Access to SU ADVANCE's "The Gendered Academy and Seattle University" can be found here: SU ADVANCE White Paper - Gendered Academy Final.

 

Overt gendered discrimination has plagued American institutions of higher education since their inception. Some institutions have experienced more, some less, but none has been exempt. In this, the academy reflects the larger sociocultural and political economic contexts of which it is a part, contexts that also are riddled with gendered biases and inequities. Reports, articles, and associated interventions situated within institutions of higher education have spent decades attempting to grapple with and resolve gendered inequities affecting faculty and students alike. The MIT reports of the mid- to late-1990s (see MIT Faculty Newsletter 1999) are well-known examples, in which high-ranking and mostly male administrators talked – often in tones of appalled amazement – about the issues facing women faculty in STEM fields at MIT. Gendered discrimination, as the MIT authors noted twenty years ago, can be overt: a woman engineer, for example, being told that she just can’t think as logically as a man. In 2019, however, gender bias in the academy often manifests in more subtle ways, which are more difficult to track. Both overt and subtle forms of gender bias remain deeply entrenched, however, inside and outside the academy. The result: women working across diverse professions in the US today, including within higher education, don’t advance in their careers at the same rate as do men, and are systematically less rewarded for their work.