenomenon. Women also began to understand that what often was ascribed by a woman to her not being good enough was really about public attitudes.

For women at IU Bloomington, many of the attitudes expresse through the survey and in-depth interviews suggested that in pre-tenure years, faculty women tended to feel that successes were more attributable to good fortune and failures to personal weaknesses. In general, men have a quite different response. They tend to claim full responsibility for successes and blame others, the system or bad fortune for failures. 

Q: And it’s not very hard to imagine that such an imbalance of self-doubt on one hand and self-confidence on the other might contribute to a less than optimal work place, is it?

A: These attitudes carry over into the work environment in numerous ways. For instance, staff and faculty women often feel that they cannot ask the institution to be flexible or assist them when they have to deal with pregnancy, maternity or family care issues. Often women try to solve these challenges on their own without asking for any special support.

But why not expect the institution to be flexible? If women are going to be hired, then we have to make it possible for them to work in conditions where being female won’t hurt them. And at times, being female includes the possibility of being pregnant and having children.

When reading through the in-depth interviews with senior women faculty, it was quite obvious that many experienced similar kinds of hurdles and challenges to their worth, and in each case, felt somehow that they were at fault. In many of these cases, women felt, and were, alone as well. They had few female colleagues to talk to about their experiences or the attitudes of some of their male colleagues. So it was even easier to believe that this treatment was a result of their own inadequacies.

One of the ways that OWA has helped to change this self-doubting has been through the women faculty mentoring program, which provides support for junior women faculty from senior women. 

We also have worked with staff women individually and through workshops and brown-bag lunches to provide opportunities to discuss issues like discrimination and hostile attitudes, and to work together to develop effective responses and to get support.

It always helps once we discover that we are not the only one who has experienced harassment or discrimination, and to realize that those hostile attitudes are not our fault.

Q: You’ve been at IU since 1977 in various capacities. What have you seen change for the better?

A: Overall, I think the campus is more women-friendly than it was 26 years ago.

Clearly, there are more women among the faculty and senior staff and administrators. There are more policies in place to support women who choose to have children while working at IUB, and there is more child care available.

There are fewer instances of overt discrimination. For example, we have programs in place to cover some health and contraceptive needs that had not been covered previously, and we have domestic partner benefits for same-sex couples. Also, we have written rules clearly prohibiting sexual harassment, and we have procedures for dealing with it when it happens.

We now have a Department of Gender Studies in the College of Arts and Sciences, and no longer do faculty and students interested in women’s and gender studies feel marginalized.

Women can walk around a campus that is better lighted now, and it is a safer environment than before.

Great strides in increasing the numbers of women studying, teaching and researching in the sciences have been made. More women are getting tenure, and, indeed, women have reached parity with men in terms of their tenure rates. I personally celebrate that we have fewer “first woman to do X” because most of the barriers have been broken by the courageous women who people our campus.

Q: And where does IU still have room for improvement?

A: Well, I do have a great dream life!

I would like to see us develop an institution that is truly woman-friendly—where, for instance, it isn’t a problem if a woman gets pregnant, because the institution is humane enough to provide proactive policies and procedures so that she doesn’t have to worry about how to pay for child care or how to find the time to be a mother and get tenure. A fully woman-friendly institution would be one where students have the opportunity to have as many female as male professors, and where women staff can expect to be promoted to more senior positions at the same rate as men staff.

I would like us to do a better job of ensuring pay equity, and one way to do that is to have regularized equity reviews for staff and faculty.

There still is distinct sex segregation on this campus. In some departments, in certain staff positions, it is highly unusual to find women. In others, there are very few men. By and large, those where women predominate are also those with the lowest salaries and wage structures. And, although we have made great progress in terms of women in the sciences we still have very far to go. 

While there is child care now, there is not enough and there is almost no infant or sick child care. I’d like to see more spaces with the same quality at lower cost. 

I would like to see domestic partner benefits for opposite sex couples. 

We need to do a better job of teaching men and women students how to avoid sexual assault and how to communicate with each other.  

Among the professional staff, we need to promote more women into senior administrative positions and more women faculty to full and distinguished professor ranks.

We need to educate, hire and retain more women of color at all levels of the institution—undergraduate, graduate, faculty and staff. 

Q: Were there any big surprises in the “Report on the Status of Women?”

A: Yes. We were surprised that the time it takes for women faculty to get promoted from associate to full professor was so much longer than for men. But it was a pleasant surprise to find that women and men now have the same tenure rate—of those who come up for tenure.

Maybe we shouldn’t have been, but I think we were surprised that our sense of there being so few women in administration was backed up by the data. I think we all knew this from personal observation but to see the numbers is still somewhat of a shock. And to see that there are far more men making large salaries than women—well again, not really a surprise, but the verification of what we knew anecdotally was powerful.

We also were surprised and concerned to find that first-generation women students have the lowest rate of retention. That is something we need to address quickly.

Another surprise—about one-third of faculty, and 25 percent of staff and students say that they have personally experienced harassment on this campus. And finally, it was a surprise that—regardless of status—women across the board are concerned about safety whereas men are not.

It was a good surprise, though, to see that most students, most faculty and most staff still think IUB is a good place to be!

Q: What do you see as the biggest advancements for women at IU during in the last five years—your tenure as dean—and what are the biggest challenges ahead for IU and women on the Bloomington campus?

A: It’s hard for me to pick one or two things, but when I look at advancements on this campus, the first I see are those that come from policy changes that are the result of many different people working together to make working and learning conditions better. So, for instance, the family leave policies, the domestic partner benefits, the extension of insurance coverage for oral contraceptives when used as birth control—these are examples of the kinds of things that really make a significant difference in people’s lives.

The presence of more women at the top is also an advancement for this campus. It will be good when there are enough women and enough people of color in higher positions—enough that we can’t count them on our fingers! But still, we have made some progress.

Finally, we are doing a better job at hiring and retaining women faculty—especially in the sciences, but really, across the campus. That is good not only for those women, but for the whole institution and for our sons and daughters.

As for challenges, well, I think one of the biggest challenges is the glass ceiling. This is true for both staff and faculty women. We need to find a way to get more women moving up the career ladders. This will be good for the institution, good for the women who move up and encouraging for the rest of us!

The second major challenge I see is to create a more equitable pay situation. We need to find resources to make sure that pay is equitable and that pay is adequate. On the adequacy issue, we all know that some of our staff—those whom we rely on to do the fundamental work that keeps the institution running—are poorly paid. On the support services side, these people are almost all women. It might appear equitable in that the few men who do these jobs are subject to the same pay scale, but that scale is really too low. The challenge is not to convince people of the low pay—most of us see it.  The challenge is to find the financial resources to change it.

And the third major challenge is to improve personal safety. Far too many of our women students are subject to sexual assault. This is not a phenomenon isolated to IUB, and it is perhaps an eternal problem. But I do believe we can change our behavior and that we must do something—starting with convincing our students to behave more responsibly and more civilly toward each other. 

For the report, go to:
http://www.indiana.edu/~owa