Harriet King, vice provost for academic affairs, and Susan Frost, director of Institutional Planning and Research, attended the meeting to provide a historical perspective on how data on women faculty has been collected, managed and disseminated, and to determine which aspects of women faculty's professional lives at Emory are most critical for evaluating the overall status of women faculty at the University.
Frost said her offices faces some fundamental problems in collecting such data, such as the varying definition of what constitutes a faculty member across the colleges and schools. In some professional schools, for example, certain librarians may be considered faculty members. She also said that different units of the University assign different status to part-time, visiting and adjunct faculty. Frost said that obtaining a University-wide consensus on defining who should be counted as a faculty member would significantly advance her efforts in monitoring the status of women faculty as a group.
Several Commission members said they would like to see data that go beyond the raw numbers of how many women faculty are hired and how many leave the University within a given year. The group would like to see data whose collection and management requires more sophisticated techniques, such as how many women candidates are brought to campus for interviews and what proportion of them are ultimately hired, how many junior faculty leave before receiving tenure and why did they leave, how many faculty appointments are the result of a search as opposed to an administrative decision, and an evaluation of Emory pay scales within disciplines and between comparable disciplines.
King said she has been involved in several discussions about forming a University-wide group with representation from the Commission and a number of other bodies to unify the efforts being made in areas such as faculty hiring, mentoring and retention. "These issues will not drop by the wayside," King assured the Commission at the end of the discussion.
In other business, Chandra Edgar of the Staff Concerns Committee announced that the committee will sponsor a booth on safety issues at a Health Awareness Fair set for Wednesday, April 12. Edgar said that vendors will display safety-related products and be available to talk with Emory community members about those products. Last fall, the Staff Concerns Committee identified safety as its primary focus for the year.
--Dan Treadaway