Letitia Meynell

Letter to the Editor

Data Ignored

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 that 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

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