UCLA professorships still dominated by men
Number of female professors slowly gaining with time
By Patrick Marantal
A first-year student walks into her general chemistry class.
Another student walks into a psychology course in north campus. And
even more students sit in a math class in Boelter Hall.
Whatever the course may be, more often than not the class will
be taught by a male professor, according to figures released by the
Academic Personnel Office.
And students have noticed.
"All my professors have been men. So far, I have only had one
woman as a professor and that was in psychology," said Czarina
Goco, a first-year psychobiology student.
While the number of tenured and nontenured female professors at
the university level has been increasing slowly, men still dominate
a profession which is far from equal, according to the office’s
statistics.
Some experts chalk the disparity up to a manifestation of
traditional gender roles.
"Women are (given) lower pay, lower prestige and lower
resources. Those lower echelons are filled by many women, while
power and money and higher positions are held by men," said
Christine Littleton, professor of law and women’s studies and the
director of the Women’s Studies Center.
The electrical engineering department, for example, has been
dominated by men for several years. During the 1993-94 school year,
there were 33 male professors and only one female professor in that
department, a figure that has not changed since.
In English, a department women tend to gravitate toward in
greater numbers, male professors still outnumber female professors
by nearly two to one in the totals of both tenures and nontenured
professors.
Theories as to the reasons behind the differing gender
breakdowns between the departments range from structural to
cultural. Some assert that unequal treatment in the past has
hindered female advancement in the current system; the growing
trend of increased female promotion is only a recent
occurrence.
Others speculate that women shy away from areas that have been
traditionally regarded as masculine fields.
"Gender stereotyping of fields, lower expectations placed upon
women, and the lesser resources granted to females influence which
fields candidates enter and how they will do," Littleton said.
Many science-oriented fields are dominated by male professors to
a larger extent than their north campus counterparts. In the life
sciences division of the College of Letters and Science, there are
nearly three male professors for every female professor.
The same cannot be said for the physical sciences. Instead,
there are 172 male professors and 17 female professors.
Historically, many of the initial entrances into various fields
by women were the humanities and arts, leaving the sciences to
men.
"A lot of sciences tend to be significantly imbalanced. You will
probably see in the humanities division a softening of that. Still,
a lot of departments are under parity," Littleton said.
Some students agreed with the idea that different majors have
different gender-specific stereotypes.
"Probably women would be more into the humanities and the arts
while men would enter math and science areas," said Carrie White, a
first-year English student.
However male professors still outnumber women two to one in the
humanities division of Letters and Science. The numbers are almost
equal to the ratios found among the science-oriented fields.
The figures for the humanities division reveal that disparities
among professors cut across all university departments. In total,
there are 1,236 male professors and 343 female professors working
on campus for the 1995-96 school year. Some departments have little
or no female professors at all, while others have many women, yet
are still dominated by males.
In spite of these figures, many hope that the future will
provide a change to these gender differences. Because it takes
approximately eight years to achieve tenure and nearly six more to
become full professors, many perceive that the present increased
enrollment of women in college will eventually result in a gender
balance in many predominantly male areas.
"The percent of women in college has been increasing. It takes
so long to obtain a Ph.D and become a professor, but in 10 years
there may be even amounts of (male and female) professors," said
Gülgün Ugur, a second-year development studies student
and editor in chief of Together, UCLA’s feminist newsmagazine.
Others believe that it takes a single person to start change and
pave the way for future female professors.
"Science is still male-centered. The first females who entered
the department had trouble but more females have entered and made
things easier," said Samantha Gianello, a first-year undeclared
student and a Together editor.
Some theorize that a gender balance will eventually be achieved
among certain majors. For instance, in the English department, of
the 45 tenured professors, 31 are male and 14 are female. But among
non-tenured faculty, the numbers of male and female instructors are
close to equal.
"There has been a real significant change in the English
department over the last 10 years. That’s an area where there is a
hope in achieving significant gender balance," Littleton said.
"Other departments have to change their process significantly to
achieve their balance."
And others mark the figures as a significant victory and as a
sign that the female gender is being given more equal
opportunities.
"The fact is that what has been identified is not a problem but
a beginning to a solution," said Thomas Wortham, a professor and
vice chairman of the English department. "In the past, there were
problems with hiring (but) in each generation of scholars there are
more women."