April 2003
November 14, 2002
At a recent general membership
meeting, members of Western’s Caucus on Women’s Issues were interested
to hear that the University had recently undergone a Federal Contractors
Program (FCP) compliance review. The FCP monitors the employment equity
situation of institutions, like Western, that receive over $200,000.00
from federal grants and contracts. Institutions deemed noncompliant
could lose their eligibility for federal funding.
In September, the President’s
Standing Committee for Employment Equity (PSCEE) was told that, after the
review officer’s visit, the University was given until October 15 to show
that it has a plan for addressing areas in which it appeared, to the FCP
officer, to fall short. Otherwise, it risked non-compliance. Given
the consequences of non-compliance, it is unacceptable and worth noting
that most members of the University community, including members of search
committees in the academic units, have little idea of the FCP’s requirements.
It is troubling that the documents outlining the specific areas of concern
and the University’s response are confidential. Given the potential cost
of non-compliance, our compliance with FCP employment equity requirements
ought to be everyone’s concern. It is unclear whose interests are being
served by keeping information about the FCP’s requirements and the recent
review from the Western community.
At the institutional level,
Western has taken some steps to address employment equity. We have the
Equity Services and PSCEE. Our newly revised Workplan document (an FCP
requirement) outlines the University/Strategy for meeting the FCP’s seven
equity objectives. Last year, a joint UWOFA and administration committee
outlined employment equity guidelines for appointments committees and promotion
and tenure committees to follow.
These welcome efforts are
insufficient to address the institutional problem of employment inequity.
Although indispensable, PSCEE and Equity Services cannot alone enact a
significant institutional change.
The University is treating
our difficulties in meeting employment equity goals as a problem to be
addressed from the top down. The Workplan assigns responsibility for the
implementation of most employment equity goals to PSCEE and Equity Services,
some to Human Resources, the Provost, or the VP Administration, but none
to Deans and Chairs, and none to appointments committees. Surely Deans
and Chairs, who have perhaps the greatest impact on each unit’s hiring
practices, ought to be involved in the discussion about employment equity
and the development and implementation of strategies to move
the institution forward.
And surely appointments committees, who write job ads, make short-lists,
interview candidates, and decide to whom to offer positions share some
of the responsibility for meeting the FCP’s requirements. Making progress
on the employment equity front is going to require a multi-level, collective
effort.
The FCP does not force arbitrary
goals on institutions under federal contracts. The program was implemented
in 1986 in an effort to rectify an unjust system of practice that has a
long tradition of favouring able-bodied white men, and disadvantaging others.
The goal of addressing injustice is a moral one. If the moral obligation
to take bias out of our hiring practices will not motivate search committees,
then perhaps the legal obligation, and the consequences to all of us if
the University is ever found to be noncompliant, will finally encourage
more effort.
Tracy Isaacs, President,
Western’s Caucus on Women’s Issues.
November 21, 2002
Tracy Isaacs’s, In 500 Words,
column (November 14, 2002) regarding the Federal Contractors Program (FCP)
is interesting reading. For example, she comments, “The program
was implemented in 1986 in an effort to rectify an unjust system of practice
that has a long tradition of favoring able-bodied white men, and disadvantaging
others.”
She also decries the fact
that, at Western, the Deans, Chairs and appointment committees are not
assigned formal responsibility under the Equity Workplan to reach the goals
of increasing representation of currently so-called under-represented groups.
And to ensure the reader is aware of the seriousness of the discrimination
favoring white men at the expense of all others, Professor Isaacs remarks,
“The goal of addressing injustice is a moral one.”
The Annual Report of the
President’s Standing Committee for Employment Equity (PSCEE), included
in the same Western News edition, is interesting as well. It
refers to Western’s employment equity record as “lamentable reality.” It
calls for President Davenport to “be more vocal about his acknowledgement
that Western is not, at present, doing well in terms of employment equity.”
Surprisingly, neither the
PSCEE report nor the In 500 Words column provide a shred of evidence to
support their strong conclusions. The PSCEE report does call, however,
for the regular updating and analysing of relevant data, suggesting correctly
that such data have been collected at Western for many years.
Apparently, the members of
PSCEE are unaware of these already collected, analysed, and published data.
In January 2000, UWO released a report of faculty recruitment for the academic
years 1991-1992 to 1998-1999, categorized by sex. The report, entitled
Full-time Faculty Distribution, Appointments, and Recruitment – by Gender
(January, 2000), is available from the UWO Office of the University Secretariat.
Summarizing the UWO data
for all 8 years, on average, women represented 23.2% of the applicant pool
for faculty positions, 30.4% of those interviewed, and 36.2% of those hired.
Thus women were both interviewed and hired in proportions greater than
their representation in the applicant pool. In each of the years
surveyed, women were interviewed at a higher rate than their presence in
the applicant pool, and except for two years, the percentage of women hired
was greater than the percentage of women interviewed.
The data in the report also
show that over the 8 year period, on average: 5.4% of female applicants
were appointed compared to 2.9% of male applicants; 21.7% of female applicants
were interviewed compared to 15% of male applicants; and 24.9% of female
applicants who were interviewed were hired whereas 19.2% of men who were
interviewed were hired. Again, the results
in each of the years are remarkably consistent.
Women had almost twice the chance of being hired as did men.
How do Professor Isaacs and
the rest of the PSCEE reconcile these data, which, if anything, support
a claim of massive discrimination against men (white or otherwise), with
their ideologically-based conviction that Western is a hotbed of discrimination
against women?
Clive Seligman, Department
of Psychology, University of Western Ontario.
December 5, 2002
Dr. Seligman raises an excellent
point when he emphasizes the importance of empirical evidence to making
claims about the status and situation of various groups on campus. (Western
News, Nov. 21)
But, his letter fails to
address the major point of Dr. Isaacs’s article, the danger of losing funding
because of non-compliance with the Federal Contractors Program (FCP).
Moreover, unlike the PSCEE report, he only addresses the status of women
faculty without explaining why he ignores people with disabilities, visual
minorities and aboriginal people, or all the non-faculty employee groups
on campus. Still and all, the point is well taken. What is surprising
about his letter is that he chooses to offer so little evidence himself.
In particular, it is very
difficult to understand why Dr. Seligman ignores so much of the very report
to which he refers. This same report shows women under-represented
in all professorial positions and over represented in poorly paid lecturer
and instructor positions. Western looks particularly bad when compared
to other Ontario universities. Though, in 1991-2 we had a lower percentage
of female faculty on average than other Ontario universities (except at
the lecturer and instructor level), in 1997-8 the percentage was yet lower.
As for the jobs into which women were hired, from 1991-99, women were 41.1%
of the limited term appointments, 35.2% of the initial probationary appointments
and 15.2% of the appointments with tenure.
The differential hiring practices
to which Seligman points mean little if the women
being disproportionately interviewed and hired are disproportionately
getting worse jobs than their male colleagues. It is yet more difficult
to glean the meaning of such data without knowing the qualifications of
those applying. Of course, none of these statistics give the whole picture,
but I rather suspect that PSCEE and the folks at the FCP have probably
spent a considerable amount of time pouring over such data and are fairly
competent at analyzing it.
Again, I agree with Dr. Seligman.
It is only when we do careful studies of the empirical evidence that we
will be able to understand our role in maintaining present inequities.
Thus the moral imperative
is that all employees of the university take equity seriously and contribute
to helping the university attain good data about its employees.
Letitia Meynell, Philosophy
and Member of Western’s Caucus on Women’s Issues.
December 12, 2002
I was very pleased to see
Clive Seligman (letter, Nov. 21) highlight two of the central claims from
my “In 500-words” Column (Nov. 14), namely that “the (FCP) program
was implemented in 1986 in an effort to rectify an unjust system of practice
that has a long tradition of favoring able-bodied white men, and disadvantaging
others,” and that “the goal of addressing injustice is a moral one.”
I’ll charitably assume that Professor Clive Seligman agrees that the goal
of addressing injustice is a moral one, and infer that his quarrel is with
either the claim that practices of inequitable hiring are unjust, or the
claim that hiring practices have been inequitable. He’s quite right
that I did not provide a shred of evidence for my claims in the column.
Are the numbers not by now
familiar? In the very report that Professor Seligman refers to, Full-time
Faculty Distribution, Appointments, and Recruitment – by Gender, we see
that the proportion of full-time female faculty members has improved only
because the number of males has fallen, not because the number of
females has actually increased (Figure 1). We see
that only 6% of our Full Professors are women (Table 1). At Western,
it is only in the less secure positions of Lecturer and Instructor that
the representation of women outnumbers the representation of men (Figure
3). Women are, indeed, in the system. Men just seem more likely
to “get somewhere.” The report notes that “…women at the Associate
Professor and Full Professor ranks are underrepresented at Western, in
comparison to other Ontario universities.” The difficulties filter
down to our graduate programs as well. Note that “in general, Ontario
universities have graduated slightly higher annual proportions of women
PhDs than has Canada, whereas Western has not matched the Canadian average
in the period since 1991” (9). We’re not doing as well as our competitors.
Finally, I must take issue
with Professor Seligman’s charge that I, and PSCEE, have an “ideologically-based
conviction that Western is a hotbed of discrimination against women.”
That is simply not true. I was pointing out that our compliance with
the Federal Contractors Program requirements is in jeopardy, and that,
like it or not, that could have grave consequences for the University’s
federal funding. It is in jeopardy because we appear not to be doing
as well as our counterparts in addressing equity issues.
If, as Professor Seligman
believes that data show, our efforts to hire women have started to pay
off over the past 8 years, I suggest that we redouble them so that we can
be competitive with those institutions to which we like to compare ourselves.
Let’s remember too that employment equity involves more than just hiring,
and more than just women. Retention and the generation of strong
and diverse applicant pools are other issues that need our attention.
Tracy Isaacs, President,
Western’s Caucus on Women’s Issues.
January 30, 2003
The theme of the recent report
of the President’s Standing Committee on Employment Equity goes something
like this: “Yes, yes, Western discriminates against women. We admit it.
We will fix the problem. We will purify the institution. We will become
diverse!” When confronted with clear evidence that Western
does not actually discriminate against women, the celebrants of guilt respond
with incredulity, obfuscation, confusion, and moral obtuseness, proving
once again that you can’t teach a spent ideologue new tricks.
Earlier (November 21), I
reported data that showed that female applicants for faculty positions
at Western were about twice as likely as male applicants to be hired: 5.4%
vs. 2.9%, respectively. Because female applicants have a higher hiring
rate than male applicants, the data explicitly refute the claim that female
applicants have faced discrimination by hiring committees at Western.
Yet, Letitia Meynell (December
5) and Tracy Isaacs (December 12) refused to accept this conclusion, and
continued to argue for their ‘ideological belief’ that women (and not men)
are discriminated against at Western. Their arguments contain several logical
errors:
First, they failed to make
the distinction between the phenomenon to be explained (i.e., there are
fewer women than men currently employed as faculty at Western) and the
explanation for it. The observation that there are fewer women than
men currently on the faculty (or at different ranks) can not be used logically
as evidence for discrimination against women in hiring. There are
many possible explanations for this gender gap other than discrimination,
in particular, many fewer women than men have applied for faculty positions.
Second, they misunderstood
the difference between the current hiring rate and the current faculty
composition. The hiring rate is informative about possible discrimination
in yearly hiring. The current faculty composition is a result of
the past 35 years of hiring decisions that were limited by the low numbers
of female applicants. The percentage of women currently employed
says nothing about the validity of the current hiring rate, which demonstrates
there is no discrimination against female applicants.
Third, they are confused
about the appropriate baseline to use to judge the fairness of Western’s
hiring procedures. At different points in their letters, they
use baselines that vary from the percentage of women in the population
(about 50%), of new PhDs (about 35%), and of faculty at other Ontario universities.
None of these statistics tells us anything about whether Western discriminates
in hiring, because Western can only hire from the
pool of women who apply for positions here.
Women consistently make up only about a quarter of the applicants at Western.
The only way to move Western
to the 50% population or the 35% new-PhD baseline is to disproportionately
hire women relative to their representation in the applicant pool, which
is precisely what has been done in every year since at least 1987-1988,
when Western began keeping records.
A recent COMPAS poll reported
that 85% of Canadians reject using sex and race as criteria in hiring decisions.
Yet Isaacs and Meynell, while professing a deep concern with morality and
justice, insistently advocate that Western continue to discriminate
against male applicants to achieve diversity. Apparently, Isaacs, Meynell
and Western’s Caucus on Women’s Issues believe that achieving (their version
of) diversity is a more important principle than treating applicants fairly
based on their individual qualifications. We should not be
too surprised. George Orwell pointed out long ago that some ideas
are so foolish that only an intellectual would believe them.
Clive Seligman, Department
of Psychology, University of Western Ontario.
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