Women: Still Unequal

"Women have intellectual abilities equal to men's." With that ringing truism, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education last week launched its latest report, Opportunities for Women in Higher Education. "What a great start!" muttered one of the reporters assembled at a press conference in Boston. The commission's chairman, Clark Kerr, was unruffled. "We know that, of course," he said, "but we had to make the statement because not all men accept it."

Begun nearly three years ago, the 282-page report has "more basic information and better statistics" than any of the commission's 19 previous studies, says Kerr, former president of the University of California. Women continue to constitute "the largest unused supply of superior intelligence in the United States." With each step up the academic ladder, their participation decreases. Women are 50.4% of high school graduates, 43% of college graduates, but only 13% of those receiving doctorates. Less than one-fourth of all college-level faculty members are women, only 8.6% full professors. The gap between the sexes in faculty salaries for comparable positions averages $1,500 to $2,000 a year.

The remedy, says the commission, is nothing less than the removal of "all improper barriers to the advancement of women; an active search for their talents; and a special consideration of their problems and for their contributions." This means change at every level, from more math for schoolgirls (so they can enter science and engineering programs in college) to tenure for part-time faculty women (so they can combine careers and families).

Distressing Aspect. The most controversial conclusion of the commission's report may be its endorsement, after a decade of increasing coeducation, of women's colleges. "All the Carnegie reports have favored diversity, not homogeneity, in American higher education," says Kerr, "but we have found special advantages in these schools for women." The report cites recent research which shows that a high proportion of successful women are graduates of single-sex colleges. In such institutions, they tend to speak up more in class, hold more positions of leadership, and have more women teachers and administrators to emulate. At women's colleges students also are more likely to enter such traditionally "male" fields as science. Recalling his own college days at coed Swarthmore, Kerr said, "We men felt the girls there were brighter than we were, but we felt the girls at Bryn Mawr were even brighter."

What Kerr calls "the most distressing aspect of this report" is the commission's estimate that women cannot possibly achieve academic equality "until about the year 2000." Today, when new college teachers are still being hired, there are not enough women available with the right training. In the '80s sagging enrollments will reduce the need for new professors, and "pressing for more women faculty will be like pressing for more women conductors on passenger trains." Not until the 1990s, when enrollments are expected to rise again, can women really expect to catch up. Says the commission, "This is a task for a generation of effort."

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