1973 MEDIAN SALARIES OF FULL-TIME SCIENTISTS AND ENGINEERS

STATEMENT OF JANET WELSH BROWN, OFFICE OF OPPORTUNITIES IN SCIENCE, AMERICAN ASSOCIATION FOR THE ADVANCEMENT OF SCIENCE

As Director of the Office of Opportunities in Science of the American Association for the Advancement of Science want to offer to the Special Sub-Committee on Education some of my experience that testifies to the importance of affirmative action regulations in achieving equal opportunity for women and minorities, including minority women.

The Office of Opportunities in Science is part of the AAAS, a huge professional association which has more than 126,000 members and 283 affiliated societies and state academies of science. As part of our responsibility for increasing the numbers and improving the status of minorities and women in the sciences, we have had ample opportunity to see how affirmative action works. After two years of experience in trying to achieve equal educational and employment opportunities, I am very firmly convinced of the necessity for strong affirmative action regulations and enforcement.

This office receives literally hundreds of requests for information on minority and women scientists, not only from prospective employers but from leaders in science who seek to include women and minorities in their committees, symposia, research and other professional activities. I can assure you from working extensively with these gentlemen that the likelihood of most of them making such efforts without the pressure of affirmative action regulations is nil. Most caucasian men of science have little awareness or interest in the problems. If this were not so we would not have so disgraceful an underutilization of women and minorities in U.S. science.

Without federal leadership the situation has actually worsened over the years. The enclosed chart shows that the percentage of women doctorates graduated in the 1920s was higher than that of the 1960s in all fields. Likewise, the percentage of black doctorates decreased in the decade of the 1960s-a decade remarkable for its educational and scientific expansion, and presumably of progress for black Americans.

Recently the professional societies have established commissions on the status of women and/or minorities in the profession. Every one of them reveals the same pattern: the women and minorities receive proportionately fewer admissions and fellowships to graduate school; they seldom get the choice post-doctoral appointments; they are found in greatest numbers in the lower ranks, in the less prestigious institutions, carrying the heavier course loads, enjoying fewer benefits and less security. They are paid less than men in every field. It is quite clear that the very persons who attack the principle of affirmative action are the very persons who built and would perpetuate this terrible record.

I can further testify from direct and extensive experience that the "top men in the field" do not know "all the good people in the field" and that "qualified" women and minorities do exist-contrary to the allegations of Professor Richard Lester in his latest, most unscientific publication on affirmative action, Antibias Regulation of Universities. Time and again I have brought to the attention of such people the existence of highly qualified minority and women scientists with specific areas of expertise. These women and minorities tend to have been overlooked by their employers, colleagues, editors and professional societies in which they have played only a token role. They are often not listed in the prestigious American Men and Women of Science. Most academic administrators do not know of their existence and would not be looking at all were it not for the federal affirmative action requirements.

Please do not allow the Sub-Committee to be used for an attack on affirmative action, the most positive and intrinsically American concept to be developed in a long time. "Reverse discrimination" is a bogey man thought up by men who have guilty consciences and feel threatened. Never has a case been proven. It is hard to find jobs these days in many fields and unscrupulous employers are sometimes not above using "affirmative action" as an excuse for not hiring men they would not have hired anyway. The unemployment rate for women is still higher than for men in all the sciences. They and the minority professionals must not once again be made to bear the brunt of national economic difficulties under the guise of non-existent "reverse discrimination."

43-979 O 75 pt. 2B 33

TESTIMONY BY LILLI S. HORNIG, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, HIGHER EDUCATION

RESOURCE SERVICES, BROWN UNIVERSITY

Mr. Chairman and Members of the Subcommittee: I am most appreciative of the opportunity to present my analysis of the impact, effectiveness, and administrative problems of Affirmative Action programs in postsecondary institutions to this distinguished Subcommittee. This is particularly true because my views are seriously at variance with other testimony furnished, for example, by Ms. Lucy Sells; I intend to present evidence to amend that record.

My own concern with the employment problems of academic women dates back many years to when I first became a member of a university faculty. I have been in constant touch with these problems since then, as a senior faculty member and department chairperson, as Executive Director of Higher Education Resource Services at Brown University, and as Chairperson of the Committee

on the Education and Employment of Women in Science and Engineering of the Commission for Human Resources in the National Research Council. My overview of the field has been broad in all these activities, and I have an intimate knowledge of faculty hiring practices. My concern with the employment problems of academic women has become much more intense during the last two and a half years while I have directed Higher Education Resource Services. The prime charge of this office is to expand and improve the employment opportunities for women in academic careers. In the course of this work we have dealt with the faculty and administrative personnel needs of well over two hundred institutions of higher education, about one-tenth of the total number in this country. They represent nearly every state and certainly every type of institution-public, private, sectarian, community colleges to the largest universities, and include almost all of the "elite" institutions. We have thus gained some unique insight into the hiring practices of a group of colleges and universities which, because they are so varied and include nearly all of the large state systems, constitute perhaps half of the total higher education effort. This unusual overview has led us to a number of conclusions concerning the necessity for and effectiveness of Affirmative Action programs.

Let me comment first on the need for these programs. There is solid evidence that without a legal mandate forcing postsecondary institutions to provide equal employment opportunity for women as well as minorities, no such efforts would have been undertaken. The proportion of faculty posts held by women had dropped steadily from the 1920's until 1972; even during the 60's, the decade of great expansion of faculties, opportunities for women decreased. In the past few years a great many professional societies and a large number of universities have established commissions on the status of women in the various professions and on faculties; without exception, their studies demonstrate shocking underutilization of highly trained women. Not only are women underrepresented on faculties in relation to their presence in the doctorate pool, but they are predominantly hired at lower ranks and denied opportunities for advancement. At leading universities at most 2-3% of senior faculty are women, although women in the relevant age groups earned 15-20% of the doctorates. Unemployment among women PhD's is significantly higher than among men.

Only a year ago the American Council on Education studied the salaries of men and women on academic faculties and found that, averaged across all institutions, all ranks, and all disciplines, women were paid 17% less than men; the differential was considerably greater in some institutions.

For many years, educational institutions also acted deliberately to deny women access to the advanced training which would prepare them for faculty positions and other professional careers. Law and medical schools maintained strict and disproportionately low quotas for the admission of women; graduate schools discriminated against them in admissions, fellowships, and support services such as career development.

It is difficult to believe that these problems existed as part of the natural order of things; they were created by the deliberate exclusionary policies of the institutions. It is equally difficult to believe that these glaring inequities and the attendant shocking waste of human-and financial resources would have been corrected by voluntary action on the part of the institutions.

The reason for my skepticism on this score is that the administrations and senior faculties of most major institutions have vigorously resisted implementation of Affirmative Action plans, either overtly or covertly. Their objections have rested on two types of arguments: (1) that the selection and promotion of faculty members is traditionally conducted by a system of peer review within the profession, is based exclusively on merit, and is therefore non-discriminatory by its very nature, and (2) that the requirement to hire women and minority candidates in proportion to their presence in the relevant labor pools is based on an industrial model not applicable to the academic environment and will result in a reduction in quality of faculties.

Both of these arguments are open to very serious question. While it is true that the traditional faculty selection system of peer review is based on merit, the people who are seen to posses merit have been almost exclusively white males; women and minorities were by and large simply excluded from consideration on the basis of sex or race, without regard to merit at all. In fact the operation of this system has been more like that of a private club than of truly professional selection: the people who were eligible for consideration on merit had to possess prior qualifications of race and sex. The system has long been known succinctly as the old-boy network. In practice it meant that when a faculty appointment was to be made, the senior members of a department would inquire of their

friends in other institutions who their "best man" was; a short list of candidates resulted, and from it the man who best fitted the particular requirements of the position was chosen. It should be pointed out that this process discriminated not only against women-who would nominate a woman when asked who his best man is?-but it also discriminated strongly against men who were not already at prestige institutions. Prior to World War II it discriminated almost totally against Jews.

The important point to bear in mind about the academic profession is that traditionally it has not been one which granted open access to all aspirants. Rather, membership was by invitation only. At least at the leading institutions, the ones who set the pace for the whole profession, no positions were ever openly advertised and no search procedures were carried out in public. Likely candidates for future academic careers were identified by their professors in graduate school, and ultimately recommended by them for suitable academic openings. At later stages in their careers, the protegees of already prominent professors were invariably the ones appointed to the best positions. Women and minorities were never members of the club, either in graduate schools or later, and therefore had virtually no access to faculty careers. If they were hired by colleges and universities at all, it was by relatively low-prestige institutions and in inferior positions, and they had to beg for employment in a field where jobs were conferred on their male white colleagues by a "grace and favor" system. The second argument of the opponents of Affirmative Action, that the requirement for setting hiring goals in proportion to the presence of women and minorities in the relevant labor pool (the doctorate population in a given field) will result in a reduction in quality, is as invalid as the first. Indeed, there is every reason to believe that the opposite is true. The reason for this is that just because of previous discrimination, which imposed much stricter criteria for admission to and successful completion of advanced training on women than on men, the women were more highly selected. On the average, then, those women who do complete advanced training would be expected to be more able than the average male PhD, and indeed a number of studies substantiate this fact. The actual implementation and administration of the Affirmative Action programs designed to remedy the problems I have outlined have given rise to a good deal of controversy which is the basis of the present hearings. On the one hand there have been charges of inefficiency, ineptitude, inconsistency, and unwarranted interference with intra-institutional affairs against the Office of Civil Rights in HEW and the various regional branches. On the other hand there have also been charges of continued discriminatory practices, unresponsiveness, evasion, and general foot-dragging on the part of universities. I would like to comment on these points in some deail, based primarily on evidence obtained by our office since 1972.

It is certainly true that the administration of the Higher Education Guidelines by HEW regional offices has been often inconsistent, generally inefficient, and sometimes inept. The administrative history of all legislation and regulations prohibiting sex discrimination (Title VII of the 1964 Civil Rights Act, the 1971 amendments to the Public Health Service Act, the Equal Pay Act, the Education Amendments Act of 1972, Executive Order 11246 as amended, and Revised Order No. 4, in addition to the Higher Education Guidelines) has been marked by delay, inaction, confusion and simple non-enforcement. A nationwide class action complaint on grounds of sex discrimination was filed against all colleges and universities by the Women's Equity Action League in January 1970, and similar charges were brought against Harvard University by the National Organization for Women at that time. In April of that year a compliance review was begun at Harvard, the first to be conducted anywhere, thus making it a landmark case. More than three years later, in July 1973, Harvard finally submitted an Affirmative Action plan which was eventually accepted by the Regional Civil Rights Director in November 1973.

Such protracted delays have been typical of both the administration of sexdiscrimination regulations by HEW and of the responses to complaints and compliance reviews by academic institutions. HEW Regional Offices have typically been sloppy in following their own procedures, often neglecting to notify an institution when a complaint is filed and giving insufficient notice of impending compliance review. There is no uniformity whatsoever among the Regional Offices in setting standards for the kinds of information institutions must furnish either during compliance reviews or in Affirmative Action plans. When an institution does file a plan, it frequently receives no written response whatever either acceptance or rejection or even a Letter of Findings. A case in point is Brown University, which filed an Affirmative Action plan with the