Women
hold fewer high positions
By Alexis Kindig
On-line Forty-Niner
Female
students outnumber males by a wide margin,
according to a report by Cal State Long
Beach’s Institutional Research. However,
this trend is not reflected in the high
faculty offices and administration positions
at CSULB.
The survey, conducted last October, shows
that female students make up roughly 60
percent of the total student body, with
a similar proportion in each class division.
The following is the breakdown of the survey:
•
Lower division: 6,380 women (62.8 percent),
3,781 men (37.2 percent)
•
Upper division: 9,671 women (56.4 percent),
7,473 men (43.6 percent)
•
Graduate students: 2,106 women (60.2 percent),
1,394 men (39.8 percent)
Only
19 of the 59 academic departments at CSULB
are chaired by women, according to information
provided by Academic Personnel.
Toni Beron, vice president of public affairs,
said it is hard to say how many women would
normally be part of the administration,
due to recent changes that have made temporary
positions necessary. However, more men than
women are in administration.
The departments that are chaired by women
tend to be in areas that deal with the arts
or society, such as film and electronic
arts, dance, nursing, philosophy, history,
and family and consumer sciences. Sharyn
Blumenthal, Judy Allen, Loucine Huckabay,
Julie Van Camp, Sharon Sievers and Sue Stanley
chair these departments, respectively.
The exceptions are computer engineering
and computer sciences, and biological sciences,
chaired by Sandra Cynar and Laura Kingsford.
Van Camp, professor and chair of philosophy,
said that in CSULB’s 53-year history “the
department of philosophy has been chaired
by only two women — the late Virginia Ringer,
who chaired the department in the 1970s
and died in1991, and me.”
The department has only had three tenured
women: herself, Ringer and Cheryl Clark,
who retired in the summer of 2000, Van Camp
said. Currently, the philosophy department
has one female tenure-track assistant professor.
Van Camp said that when she was a student
at Mt. Holyoke College, a women’s college,
it never occurred to her that philosophy
was a male-dominated field. Later, when
she was in graduate school at Temple University,
only two out of 20 tenured or tenure-track
faculty were women, and only two out of
10 doctoral students in her class were female.
“The sad fact remains that when you are
female in a mostly male discipline and department,
as I am, the men just aren’t used to working
with and for women. We are still an oddity,
a token,” Van Camp said.
She said she tries to be a role model and
a reassurance to her female students. She
remembers her female professors in the ’70s
were for her, but adds that she wishes she
“didn’t feel like such a token at this stage
of [her] career and in the year 2002.”
Van Novack, director of Institutional Research,
offers some explanation for the trends seen
on campus. He said that the population gap
between male and female students, which
is a national trend, may be due to the fact
that male high school graduates have more
job opportunities that do not require degrees
than females do. These jobs include construction,
sales and military service.
Novack said the gap probably has less to
do with academic success than may be supposed.
Novack said it is true that female high
school students tend to have better grade
point averages than their male counterparts,
while males tend to do better on standardized
tests.
CSULB received 15,520 applications this
semester from women and 9,357 from men,
Novack said. Nearly 64 percent of this year’s
incoming freshmen are female, he said.
The fact that men outnumber women in high
faculty positions is a phenomenon largely
due to tenure, Novack said.
Full-time professors and chairpersons tend
to hold their jobs for a long time and the
preponderance of males is a result of the
days 20 to 30 years ago when almost all
university faculty were male, he said.
The process of integrating women into these
positions is slow but “it’s starting to
catch up,” Novack said.
Novack stressed that the male-to-female
ratio among part-time professors and lecturers
is “about equal.”
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