Crashing the top

Some of the critics of the MIT report argue that what gender inequality, if any, remains in the academy merely reflects women's personal choices -- perhaps they wanted to be less career-driven, to take time off to raise children. But that doesn't explain why the women who have pursued full-time careers still meet discrimination. There are many factors at work in today's sometimes embattled, ever more profit- and prestige-conscious elite universities, factors that shape women's (and men's) careers in a variety of ways. Yet among them is surely the old gender pattern sociologists identify as "feminization," the shift from a largely male to a largely female work force, and its consequences. Greater numbers do not necessarily spell increased equality, especially when the group in question is female.

When "feminization" has occurred in the past, notably in elementary school teaching, the result has been a loss for the occupation in pay and status. Women move into male territory only to find that its occupants abandon it rather than share it with women, and they take their privileges with them. In such situations, female failure becomes a consequence of female success. A feminist journal of the 1970s summed up this dynamic: "Women Get a Ticket to Ride After the Gravy Train Has Left the Station."

The elite academy, however, presents a critical new variation in the feminization pattern. Gifted 19th century male elementary and high school teachers, unhappy with the growing number of women in their ranks, could aspire up to the all-male world of the richest private colleges and universities. But if the elite institutions are themselves overrun with women, where can the most distinguished men go? The backlash today against women in the top-level universities is intense, though unacknowledged, precisely because the stakes are so high. And if obvious discrimination is in theory prohibited, mistreatment less accessible to legal remedy can accomplish the same end.

Nancy Hopkins' awakening didn't come when she discovered how much lower her salary was than those of her male peers ("it was my fault," she remembers thinking; "I'd never asked about salaries"), but when a male colleague in effect took over a course that she had been teaching. She sought redress, only to realize that the rules were one thing, the practice something else. As Anne McClintock, a pioneer in gender studies at the University of Wisconsin, told me, "The decisions that really matter are made outside the democratic process."

The right of faculty women to be in the elite academy is no longer at issue. But their authority, their ability to lead in both the scholarly and administrative realms -- particularly in areas that have traditionally been all-male preserves -- is on occasion not only challenged but actively undermined. One female professor quit her tenured job at an Ivy League university after watching two female colleagues of unimpeachable intellectual and moral standing in important administrative positions be stripped of their power and accused of unethical conduct. Watching this "torture," as she put it, brought her to "a level of despondency about which I could do almost nothing." "I don't want to do bitter," she told me. "Not if I have a choice. So I ran away." She was fortunate enough to be offered a post at another top university.

Another scholar was forced out of a departmental chairmanship by an all-male administration that sided with a hostile male colleague, who had campaigned to turn her colleagues and students against her. Despite the fact that the male scholar was widely recognized as unstable, she says, the administration treated her adversary like "a sick but brilliant brother they were going to take care of at all costs."

According to another female scholar, "even when the man making the charges is less valuable than the woman he accuses, shoring up male camaraderie at the center takes precedence over the well-being of the institution." An Ivy League administrator, reminiscing about a moment when she horrified her male superiors by demanding "a penis salary, not a vagina salary" for a post she wanted to fill (the spot remained vacant), explained that women have to "stroke the fellas to get something done. Anything else, and you're a bitch. If you want to complain, you can't, because you're always going to be complaining to a man, since you wind up going to that level, and the man will side with the men." As Elaine Combs-Schilling, an anthropologist at Columbia, notes: "Power flows around the woman in a leadership position, never through her."

In my own department at Columbia, though there are significantly more women than men at the graduate-student and junior-professor levels, tenured men still outnumber women by over 4-1. Behind the surface rhetoric of equality, old attitudes lie in wait, and sometimes manifest themselves in ugly and disturbing forms. A personal example:

Last winter, I was asked to poll my department as part of the process of electing our next chair. The results, which favored a brilliant and feminist candidate, were unwelcome to a small group of senior men who had the (all-male) administration's ear in a way that the departmental majority (which in this instance included most of the department's women, minority group members and faculty under 40) did not. One of these male colleagues accused me of falsifying the polling; the poll was declared invalid, and, for various reasons, the female candidate withdrew.

I was devastated. How could men who had worked with me for a quarter-century not know that I would never tamper with the democratic procedures on which all my hopes for progress depend? Success, it turns out, seldom shields women from injustice, though it sometimes protects their male colleagues from the consequences of unjust acts.

There are, of course, women at Columbia and elsewhere who believe that gender is not a decisive factor in their careers, and certainly not a reliable basis of identification among complex and varied human beings. This is a respect-worthy position, one that the academy -- like many workplaces -- often rewards highly. Nancy Hopkins remembers avoiding one early feminist organizer lest she anger the men in her department or be distracted from her research. Yet ultimately, the burden of "living alone with discrimination" proved too heavy for Hopkins. After years of silence, she began to talk to other faculty women about how she felt. When they said, not, as she feared, "You're crazy!" but rather, "Me, too," her life changed, and she took the actions that led to the MIT study. The task force succeeded, Hopkins believes, because the women involved operated like "a school of fish, doing everything by consensus."

Today, MIT's administrators are justly proud of the steps they have taken to end gender discrimination, which include equalizing salaries and hiring nine new faculty women in the School of Science. In fact, what these women asked for was good for their institution as well as themselves. As Susanna Cole, a senior at Brown, observes, when universities recruit female students and faculty, they usually "promise them an environment in which women will be equal. If it's not there, they're lying," and sooner or later, lies have consequences.

When I asked the faculty women I interviewed what motivated them today, they spoke of their work and their teaching. Research in biology remains "the most interesting thing in the world" to Nancy Hopkins. "The students make my heart sing," Elaine Combs-Schilling said. But they also spoke of the challenge of still feeling like pioneers in mostly male worlds. "These institutions are still a frontier for women," said Jean Howard. "Someone has to fight the battle in the Ivy League."

For me, it's worth fighting. I still believe with all my heart in what my great Harvard teacher Perry Miller called "the life of the mind," the gold-rush kingdom of first strikes and second chances. Its sole prerequisite is freedom; its only law, democracy.

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