Revolt of Faculty Women

How did Academic Women in the 1970s Reverse their Declining Fortunes?

In 1969, women comprised a smaller share of the faculty (3.6%) than they had in 1929 (8.3%); as we explained in an earlier essay, they had been steadily losing ground since 1940. Then suddenly, at that low-point, they began a concerted effort to reverse the decline. A new organization called the Women’s Faculty Group devised a plan that would bring about deep and lasting changes to the university as a whole, not just to faculty women. Beginning as an attempt to assess and improve the status of academic women, their efforts caused major reforms. UC altered its personnel policies in hiring and promoting faculty, research, and administrative staff; improvements were made in graduate-student selection, fellowship support, employment, and departmental cultures; and the relation between the university and the state and federal governments also changed. The Women’s Faculty Group motivated the legal and procedural methods that would alter the faculty’s gender proportions from 3.6% female in 1969 to 34.4% fifty years later. The consequences for the university’s culture continue to ramify. 

To be sure, faculty women were not the only people advocating gender change on campus. Graduate students were beginning to form women’s caucuses, which worked to insure equitable admissions standards, fellowship, and teaching assignments, while also lobbying for courses in which women’s accomplishments, experiences, obstacles, and social roles would be examined. Their efforts would change the curriculum, put pressure on individual departments to hire more women faculty, create entirely new sub-fields in several disciplines, and stimulate interdisciplinary research and teaching. Several essays on our website document the activities of that younger generation of aspiring academic women.   

The women’s movement of the seventies, though, was comprised of more than one generation; nationally as well as locally, it was a partnership of established professionals and younger people, who had only recently graduated from college (Freeman, 796-8). This essay will concentrate on the faculty women who worked to bring change both inside the institution’s official channels and outside, through the proliferating networks of feminist organizations. They had arrived in academia under the old dispensation of routine sexual discrimination, so they understood how difficult it would be to extirpate. From our historical perch, it may look as though the change was inevitable. But they were at the low point of a long decline, the way up did not look easy, and they nevertheless built the steps that the rest of us climbed.   

Phase I: Planning to Raise the Status of Academic Women 

The Women’s Faculty Group, which took its name from its meeting place in the Women’s Faculty Club, included various kinds of academic women: researchers, lecturers, and even some advanced graduate students, as well as a few women among the professorial ranks. It was founded at the beginning of 1969, as the offshoot of a group that had been meeting since the spring of 1968. Two of its founding members—Statistician Elizabeth Scott and Law Professor Herma Hill Kay—were among those invited by the UC President’s office to meet and discuss remedies for the nation’s “urban crisis”, a topic that President Charles Hitch had proposed as a university-wide research project after Martin Luther King, Jr.’s assassination and the ensuing civil unrest in the spring of 1968. The dozen women who met that summer were interested in tackling the problem of inequality through public education, and their discussion turned specifically to the educational handicaps of women and girls. The group had an impressively wide range of non-ladder-ranked researchers and lecturers in fields related to public policy: higher-education planning, bio-chemistry and medicine, and industrial relations. Their train of thought about educational reform soon encountered the question of why there were so few faculty women at Berkeley and such low numbers of women in the academic graduate programs. In order to answer those questions as well as to bring pressure on the university to increase women’s participation, they formed a separate group, the Women’s Faculty Group. The WFG thus began by investigating the problems of a disadvantaged racial minority and soon discovered that the group to which they belonged was also hindered by bias (Golbeck, 5-15). 

Their trajectory was common in the late 1960s; women working on civil-rights issues noticed that they were seldom recognized as people who also suffered from discrimination. For example, the main national women’s coalitions—the National Organization for Women and the Women’s Equity Action League—had formed in 1966 and 67 to counter the refusal by federal officials to protect the employment rights of women under the Equal Employment Opportunity Plan (Freeman, 798-9). The national organizations would eventually become involved in the Berkeley effort, so a brief sketch of their emergence can help us to understand the local story. Many of the national leaders had been included in JFK’s 1961 President’s Commission on the Status of Women, which put out a report (American Women, 1963) showing how many rights and opportunities women still lacked; their report especially focused on legal and economic handicaps. However, even after discrimination in women’s employment became an official civil rights issue, with the 1964 addition of the category “sex” to Title VII of the Civil Rights Act, there was still reluctance on the part of most federal agencies to enforce the rules for women. In 1967, an additional Executive Order, 1375, was signed, which made federal contractors, including universities, more accountable to federal anti-bias rules than they had been previously. The Order specifically forbade “federal contractors” from practicing bias (including sexual bias) in hiring, and it mandated that they “adopt and implement ‘affirmative action programs’ to promote attainment of equal employment objectives” (Kay and Green, 1063). One of the national women’s organizations—Women’s Equity Action League—began using the new Order in 1970 to file complaints with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare against numerous universities, few of which by that point had taken any affirmative action plans to insure gender equity in hiring. In 1971—a year after members of Berkeley’s Women’s Faculty Group had released a study of the campus’s hiring record—WEAL filed a complaint against both the UC system as a whole and the California State University System. 

In 1968, the women who would make up Berkeley’s Women’s Faculty Group could see that academic women were seldom hired in regular faculty positions, but they had no overview of the history of academic women’s employment on campus. In an earlier essay we explained the causes of the steady shrinkage of the proportion of women on the faculty during the 1950s and 60s. While it was occurring, however, no one called attention to the decrease (Page-Medrich, 16-24). And the first mention of the systematic exclusion of women from the faculty seems to have been made in the context of the postwar academic labor shortage, rather than in any concern about discrimination. In 1958, the Letters & Sciences Dean asked departments whether, when facing recruiting problems, they might “consider hiring qualified women if no men were available” (Seaborg, 282). Bio-Chemistry and Zoology both indicated that they wouldn’t, but even more revelatory is the phrasing of the question: not “will you hire well-qualified women?” but “if no men are available, would you consider hiring well qualified women?” The question assumed that men will, of course, be preferred over women, and that departments need not even consider women applicants if hirable men have applied. Bias against women wasn’t hidden; it was just so deeply ingrained that it went without saying. Nor was the very low percentage of women on the faculty entirely unknown. When in 1959 Professor Catherine Landreth, then in Home Economics, suggested to Chancellor Seaborg that “the role of women in the university” be systematically studied, because the issues “must be faced up to in the near future”, nothing was done (Seaborg, 283). When in 1960, the Chancellor responded to a questionnaire on the “nation’s intellectual force”, he easily laid his hands on the statistical information: “Women on the Berkeley faculty. . .accounted for 3.4 percent of the professors, 6.1 percent of the associate professors, 5.5 percent of the assistant professors, and 5.4 percent of the instructors—for an overall total of 4.7 percent women” (Seaborg, 385). But the numbers didn’t seem unusual or surprising enough to merit any comment. 

 grayscale photo of Kay Young in flipped out haircut, abstract patterned blouse, and glasses staring off into the distance

Thus, when the Women’s Faculty Group began examining the history of gender imbalances in academic training and employment, they were almost starting from scratch. Despite the enormity of the research task,though, they were from the outset committed to mobilizing for change in addition to discovering the roots of the problem. In the summer of 1968, when the women were still meeting to discuss the urban crisis, law professor Herma Hill Kay argued vehemently that they should transform themselves from a mere study group into a “pressure group” that could influence campus policy on women. The WFG was the incarnation of that idea. Kay also noted that the Academic Senate could be a vehicle to give their efforts official sanction and greater reach. Since she was serving at the time on the Academic Senate’s Policy Committee, she volunteered to ask for the creation of a Senate subcommittee on the status of academic women. The strategy of action was thus two-pronged. Forming the WFG would give them the opportunity to invite more women into the organization, especially women in the professorial ranks, who could work within the Senate while also coordinating with other women’s advocates (Golbeck, 11-12). Working within the Senate would give them campus-wide contacts and resources as well as the standing and procedural mechanisms to change policies and practices. 

Herma Hill Kay would go on to become one of the nation’s leading scholars on women’s employment discrimination, co-authoring works with Ruth Bader Ginsburg on the topic, and she would remain at the forefront of campus anti-bias activism throughout her 50-year Berkeley career. At the beginning of 1969, she played the crucial role of overseeing the establishment of the Academic Senate’s subcommittee to report on the status of academic women, thereby also creating a dual-organizational framework, comprised of a women’s pressure group (the WFG) and a cadre of ladder faculty working within the Senate. The structure for action was thus her brainchild as well as her institutional invention. Kay recruited anthropologist Elizabeth Colson to chair the Senate subcommittee (Colson, 183), and the appointments of statistics professor Elizabeth Scott (the other full professor on the original urban-crisis panel) and psycholinguist Susan Ervin-Tripp (then in the Rhetoric Department) completed the female majority on the Senate subcommittee. 

Phase II: Researching and Reporting the Status of Academic Women

Herma Hill Kay thus first conceived of the organizational structure for bringing major changes to the lives of women at Berkeley, and the team assembled at the nexus of the institutional juncture she created had just the right combination of talents and dedication to actualize its potential. The key actors in the next phase of the campaign, which included the researching, writing, and release of the subcommittee’s report, were its women members: Colson, Scott, and Ervin-Tripp. The subcommittee also included two men, Sociology Professor Herbert Blumer and Law Professor Frank Newman, but, as Chair Colson later reported, the men left the main work—the collection of data, its analysis, and the writing of the report—to the women, aided by a few advanced graduate students in Sociology (Colson, 184; Golbeck, 212-213). Two of the graduate students also made substantial contributions to the report: Lucy Sells, who had wide knowledge of research in the field because her thesis was on a similar topic, and Arlie Hochschild, who served on the board of the WFG (Golbeck, 212). True to the original plan, the subcommittee women continued to rely on the WFG’s growing network of academic women for advice and information. The dual structure also insured that the three members on the Senate subcommittee would understand and represent the viewpoints of the vast majority of academic women on campus, who were not eligible for Senate membership.   

 grayscale photo of Elizabeth Scott smiling in glasses and looking off into the distanceThe Women’s Faculty Group began its work as the Policy Committee was making its appointments, and Statistics Professor Elizabeth Scott had already taken the lead in gathering data from all of the academic departments by the time the subcommittee convened in May (Golbeck, 214). Once the women were working under the auspices of the Academic Senate, though, their task became easier. The very fact that a Subcommittee on the Status of Academic Women had been appointed signaled that the routinely different treatment of female job candidates was becoming an officially recognized problem rather than a given. Announcing the appointment of the subcommittee—and using information already gleaned by the WFG—the Policy Committee was the first to state the obvious fact, in the spring of 1969, that women were under-represented in academic life: “It is surprising that so few women—only 15 at the present time—achieve the rank of full professor at Berkeley. A relatively small number of women are enrolled in graduate schools on this campus and elsewhere” (quoted in Golbeck, 213). The Academic Senate is the central organ of faculty governance, and since academic hiring and promotions are primarily controlled by the faculty at the departmental level, the Senate’s initiation of an investigation into women’s exclusion was a sign that it was willing to take responsibility for its own gender imbalance. Soon after the subcommittee started its work, moreover, it discovered another indication that the Senate was taking an independent interest in the problem: the Budget Committee (the Senate’s top review body for faculty hiring and promotions) had already started a study of women’s advancement through the professorial ranks, which was sent to new subcommittee (Golbeck, 215). 

The Senate auspices no doubt also encouraged the university administration to help uncover information about the problem. Administrative offices in every corner of the campus shared their records and sometimes prepared reports for the subcommittee. And the Chancellor’s office conducted its own survey on the topic in the summer of 1969, when Vice Chancellor William Bouwsma asked all deans, directors, and department chairs for their views on “the advantages and disadvantages of having women colleagues and their suggestions on how to improve the status of academic women” (quoted in Golbeck, 216). The carefully non-judgmental language (“advantages and disadvantages of having women colleagues”) seems almost offensive now, but at the time it probably made its readers feel free to air the negative stereotypes that needed refuting. The memo also encouraged full disclosure of the reasons for relegating women to non-ladder-ranked jobs: “departments no doubt have their reasons. It is in the interests of the academic community that these should be made explicit so that they can be subject to examination and the test of research” (quoted Golbeck, 216). But the memo also made the university’s interest in improving the lot of academic women clear, remarking that the small proportion of women faculty could be “an indication of the poor training which Berkeley and other major universities are providing for women students” (Golbeck, 216). Either universities were not training women well or they were denying well-trained women sufficient career opportunities. Since they were both the producers of the academic workforce and its employers, the universities could not escape their responsibility for letting a significant proportion of it decline. 

Thus, by the summer of 1969, the Academic Senate and the university administration had joined the WFG’s efforts to look for the roots of the deterioration of women’s academic participation and to find remedies. The official administrative cooperation, moreover, confirmed WFG’s sense that their strategy was working effectively. The plan continued to produce results throughout the academic year 1969-70 and into the summer of 1970, when the subcommittee’s report was released. The very extent of the participation, though, required constant coordination and the ability to oversee the collection of data and its quick analysis, for the subcommittee was slated to finish its report early in 1970. 

Statistics Professor Elizabeth Scott emerged during this phase as the single most crucial member of the subcommittee and its co-chair. We briefly profiled Scott’s graduate career in an earlier essay, which dealt with her WWII work. In the late 1960s, she was chairing the Department of Statistics, had been on the urban crisis panel, and was an enthusiastic founder of the WFG when she was appointed to the subcommittee. She assumed the leadership role and became the subcommittee’s co-chair both because Chair Elizabeth Colson needed to be away from Berkeley for much of 1969-70, and because her talent and professional experience prepared her for the urgent tasks of shaping the research questions as well as processing and analyzing the data that could provide reliable evidence about the roots and extent of the women academics’ problems. Scott would continue to be fascinated by some of the statistical issues she encountered in the study would devote many years to . . . She also proved to be an adept and persistent publicist. 

Scott’s task was huge, conceptually complex, and unprecedented. The report was to be the first historical overview of women’s roles in teaching and research at Berkeley, going back to the beginning of the 1920s. It couldn’t be only a snapshot of the current state of academic women, for that would not reveal the dynamic processes in play. Getting the historical information was time-consuming, but the results were galvanizing. For example, when Scott received the information on women from the Budget Committee in the summer of 1969, she immediately discovered the soon-to-be scandalous fact that out of 1,721 full time tenure ladder faculty, only 60, or 3.4% were women. Access to the historical percentages allowed her to see the drastic decline in women’s share of the faculty over the past thirty years, from 9.3 in 1939. Ladder-faculty women, she realized, were in danger of becoming extinct. With characteristic efficiency, Scott then quickly disseminated the information she’d uncovered and even used it to recruit participation in the study. While still in the initial stages of collecting data, she had the subcommittee send a letter to all the women academic professionals at Berkeley (the 60 Senate faculty, 233 lower level teaching faculty, and 234 researchers), which began with the 3.4% statistic and the explanation of its historical significance. The statistical slide illustrated the seriousness of the problem: women’s academic status had sunk to a thirty-year low. That framing created a sense of urgency, motivating the women to fill out and return the enclosed questionnaires. It also helped spread the word throughout the campus about the severe erosion of women’s status at Berkeley and the existence of the subcommittee’s work (Golbeck, 212-221). 

Thus, the subcommittee’s means of gathering information expanded awareness about academic gender inequality, which in turn raised the level of curiosity about the impending release of its report. And yet, while framing the status of academic women as problematic at the outset, the subcommittee presented itself as committed to a dispassionate appraisal of the problem. Its official status, reliance on university data, surveys, and historical contextual analyses, all of those features projected the image of a trustworthy, discrete, and objective panel. 

When the Report of the Subcommittee on the Status of Academic Women on the Berkeley Campus, was released in June 1970, it also fit that profile: momentous in its findings, while solidly evidence-based, reasonable, even conciliatory in its tone, and moderate in its recommendations. The mode of its release immediately set it apart from routine Senate reports, which go through a lengthy process of vetting and commentary by various individual committees before they’re presented to the full faculty. But interest was already so heightened that copies were sent to the entire Academic Senate even before its recommendations were discussed by the Policy Committee, which nevertheless prefaced it with a short endorsement: "the most detailed and thoughtful study of the status of women on the Berkeley campus that has ever been prepared.” The Committee also explained that it was being distributed “in the hope that it will serve as the basis for sustained discussions next year by the Berkeley Division and in the hope that it may serve to stimulate similar studies on other campuses” (Report, np). 

Even more remarkably, the UCB administration held a press conference to publicize the Report, at which Elizabeth Scott, Elizabeth Colson, and Sanford Kadish (Chair of the Senate Policy Committee) presented the findings and answered questions from the local newspapers. Chancellor Heyns’s administration thus signaled its goodwill by publicizing it, although the local press received it as a critical assessment of the university: "No Equality for Women on Faculty” the Oakland Tribune reported; and the San Francisco Examiner article concluded that “The University of California is not using the talents of the women it helps to train” (quoted in Golbeck, 249). Nevertheless, by framing the problem as one that they were already tackling, the administration tried to put itself on the right side of the issue. The press conference was held even before the Academic Senate saw the Report. In short, both the Academic Senate and the administration began signaling their support for the Report’s findings, if not for all of its recommendations, the moment it was finished.  

Looking at the Report (posted on our website here), we can see why it garnered such quick support before its official approval. Sixty-eight of its seventy-eight pages are taken up with appendices, at the back of the document, summarizing numerous sub-reports and various kinds of evidence, often in statistical tables.There the conditions, expectations, and handicaps faced by women in all stages and aspects of their professional lives are analyzed, described, and compared to those encountered by men: their graduate training, their unequal treatment on the academic job market, their consignment to untenured jobs, their restriction by nepotism rules, their slower advancement through professorial ranks, their low status on Academic Senate committees, their non-appointments to administrative posts. And yet despite all of these objective impediments, the statistical evidence also showed surprisingly similar levels of scholarly accomplishment and publication between comparable men and women. Thus, the commonly held views that women drop out of post-graduate degree programs or produce less than men as faculty members were refuted by the evidence. There were, as well, the depressing tables showing how much conditions had worsened for Berkeley’s academic women, how much support and power they had lost over the previous thirty years. Not only had progress not been made, but regress had become the norm.   

Although providing the evidentiary basis of the report, the fifteen separate appendices that comprise those last sixty-eight pages were not synthesized into a continuous presentation. Consequently, some of their potential, cumulative reproving power was  dissipated. The Report’s general conclusions were given in a more cohesive, five-page “Background” section sandwiched between the recommendations, which came at the beginning, and the appendices. Although firmly asserting that the “hard facts” fully justify “the fears of academic women that they will be denied equal opportunities and recognition” (Report, 5), the “Background” section also insisted that the Report not be read as an indictment of past treatment, but as a harbinger of change: “It is a waste of time to raise cries of prejudice and to attempt to cite this department or that department or research unit as guilty of it, though. . .we have collected evidence relevant to such situations.” The sly hint that one can assign guilt by reading the evidence is followed immediately by an affirmative prescription: “address . . . the positive changes necessary to ensure the increased employment of women and the recognition of academic and professional contributions” (Report, 9-10). The opening parts of the Report are optimistic and meritocratic; they assume that the problems can be solved by leveling the university’s academic playing field, even though it had been radically tipped against women for over a hundred years: “We are not recommending that the University should lower its standards, but rather that it should broaden its vision” (Report, 10). The only hint of penalties for not hiring women seems to have come from outside of the institution, when federal regulations are briefly mentioned that require the university to take “positive action to correct discriminatory practice, as evidenced by differential rates of employment” (Report, 5). This announcement that the low percentage of women on the faculty automatically requires some affirmative action “to forestall possible federal intervention” implied that merely implementing the report’s recommendations would suffice. This, we’ll soon see, was an unrealistic forecast.

 image of Elizabeth Colson in neutral expression and cream plaid blazer with arm propping her head on a desk against background of booksThe “Background” section of the Report was drafted by Elizabeth Colson, who later recalled that the subcommittee’s rhetoric was purposely nonthreatening: “We didn’t want to antagonize people. We were trying to be very polite, but at the same time point out how the university was failing. At that point, we thought it might be a little bit better to deal with them as though they were rational creatures” (Colson, 187). The conciliatory tone was a deliberate rhetorical choice, but Colson and the other committee members also held their meritocratic beliefs sincerely: “What we were asking for was the right to compete” (Colson, 190), and thus they attempted to demonstrate that putting women at a disadvantage in graduate training and hiring “didn’t fit with other standards that the university said that it was concerned about, such as intellectual standards, merit, et cetera” (Colson, 185). 

The three pages of recommendations that open the Report, moreover, are also consistently and optimistically meritocratic. Some of them recommend remedies that now seem self-evident:women must be reviewed for promotions regularly; faculty jobs must be advertised, and women candidates considered on their merits;women should be appointed to important Senate committees; quotas shouldn’t be used to limit women’s graduate-school admittance; fellowships should be awarded on merit without regard to women’s marital status; and nepotism rules should be eliminated. Other recommendations indicate the more intractable and still current problems stemming from women’s larger share of family responsibilities: maternity leave; part-time faculty appointments; support for childcare centers. Only one seems to give women any kind of preferential treatment to compensate for the history of discrimination: creating a pool of FTE for new women faculty, which could be used especially in departments with few women faculty but many women graduate students, such as  Psychology. More typical of the proposals for increasing women’s hires, though, is simply encouragement for departments to strive for a number of women on the faculty proportional to the women trained in the field. The recommendations aim to remove the most obvious barriers that prevented women’s employment and advancement, to give moral support for hiring women, and to help them to pursue academic careers. But there aren’t any suggestions about penalizing departments that don’t change their ways, or even monitoring their efforts. A request to establish a permanent Senate committee on the Status of Women alone points to the need for a watchdog, albeit one without teeth. The tone of the Report as a whole is consistently conciliatory, encouraging, and collegial. It assumes that the members of the Academic Senate are ready to upgrade and expand women’s academic participation voluntarily.   

Phase III: The Report’s Implementation and Federal Intervention

The first year following the Report’s release saw some administrative action on the recommendations, both from the UCB Chancellor’s and the UC President’s offices. Consideration by the whole Academic Senate was slower because the report came early in the summer, and it needed to wend its way through various committees before a full Senate discussion. By the time the Senate voted on the Report in April of 1971, though, the ground had shifted under the university’s feet, and the conditions for cooperation between the women in Women’s Faculty Group and the administration were somewhat less stable. First, California's economy went into recession, and UC was hit by steep budget cuts, which restricted new hiring and limited the institution’s ability to implement some of the Report’s recommendations. Second, a national organization, Women’s Equity Action League (WEAL), began filing complaints with the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare against universities, using the federal Executive Orders. And third, some members of Berkeley’s Women’s Faculty Group became impatient with what they saw as the slow pace of UC action and filed a civil rights complaint against the university with HEW. Thus, in the spring of 1971, the women in the WFG who wished to sign on to the HEW complaint formed yet another organization, the League of Academic Women (LAW), whereas others continued their efforts inside the university channels. The WFG persisted as a clearing house, while different paths were pursued, the “inside” route and the “government” route, as Susan Ervin Tripp later described them (Tripp, 1995, 3). We’ll trace the course of events in the years after the Report’s release by following the paths taken by its three women authors: Colson, Scott, and Tripp. 

Elizabeth Colson, the most senior of the three, adhered to the “inside” track and quickly moved deeper into the university hierarchy by an appointment to the Senate’s Budget Committee after the Report’s release. Colson’s career as an anthropologist had trained her to understand social dynamics and the difficulties of integrating new groups into existing power hierarchies; her belief in the efficacy of fair play was by no means naïve. She knew it would be necessary both to make new rules and to monitor their implementation, so she became the first women ever to serve on the powerful Budget Committee, which oversees academic personnel cases.  She then became its first female Chair, later recalling, “I’ve integrated more committees than I wish to remember—I used to think of it as a process, something like that of a birdwatcher. You kept very quiet until they got used to your being there, and then you could move” (Colson, 190). Birdwatching is a good metaphor for Budget Committee work as well because from that vantage point, she could also “look right across the campus, and look right across the individual’s record from the beginning of that person’s arrival on campus . . . in comparison with what was happening to other people.” Colson also insured that the Budget Committee would continue to do audits of the records of all kinds of academic women, including researchers. As she later recalled, the BC was the best place to discover women who were being undervalued or not regularly reviewed for advancement: “somebody who was in the lectureship position perhaps [who] should be considered for a regular faculty position” (Colson 197). 

The panoramic view was not the only advantage of working on the Budget Committee. When a report from another Academic Senate committee is sent to that BC for action or comment, the task of drafting a statement is assigned to the one member among the nine who is most knowledgeable about the topic. Thus, the Budget Committee’s lengthy memos commenting on the Report in February and March of 1971, although signed by the Chair, were no doubt the work of Colson.  In that guise, she both validated the subcommittee’s work and helped plan the ways in which its recommendations would be implemented. Acknowledging the discriminatory effect of the nepotism rule, the BC called for its revision or abolition. Moreover, in one of its memos, the Committee went even further than the Report by suggesting that the imbalance in hiring tenure-track faculty could be corrected by temporarily instituting preferential hiring favoring women (Golbeck, 304). Mainly, though, the Budget Committee echoed the Report’s recommendations on tenure-track hiring, job advertising, and anti-discriminatory candidate reviewing, and it strongly stressed that changes had to be made at the level of departments and colleges (Golbeck, 302-305).

Shortly after the Budget Committee memos were written, the university’s Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs made a momentous announcement to all deans and department chairs: they would need to “demonstrate that for every new appointment proposed an adequate search has been made for possible women appointees” and that such searches had reviewed “women currently holding non-ladder appointments on the Berkeley campus” (Raleigh). These may seem like obvious requirements, unless we remember that academic hiring was usually done at the time without even announcing the job openings, let alone advertising them. When departments had faculty positions to fill in 1970, they could simply ask distinguished scholars in the field at other universities to send them the names and dossiers of their most talented students or younger colleagues. Getting the best jobs thus depended on working closely with nationally influential professors—practically all male—at a handful of schools. Of course, the favorite students and close collaborators of most male professors were young men. The Vice Chancellor’s memo was thus saying something revolutionary: from that time forward deans and department chairs proposing new candidates for appointments would need to describe their searches, demonstrating that they’d reached out to qualified women. The memo was, of course, only a beginning, and hiring procedures would need to be elaborated and revised many times over the years, but it was the earliest example of “affirmative action” (which only later came to be thought of as preferential treatment) in academic hiring at Berkeley. It was designed to replace the old-boys’ network with the open, nation-wide academic job market that we take for granted today. The requirements to advertise openings nationally, seek women and minority applicants, and keep records of the demographic information and reasons for deselection of all applicants would follow. 

The Budget Committee memos were not the sole cause of that announcement from the Vice Chancellor’s office. There had been continuing lobbying by the WFG, and rumors that a national organization might soon file a complaint with the HEW were circulating. Moreover, an earlier memo in February from the system-wide President Charles Hitch to the Chancellors had called attention to de facto discrimination, which put "a rather large proportion of women members of the faculty . . . in non-ladder positions”. Hitch asked campuses “to take care to make certain that all cases are considered strictly on their merits” (Hitch). The Berkeley memo, though, placed much more responsibility on the hiring units to take specific actions, conforming to the Budget Committee’s emphasis. Because the administration was seeking campus consensus, it’s likely that they gave considerable weight to the Budget Committee’s views, shaped by Colson. Campus women benefitted greatly from her willingness to guide the direction of an existing organization by working within it. 

Although her work on the Budget Committee was confidential and couldn’t be discussed with other women in the WFG, Colson continued to belong to that group and, like others working in regular university channels, benefitted from its wide range of perspectives.  In the year after the Report’s release, two new permanent committees on the status of academic women were established, one by the Senate and the other by the administration, both of which were largely staffed from the WFG’s membership. The sheer number of the people officially appointed to investigate and report annually on the issues had increased considerably (Ervin-Tripp, 1995, 3). 

And yet the WFG not only continued its incessant lobbying for more official cooperation at Berkeley, but also increased its outreach to other universities and national organizations. Elizabeth Scott, who earlier took the lead in gathering and analyzing the data for the subcommittee, played a key role in extending the effort beyond Berkeley. She began by disseminating the Report throughout the country, giving other academic women a model for how to proceed. During 1970-71, she saw to it that thousands of copies of the Report were printed as handy pamphlets (known as the “blue book”) and mailed around the country (Golbeck). They were sent to politicians, journalists, professional associations, learned societies, and foundations, as well as women’s groups and individual academics, and the response was enthusiastic. Legislation on the topic was introduced in the California State Assembly, the California Education Department revised its guidelines, and various California legislators became active in the cause of affirmative action. Portions of the Report were read into the U. S. Congressional Record. 

Scott’s outreach efforts were also motivated by her intellectual curiosity about the mathematical, statistical, and other methodological questions arising from such complex social and economic issues. By contacting individual researchers at other universities and through professional associations, like the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the American Statistical Association, she formed networks of people who were collecting more information. She hoped to improve the methods for analyzing it and build a solid base of evidence for policy decisions. In the years from 1972-4, she conducted groundbreaking studies of salary disparities in higher education for the Carnegie Commission and Council on Higher Education, thereby becoming a nationally recognized expert on the topic. One of them showed that similar achievements led to significantly lower salaries for women than for men, and the discrepancies diverged as the careers lengthened. Another study showed the gap between the number of women actually on the faculty and the number that would have been expected given the availability of women in the pools of PhDs in different fields (Ervin-Tripp, 1995, 3).  In 1974, she began working under the auspices of the American Association of University Professors to develop a “Kit” for universities that would allow them to do self-evaluations of the gender and racial equity of their salaries. Published in 1977, it allowed them to flag “personnel for whom there is apparent salary inequity” and achieve equal pay for substantively equal work (Golbeck, 501-505). 

Scott’s career in the 1970s shows a remarkable level of integration between her professional intellectual pursuits and her ability to advance the cause of academic gender equity nationwide. It also shows an ambition to have a broad impact in academia by helping universities and other professional institutions diagnose and solve their own problems. She greatly extended the reach of the “inside” route. 

 grayscale headshot of Susan Ervin Tripp smiling in pearl earrings and pearl necklace with short hairSusan Ervin Tripp was the only one of the three authors of the report who took what she later called the “government” path to gender equity. When several members of the Women’s Faculty Group filed a civil rights complaint with the Office of Civil Rights of the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare in 1971, they did so as members of a separate group—the League of Academic Women—which also included many graduate students. Its members, Ervin-Tripp later recalled, were impatient with the administration’s tactic of relying on departments and colleges to reform their own hiring practices. Their complaint drew attention to the absence of penalties that we noted in the Report’s recommendations, and it assumed that if under the threat of the suspension of federal contracts, the university would be more aggressive about penalizing units that failed to change their ways. Although the Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs’ memo in March of 1971 implied that new hires would not be made unless they had resulted from non-discriminatory searches, it seemed too little too late. The fall after the report's release, Ervin-Tripp called for additional pressure from the outside. In a message to campus women explaining that UC was included among the institutions against which the Women’s Equity Action League had already filed complaints, she asked them to help WEAL gather information in order to get “a stronger affirmative action program sooner” (Ervin-Tripp, 1970). 

Although HEW’s intervention probably did motivate the university’s production of affirmative action plans for both non-academic and academic employees, it also set up a series of stand-offs between the agency and the university, which seemed to delay progress. The stalemates resulted partly from the fact that in 1970-71, HEW had only recently been given the job of enforcing the Executive Order relevant to higher education, and they had had neither experience nor guidelines for doing so. It wasn’t until October of 1972 that their “Higher Education Guidelines” were issued, and consequently their positions in the negotiations with the university were often halting and inconsistent (Kay & Green, 1064-65). HEW also did not understand the university’s reluctance to turn over academic personnel files containing confidential letters; they suspected the adherence to confidentiality was merely a screen for hiding bias. For its part, the university, still smarting from the damage to its reputation done by the Loyalty-Oath fiasco, wanted to protect its employees from political interference and argued that if HEW could force them to turn over information on individuals, then so could other governmental bodies with more dubious motives. It took months to resolve these issues that had little to do with affirmative action, to which the university kept stating its principled adherence. The result was frustration on the part of the women who were waiting to see the finished HEW guidelines and a university affirmative action plan. 

Indeed, LAW seemed to lose patience with HEW when in 1972 it filed a lawsuit against the university with the U. S. District Court in San Francisco, for “Injunctive and Declaratory Relief” under the Civil Rights Act. The lawsuit ultimately became entangled with the HEW’s investigation of the campus, which continued to be adversarial after the new guidelines were issued; the university wasn’t declared “compliant” until 1975. The lawsuit was then dismissed. We should note that the lawsuit differed from the other remedies pursued in that it sought not just non-discrimination in the present and future but also redress for past wrongs in the form of “back-pay” for the plaintiffs (League of Academic Women). It thus introduced a recriminatory element into the effort that, although justified, made a striking contrast with the original attitude of collegiality adopted by the subcommittee’s Report. It was a frank expression of the anger that many women felt after decades of exploitation.  

Ervin-Tripp always held that it was the combination of inside and outside pressures that resulted in effective affirmative action at Berkeley, and she energetically pursued both channels. In addition to co-authoring the Report, she chaired the Senate’s Committee on the Status of Academic Women, monitoring searches, investigating complaints, and advising on various drafts of affirmative action plans. Moreover, she mentored young women who were recruited to the faculty, held lunches at which they could meet and discuss their difficulties, even wrote a guide to help assistant professors navigate their way to tenure. She arranged meetings between assistant professors and members of the Budget Committee so that they could better understand the review process (Colson, 192). She also worked alongside the trade union AFSCME to combat sex discrimination in non-academic university jobs. (Ervin-Tripp, 2016, 53-55). 

Conclusion

Looking back at the struggle for women’s inclusion on the faculty, it seems clear that the most effective changes originated in the recommendations of the subcommittee’s report: the end of the nepotism rule, the demand that jobs be advertised, that women applicants be considered on their merits, and that women faculty be given maternity leave were all crucial. The affirmative action that mattered was the enforcement of these rules, and their result can be seen in this graph.

 bar graph on gender breakdown of berkeley faculty from academic year 1979-80 to 2020-21

In 1969, women were at 3.6% of the faculty, and in every decade since, their share has grown between 5% and 7%, with the exception of the decade 2009-2019, which fell slightly short. When we take into consideration the slow turnover in academic jobs and the shift in faculty positions from fields like social sciences and humanities, where women are relatively plentiful, to engineering and technology, this gradual but steady increase in the percentage of women on the faculty seems progress worth celebrating. The fact that leveling the playing field has worked for women at universities shouldn’t surprise us after examining their history: they had always been the overeducated reserve army of the underemployed in academia.  

Works Cited

Colson, Elizabeth. Anthropology and a Lifetime of Observation. Interview with Suzanne B. Riess. Online Archive of California. The Bancroft Library, University of California at Berkeley. 2000-2001. Accessed 6/10/2021. 

Blumer, Herbert; Colson, Elizabeth; Ervin-Tripp, Susan; Newman, Frank; Scott, Elizabeth. Report of the Subcommittee on the Status of Academic Women on the Berkeley Campus. Academic Senate, Berkeley Division, University of California, 1970. 

Ervin-Tripp, Susan. “Affirmative Action”. 11 November 1970. 

Ervin-Tripp, Susan. “Susan Ervin-Tripp: A Life of Research in Psycholinguistics and Work for the Equity of Women”. Conducted by Shanna Farrell in 2016, Oral History Center, The Bancroft Library, University of California. Regents of the University of California, 2017.

Ervin-Tripp, Susan. “Women Activists of the Seventies: Multiple Routes to Affirmative Action”. Paper given at the History of UC Women Conference, sponsored by the Center for Studies in Higher Education, UC Berkeley. April 28, 1995.

Freeman, Jo. “The Origins of the Women’s Liberation Movement.” American Journal of Sociology. 78, 4 (January, 1973): 792-811.

Golbeck, Amanda L.  Equivalence: Elizabeth L. Scott at Berkeley. Taylor & Francis. 2017. 

Hitch, Charles J., President of the University of California.  Memo to Vice Presidents, Principal Officers of the Regents. 9 February, 1971.

Kay, Herma Hill & Green, Tristen K. Sex-Based Discrimination: Text, Cases, and Materials. Seventh Ed.  West Publishing Co., 1996. 

League of Academic Women, etc. v Regents of the University of California, etc. US District Court, San Francisco. Filed 15 February 1972.  

Page-Medrich, Sharon. “Noticing the Women: An Inquiry into the Evolution of Gender Equity Among the Professoriate of the University of California, Berkeley”. Honors Thesis, Mills College. 2004. https://150w.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/noticing_the_women_-_sharon_page-medrich_2004.pdf(PDF file)

Raleigh, John Henry, Vice Chancellor for Academic Affairs. Memo to Deans and Department Chairmen. 17 March 1971.

Seaborg, Glenn T., with Colvig, Ray. Chancellor at Berkeley. Institute of Governmental Studies, University of California. 1994.