3/11/96
In education, inequities persist despite gains
By DOUG RIGGS
Journal-Bulletin Staff Writer
Kathryn Quina almost didn't make it.
"I went to graduate school in psychology with 54 male faculty members, very few females," she recalls. "There were many, many points that I almost dropped out.
"I had a really supportive major professor, and I loved what I was doing, but it just didn't look like the thing women did."
That was back in 1971, at the University of Georgia. Today, Quina is a full professor of psychology and women's studies at the University of Rhode Island - one of 10 women (including the chairwoman) in a department of 25, where her base salary ($58,000) is comparable to those of the men.
"Psychology has changed dramatically," she said. "But engineering hasn't."
Indeed, engineering is one of those fields - mathematics and the physical sciences are others - in which the glass ceiling that still separates the women from the top rungs of the academic ladder can look more like structural steel.
At Brown University, where 140 women constitute 26 percent of the 540- member regular faculty, the physical sciences are taught by 142 men and 11 women. At URI, the engineering faculty stands at 64 men and 2 women - and one of the women currently has another assignment.
On the other hand, the nursing programs at the state's three public institutions of higher learning - URI, Rhode Island College and the Community College of Rhode Island - have a combined faculty of 67. Not one of them is a man.
It is no coincidence, say the growing numbers of women in education who are pushing against all sorts of ceilings, that engineering and science teachers are among the highest paid, nursing instructors among the lowest.
But such imbalances, however dramatic, are viewed more and more these days as anachronisms - stubborn but ultimately doomed legacies of the male chauvinist era that has been banished from the American campus.
At least in theory.
Kathryn "Kat" Quina has been at URI 17 years. In 1991, she filed a sex- discrimination suit against the university alleging that she had been passed over for promotion in favor of a less qualified male colleague. She won.
What she remembers best about that episode, she says, is not the victory itself but the overwhelming support she got from her colleagues on the faculty, male and female.
"If there is one significant change I have seen, it is that there is no longer any doubt in anyone's mind that women can achieve as academics. Women have done very, very well at their jobs," she says.
But women's actual participation in education at every level continues to lag behind this perception - shockingly behind in some cases, especially in the upper echelons. The overall trend is toward closing the gap, however:
Although 72 percent of the state's 14,083 public school teachers are women, only 25 percent of its superintendents (9 out of 36) are. But that's up from 3 out of 37 a mere six years ago. And 25 percent is "very high nationally," according to Richard Latham of the civil rights office in the state Department of Education.
Women made up only 23 percent of Rhode Island's public school principals and 17 percent of assistant principals in 1990. At the start of this school year, women held one-third of those positions: 153 out of 460.
In 1990, only 2 of 8 management-level employees at the Department of Education were women. Now it is 5 out of 14, including one deputy commissioner. (The department's top job was held by a woman for many years, although it is not now.)
Women make up 53 percent of all faculty at CCRI (up from 46 percent in 1990), 38 percent at RIC (up from 31 percent in 1990), and 27 percent at URI (down from 28 percent). At Brown University, the state's most selective and prestigious private institution, the percentage is 25.9 percent women, up from 11 percent 20 years ago. (National average: 31.6 percent.)
Women are more underrepresented in administrative positions. At URI, 28 percent of the administrators at the dean's level or above are women. Only 9 percent of those jobs are held by women at RIC, 25 percent at CCRI.
Women are still making less money than men for the same work, in education as in other fields, but the gap is narrowing significantly. In 1990, women at URI earned 81 cents compared with a "man's dollar," 83 cents at RIC, 88 cents at CCRI. Five years later, the figures (at the associate professor level) were 94 cents at URI, 93 cents at RIC and 92 cents at CCRI.
Nor are women getting as many promotions as men. At URI, for example, 62 percent of all male faculty members hold the rank of full professor, whereas only 26 percent of the women are at that level. The situation is comparable at the other state institutions, and at Brown, where 12.5 percent of its 295 tenured full professors are women.
The statistics, most of which were compiled by Kathryn Quina for the Rhode Island Commission on Women, which published them in 1992 in a "Report Card" on the status of women in education in Rhode Island and in a 1995 update, point overwhelmingly to one conclusion:
Women are still clustered on the lower rungs of the educational career ladder, men on the upper rungs.
Why that pattern persists in a field so closely identified with enlightenment and the cutting edge of social change is a complicated and somewhat touchy subject.
"Clearly it's a combination of factors," says Cynthia Ward, an associate commissioner in the state Office of Higher Education. "Probably there's some residual discrimination.
"And you certainly have the fact that women's professional lives are different from men, because they take time out to have children, and they often want more time to be at home with their children. This kind of takes them off the promotional route.
"And you just have the personal preferences of people: Not everyone wants to be a supervisor." A teacher's schedule is ideal for working mothers, allowing them to be home exactly when their kids are, she points out.
For Quina, it's more a matter of institutional and societal stereotyping - and she's doing what she can to end it.
Among other things, she assigns her students to look up the data, and then write a letter to "Professor X," an actual (but unnamed) engineering professor, who once counseled a female student not to go into engineering "because women are biologically, inherently, less able to do math."
"Basically, the literature doesn't support that sort of thing at all," she says; only one standardized test shows any sex differences in math aptitude, and then only among the very top scorers.
"Women haven't been encouraged that much to do that sort of stuff; they have been discouraged. There are plenty of women who are going through engineering at URI now, but they are seeing one woman out of 64 professors there."
Freda H. Goldman of Providence, an educational consultant, longtime member of the Rhode Island Commission on Women and chairwoman of its education committee, agrees.
"There's a pervasive kind of stereotyping that goes on, either consciously or unconsciously, and it does have some impact on the kind of work or careers girls eventually end up in.
"You have to break down the glass ceiling at every level; promotion is much harder for women than for men. They have to work harder and they get turned down more often.
"I don't know whether it's deliberate or just perception that guides this kind of thing," Goldman said. "Or maybe it's talent, who knows? Maybe men really are more talented than women.
"Now, don't quote me," she added, laughing, "because I don't believe that for one minute!"
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