Female faculty at Pitt still few, but growing

After five semesters as an engineering major at Pitt, Sarah Hoover has only had one female… After five semesters as an engineering major at Pitt, Sarah Hoover has only had one female professor.

“I didn’t even notice at first. It’s weird, but you just get used to it and accept it like, ‘of course, all professors are white males,'” Hoover said.

College administrators across the country, however, want to ensure that students such as Hoover are exposed to more diverse faculties. At Pitt, aggressive recruiting techniques during the last three years have led to an increase in the number of women hired for tenure-track jobs.

According to John Cooper, dean of the College of Arts and Sciences, 22 percent of the new tenure-track professors hired in 1999 were women. This fall, 46 percent were women.

Cooper said the school needs more female professors because, “the learning styles [of women] are quite different [from men]. Women often learn more by working cooperatively.”

Susan Hansen, who teaches the Women in Politics course at Pitt, said both male and female students need female role models. She added that female professors should be fairly represented on campuses to help break negative stereotypes about women.

According to Hansen, women that are hired often receive lower pay than their male colleagues and also face more difficulty while conducting their research.

Cooper agreed that another main goal of the recruitment campaigns should be to “better represent the diversity of students the University serves.”

In 2001, 55 percent of the undergraduate students at Pitt were women, according to Pitt’s Web site.

Despite the fact that many other universities also have slightly more female students than male, men continue to outnumber women in faculties nationwide.

According to an article in the New York Times, only about 52 percent of female faculty members hold full-time tenured positions, compared to about 70 percent among men. These statistics have not changed much since the 1980s.

And while the number of assistant professors nationwide is divided roughly equally, only 20 percent of full professors are women.

Although qualified women are being recruited for all departments at Pitt, there is an emphasis on finding women to teach math and the sciences. Women are still particularly underrepresented in traditionally male-dominated fields such as engineering. For instance, just three out of the 35 faculty and staff members listed on the bioengineering department’s Web site are women.

The Provost’s Advisory Committee on Women’s Concerns was formed in 1999 to address some of these gender inequalities.

According to a resolution passed by the committee, it hopes that an increased number of female administrators, in addition to a higher number of job search committees chaired or staffed by women, might lead to more female professors hired.

Even if more women are hired, though, it might take some time before women play an equal role in departments and discrimination is eliminated. Because she’s had so few female professors, Hoover said she would regard a female professor skeptically.

“It is so different from the norm in my field,” she said. “I’d worry that she wasn’t going to have her act together or was going to allow herself to be intimidated by guys.”