Testimony : ONE PERSON’S STORY ABOUT GENDER BIAS : ‘Not All Women Are Advancing at UC’

I grew up in Altadena and went on to Bryn Mawr, a women’s college, which perhaps accounts for my thinking that women are equal in the world.

I finished my medical education at UCLA, followed by a four-year residency in ophthalmology. I was oblivious to obstacles based on gender, except for the fact that I knew there had never been a woman resident in ophthalmology before at UCLA.

I went on the UC Irvine faculty in 1976. During the first few years there, I noticed considerable inequity in the way the chairman treated me in relation to a new male colleague in almost every area: space, clerical support, research, laboratory support, travel to professional meetings--he was being given large amounts of all of those things and I was routinely being denied most of it.

The chairman of my department would introduce me at social events that go along with professional meetings as his “prettiest faculty member.” That was so inappropriate. It reflected his attitude toward women in his profession.

When I tried to inform appropriate people in the dean’s office about what was going on, basically there was no response. We finally came up for tenure and my male colleague received tenure and I didn’t.

I have talked with so many other women faculty from the UC system throughout the state and you hear the same things over and over. In many cases the bias is much more blatant. The university has had a long experience with women faculty and it’s shocking to see how few have risen to the tenured level or to the higher administrative level. And as shocking as it was when I started in 1976, it is even more shocking now because the percentages really have not changed.

Talking to women faculty members, I learned that they had suffered the most extreme sorts of things, quite often in silence, and a lot of them had left the university feeling that they had neither the emotional energy nor the funds to stand their ground. And so I convened a meeting--I think it must have been in 1985--of about a dozen or 15 women whose stories I had heard. We met and shared the stories and the feeling that I think most people had at the end of that afternoon was one of emotional exhaustion. It was sort of like listening to an afternoon of child abuse or something.

Then I realized that this was a very systemic problem. A lot of women had suffered terribly and their academic careers had been ruined or terminated and I thought, well, maybe I am in a good position to try to do something about it.

The overriding emotion that many women felt and feel about it is fear because the university is very powerful, it’s very wealthy and most of these women had been told that they would be academically blackballed if they raised the issue of gender bias. I just felt that I had to speak out on the injustice. Of course, by opening my mouth, I got roundly slapped, to put it mildly. It’s something the university doesn’t want to hear about, apparently.

The university is spending tremendous amounts of money to protect its reputation and to keep qualified women from advancing in the system and the taxpayers are paying for it and should care about it. It is a terrific waste of money.

The women at UC Davis and UC Berkeley and UCLA are all saying the same thing: Women are predominantly in the lowest, least secure, least compensated, least rewarding positions. And they tend to stay in the university the shortest time. They are in the revolving door for the most part and, despite some high-profile exceptions, totally disposable.

The problem is that women faculty in the University of California are, overall, not given evenhanded treatment and they suffer as a result in terms of the hiring, promotion, pay equity, retention practices, all those sorts of things that make up employment life. They suffer in disproportionate numbers and they suffer severely.

Why should the public be interested in this issue? Because, No. 1, they are paying for it, and, No. 2, their daughters--if not themselves--may very well be subjected to this kind of treatment. It keeps women perpetually in a disadvantaged situation.

It is very discouraging to me to realize that the great advances that we thought women would surely make back in the ‘60s when we started out in our careers haven’t been made, at least in the UC faculty.