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Clive Seligman
Claim unsupported
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