Women Accuse Rutgers Political-Science Department of Bias and Hostility

By KATE MOSER
Female faculty members and graduate students in Rutgers University at New Brunswick's political-science department feel unfairly compensated and shut out of leadership positions by their male counterparts, says an internal university report obtained by The Chronicle. In at least one case, a woman has been afraid to complain about sexual harassment because of worries about retaliation.
"We were often shocked to hear that the kind of discriminatory attitudes that, sadly, were prevalent in much of the academy decades ago and that have long been unacceptable in our own departments are apparently still prevalent in political science," concludes the July report, put together by a faculty committee convened by top administration officials. Several faculty members have taken the additional step of filing a complaint with New Jersey's Office of the Attorney General.
Historically, political science has been one of the most male-dominated disciplines among the social sciences, and observers say that may contribute to a culture of bias.
Reviewing a variety of salary data, the committee uncovered "evidence of subtle and not-so-subtle bias against women in the department," leading committee members to recommend that the university "take decisive action to remedy the departmental culture," the report says.
Douglas Greenberg, the university's new dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, told The Chronicle that the report has been at the top of his agenda since his first day on the job in August. No steps have been taken yet to deal with the report's findings. Mr. Greenberg said he wanted to fully understand the "very serious charges" in the report before he acts.
The matter surfaced officially in April 2007, when some of the female faculty members in the department lodged a formal complaint with the then-dean of the School of Arts and Sciences, citing inequalities in compensation. The school examined the complaint but found no evidence of unequal pay. Female faculty members disputed that conclusion and followed up with a letter to the university's president, Richard L. McCormick, in May 2007.
After the dean's office had analyzed the claims and concluded that they were unfounded, in December Philip Furmanski, executive vice president for academic affairs, assembled the investigative committee. Four faculty members from a variety of disciplines across the university sat on the committee, which conducted its investigation from late fall of 2007 to June 2008.
Gatherings of Men
Their report cites many acts of exclusion, such as a longstanding Tuesday dinner regularly held by male senior faculty members. The report found that many in the department considered the dinner an unofficial decision-making venue to which women were not invited. Emeriti professors, all male and some of them former chairmen, still have offices in the department and shape the culture there, the committee also says. The report describes a feeling within the department that the subdiscipline of women and politics isn't valued highly, exacerbating the gender-equity problems.
The report stops short of delving into allegations of "a long-term and persistent pattern of sexual harassment" but does describe two issues, based on interviews with faculty members: at least one graduate student who "is said to be 'terrified of retaliation' if she lodges a complaint" and at least one male faculty member described by women interviewed by the committee as a "creep."
The committee summed up a pervasive impression of behavior in the department as a culture of a cliquish group of senior men. "Members of this club apparently have no clue about modern norms of what is acceptable in the workplace," the report says.
Unhappy because the university did not immediately respond to the report, five political-science faculty members at Rutgers filed complaints of differential compensation, based on gender, with the civil-rights division of the state attorney general's office on August 13. The division was informed on September 29 that the parties involved decided to participate in private mediation, said Lee Moore, a spokesman for that office.
Mr. Greenberg said he could not comment on the question of mediation. Faculty members who lodged the complaint with the state did not respond to The Chronicle's phone and e-mail messages.
Political science and international relations, along with economics, are traditionally among the most male-dominated fields in the social sciences. Women earned 38.5 percent of total political-science and international-relations doctoral degrees granted in the United States in 2006, compared with 30.4 percent in 1996, according to the most recent survey of earned doctorates by the National Opinion Research Center, at the University of Chicago.
A Broader Pattern
Across disciplines, female faculty members continue to lag behind men in pay, particularly at doctoral universities, where their average salaries are 78.1 percent of their male colleagues', according to the most recent study on gender equity in the professoriate, which was conducted in 2006 by the American Association of University Professors (The Chronicle, November 3, 2006).
"It's an issue we've been seeing in the last couple of years again," said John W. Curtis, the AAUP's director of research and public policy and an author of that report. "There's an attitude that this is something we've taken care of already, but the data indicate otherwise."
The Rutgers committee comes to a less definitive conclusion on what the data say about the alleged gender inequity in faculty salaries, though it does conclude that the department's gender bias is reflected in salaries, particularly at the associate-professor level. In one example the report provides, female associate professors earned 82 percent of what their male counterparts made during the 2006-7 academic year. One senior female faculty member in the department was earning $113,029 after 35 years at Rutgers, the report says, compared with a senior male faculty member who was earning $123,359 after 16 years at the university.
During the 2007-8 academic year, the School of Arts and Sciences "took aggressive steps to correct several of the most blatant examples of salary inequity for women faculty members," the report says.
Many universities respond to allegations of gender inequity in pay by considering individual cases, Mr. Curtis said. But that approach doesn't change the way promotion decisions are made or how starting salaries are determined, he said: "It doesn't fix the underlying structure."

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Section: The FacultyVolume 55, Issue 8, Page A14