Statistics Day
October 20 is National Statistics Day, as I was reminded by our partner blog for students (check it out here and recommend it to your student friends!).
I love statistics for their power of showing what people DO as opposed to what they say or what they believe they mean. When I was academic VP at Pomona College, I got the data plots of number of women and minority faculty members in tenure track jobs and overall and how they were changing year by year, annually, and also got plots of their salaries, their research awards, their numbers of students enrolled. I was looking for places where a boost from the administration could help. I also looked for faculty searches where we saw a lot of high quality diverse candidates. After those searches were complete, my Associate Deans and I met with the chairs to find out what they did that worked. We added items to the standard operating procedure like having the chair personally call graduate advisors who had previously recommended strong candidates from places that served a lot of women and minorities. With these enhancements, the period became known (I'm told) as the golden age of increasing faculty diversity here. But the culture faded away as soon as I stepped down as VP. I never forgot the role statistics played in getting a clear understanding of the situations we faced, though.
Have you seen the power of statistics to help women?
A Not really. To collect such statistics is left to the remnants of the Affirmative Action Committee.
B. Yes, sometimes. But women had to demand that they be made available, and the admin tried to make it inconvenient for us to see them.
C. They claimed they couldn't because there were so few women we could identify individual women in the data instead of seeing anonymous data.
D. No evidence anyone cares.
cheers,
Laura
Should we all ask for the statistics just to find out what would happen? Not if they are regularly produced, of course, just if we are in places where no one ever mentions them. Ask, then Tell the world! Cheers,
Laura
I think the stats should be tied to funding. In Jill Ker Conway's autobiography, she had a nice real world discussion of her own experience with statistics in Canada. The statistics were available to people at her level for review and were dutifully collected. No one had ever asked to see them until she came along...sometimes it just takes someone who cares to effect change to use the data already present to drive the process!
A, sorry to say. I wonder if there could be a national movement to ask for the data and then publicize them?
A is about right where I am too. I think the committee here is called the Diversity Committee but it does about what the Affirmative Action Committee used to do. I think they put out a report every year on the percent women, percent minorities. Sometimes they work on retention issues too.
A And now that you mention it, what happened to the affirmative action committee anyway? Is affirmative action illegal or something? Or are the lawyers winning by intimidation when the law has not really changed? I see EEO without AA in a lot of advertised jobs these days.
B for us. I don't think the women's organizations on campus are very active right now. The institutional research team told me that Committee W of the AAUP used to ask for this kind of data every year, but now they only get random requests from individuals.
It turns out to be C. They do collect the information but the average person does not have permission to look at it. I guess government auditors do? Very strange. I bet if I knew a good lawyer, and if I really wanted to, I could pry it loose. But I need a good rec from this postdoc, so I probably won't.
I'm sorry, I really don't know. But I will try to remember to ask at the Women's Center next week and post what I find out. Sounds like something we need to keep track of.
The president's office has a book of data that anyone can go and look at. Various faculty committees investigate treatment of women and minorities and make use of the data. I guess B is the closest answer. Did you assume no place did it right, Laura? Funny! but sad...
D I'd be willing to bet that places like Princeton where a woman scientist is the President would really make good use of such statistics. Here, sadly, they are filed and gather dust.
A at my grad institution. Statistics are gathered and ignored to this date. C. at my postdoc institution. They gathered the data but wouldn't show it to anyone. It also made the administration look really bad...We gathered the same info for the postdocs and sorted by gender and saw a significant difference in the pay even at that level. The situation was even worse for international vs. domestic postdocs. We had enough information to show that you really got hurt by being a woman AND international...we showed it and asked for change and were ignored. Postdocs are trainees and thus their pay is not the business of the university. All very sad.
Now at my company they collect statistics and if ANYTHING is trending according to a protected characteristic, there is a meeting to correct it immediately. Quite a change!
