[WFA] WFA 2020-21 Report and Updates

[Jean Helwege]

Dear colleagues,

As one of the three women on CAP this academic year, I wish to respond to
the proposal to add more women to the committee. UCR's version of CAP
requires a tremendous amount of time and I do not think it is a good career
move to join it unless one is a full professor at the level of at least
step six. I am a full professor at step IV and I believe my participation
on CAP will prevent me from reaching step VII before I retire (I am 62).

CAP typically reviews 400 files a year and each file is discussed for at
least a few minutes, if not ten minutes. At other UCs, CAP does not review
every file or does not review it each time a merit step is considered. So
by asking for more females on CAP the WFA is essentially asking more women
to give up their research time to do work that most UCs do not impose on
their female faculty. CAP meets for six hours nearly every week during the
school year and meets several times in the summer. To do the work
appropriately, the first and second reader must spend time outside of the
meetings to prepare. The preparation is all the more onerous because
confidentiality concerns limit the amount of printing/saving of files one
can do and the amount one can safely write down. In other words, a CAP
member who is the first or second reader can expect to spend at least an
hour outside of those six meeting hours. There are nine of us who serve as
first or second so the typical CAP member has 400/9 =44 files to work on
outside of the meetings. The first reader is required to write up the
minutes of his/her cases and the second reader reviews and, if necessary,
edits the minutes. In addition, the committee writes memos about various
topics and these are crafted by sending emails back and forth between the
members. These emails often show up on the weekends. The assignment is
onerous to anyone, but certainly more so to any professor who is trying to
publish at as fast a pace as her colleagues.

Given the few female professors who are even at the full level, let alone
past step six, I believe asking for more female representation on the
committee is not a good method of ensuring equity on campus. That is not to
say that I think the WFA should not push for greater gender equity. The
discrepancies in faculty status by gender are not easily understood on this
campus. CAP does not have any aggregate statistics to use in evaluating
fairness but having looked at so many files I have some guesses as to why
women seem to progress through the steps more slowly than men here. It
would be helpful for the WFA to obtain such data and base its proposals on
the outcomes of its analysis.

For example, I have seen a fairly large number of merit cases in the
sciences that have very little undergraduate teaching. If a merit file has
only six course evaluations and they are all for graduate courses with
fewer than ten students, I think it is unlikely that those six courses
would have low student evaluations. Thus, it is unlikely that the
department, dean, CAP or VPAP would conclude the professor has weak
teaching. This makes it more likely that a good researcher is eligible for
a promotion. It would be interesting to know if there is a gender gap vis
a vis class size and whether the gap, if it exists, has an impact on the
speed of promotion through the steps.

Jean Helwege
Anderson Chair in Finance
School of Business


On Mon, Jun 21, 2021 at 4:24 PM Jennifer Hughes <jennifer.hughes at ucr.edu>
wrote:

> Dear Constituents *and Allies* of the Women's Faculty Association (an
> organization that is seeking to become more inclusive with respect to
> gender diversity),
>
>
>
> We are writing at the close of a very long and challenging year to update
> you regarding WFA activities.
>
>
>
> *New Initiatives *
>
> 1) *WFA Academy of Distinguished Faculty Mentors*
>
> The WFA is launching a new Academy of Distinguished Faculty Mentors. Faculty
> may select a mentor from our list for up to three individual meetings of
> about an hour in length to discuss merit and promotion at all levels,
> trajectories of research, the “path to full professor”, balancing research,
> teaching, and service, navigating the personnel system, and so on. The
> WFA is coordinating our efforts with the mentoring initiative of Katina
> Napper out of the Academic Personnel Office (APO).
>
>
>
> Mentors must be nominated by WFA constituents (not self-nominated) and are
> required to participate in a short training offered by the APO to make sure
> their knowledge of personnel systems is fully up to date.
>
>
>
> To nominate someone for the WFA Academy of Distinguished Faculty Mentors,
> please fill out the survey here (nominees will be contacted but are under
> no obligation to serve). We invite nominees at all ranks as well as emerita
> faculty:  https://forms.gle/tkgVcEvrzWQrygpZA
>
>
>
> 2. *Expanded leadership*
>
> We received 8 nominations for a new WFA Advisory Committee. The current
> advisory committee members are:
>
> Xuan Liu (Biochem)
>
> Aleca LeBlanc (Art History)
>
> María del Rosario Acosta López (Hispanic Studies)
>
> Isgouhi Kaloshian (Nematology)
>
> Ruhi Kahn* (Media and Cultural Studies, *representative to CACSW,
> currently on leave).
>
> We intend to bring on additional members in the fall.  Note that the
> nomination list is still open.  https://forms.gle/ZuEcHk7W91NR1qzL9
>
> Katherine (School of Ed) and Jennifer (HIST) will continue as co-chairs
> for one more year, rotating off in June of 2022.
>
>
>
> 3. WFA leadership has scheduled a July meeting with our new EVC/Provost to
> share WFA issues and initiatives.
>
> We are asking for your feedback on these initiatives and inviting you to
> suggest others. We will bring these to our meeting with the EVC/Provost:
>
> https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/X6M62QV
>
>
>
>
>
> *Ongoing Work *
>
> 1) *Call for comprehensive salary equity study and individual salary
> equity review upon request*
>
>  The WFA continues to advocate for comprehensive salary equity review for
> our campus by gender and race.  Last year, we submitted a written request
> to the Senate Committee on Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (CODEI) with
> requests for specific data and our recommended process.  This year we
> have been in ongoing communication with CODEI chair and the Vice Provost of
> Academic Personnel (VPAP).
>
>
>
> We have also requested that the campus reinstitute a practice of salary
> equity review upon individual faculty request.  Unlike Career Review,
> salary equity review does not require external letters and it allows for
> comparison to individual department or college faculty at target rank and
> step.
>
>
>
> 2)*Student Evaluation of Teaching*
>
> The WFA continues to advocate for a substantial revision of our Student
> Evaluation of Teaching given that multiple studies have indicated that
> these are highly subject to bias (gender and race).  We have requested
> revision of SET questions as well as revised protocol for the use of SET in
> merit and promotion.  We contributed to subcommittee recommendations on
> SET.
>
>
>
> 3) *Addressing underrepresentation of women faculty on our campus overall
>  *
>
> UCR has the lowest percentage of women faculty in the UC system.  This
> continues to be the case even after the massive faculty hiring initiative
> of 2015-2017, which could have been leveraged as an opportunity to bring
> gender parity to our campus, but only increased the representation of women
> faculty by about 2%-3% overall.
>
>
> The WFA submitted the following modest targets for inclusion part of our
> campus’s strategic vision plan:
>
> Measurable improvement in the status of women faculty on the campus. (A)
> Increase the percentage of female faculty at UCR from current 38% to the
> system wide median (42%) by 2025 and to 50% by 2030. (B) Increase the
> representation of women faculty at Full Professor rank from current 24% to
> 36% by 2030. (C) Increase the representation of women faculty at the higher
> rank (Step IV+) from current 18.5% to 30% by 2030.
>
>
> 5) *Fostering promotion of women faculty to upper ranks*
>
> We continue to seek to address diminishing percentages of women faculty at
> higher ranks (full professor and above). We observe that there is a lack of
> parity with respect to time at rank.  UCR is below the average for the UC
> system with respect to women faculty at the rank of Full Professor.
>
>
> 5) *Addressing underrepresentation of women faculty on CAP*
>
> We continue to have very low representation of women faculty on key senate
> committees, the Committee on Committees and Committee on Academic Personnel.
> We routinely have among the lowest percentage of women faculty on CAP in
> the entire UC system.  The WFA has been advocating for the appointment of
> women faculty to CAP and is calling for parity in communication with senate
> leadership. This spring we have been at risk falling to 3 or even 2 women
> faculty on CAP.
>
>
>
> 6) In the Spring of 2021 the WFA proposed a change to the CALL for 2021-2
> that would allow for the consideration of completed chapters of books in
> progress for faculty in book-based disciplines for purposes of merit
> review.
>
>
> Relevant WFA documents are available at this link:
> https://drive.google.com/file/d/19ogh1ZB22qE5gwAiKK-QNwkTBgqDxyVs/view?usp=sharing
>
>
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> WFA mailing list
> WFA at lists.ucr.edu
> https://lists.ucr.edu/mailman/listinfo/wfa
>


-- 
Jean Helwege
UC Riverside
jean.helwege at ucr.edu
951-827-4284
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