The College of Fine Arts strategic plan for gender equity, as a matter of process, will advance as follows:
I. Remedy as promptly as possible the most conspicuous inequities revealed in the University’s 2008 Gender Equity Task Force Report.
- Except in the ranks of full professors, salaries in the college of Fine Arts are largely equitable by gender within rank. The dean and department chairs have identified 14 female professors whose salaries are being considered for adjustment in 2009-10. Faculty salary increases in Fine Arts for 2009-10 will focus predominantly on correcting gender inequities among salaries of our full professors.
- Women faculty make up only one third of the entire tenure-track faculty in Fine Arts and only one quarter of full professors. Two of the college’s three departments are chaired by men. Searches for senior faculty positions and administrative leadership positions receive special admonitions about searching for and advancing nominations of women and minority candidates.
Only 12% of the endowed faculty appointments in the college (4 out of 32) are held by women faculty. The chairs and directors of our departments have been told to advance at least one, qualified women candidate for any vacated chair or professorship, Fine Arts Gender Equity Stategic Plan Page 2 September 13, 2009
II. Form a Fine Arts Task Force on Gender Equity to analyze further objectives and obstacles, propose and prioritize remedies, and monitor progress.
The dean will be forming the College of Fine Arts Gender Equity Task Force during the fall 2009 semester. The composition of the task force is still being considered. The dean’s charge to the task force will be to:
- report to the dean how best to share and improve key indicators (see III below) and
- how best to examine the university’s gender equity task force finding that female faculty in fine arts are significantly less satisfied than their male colleagues in the college and female colleagues across campus (see IV below).
III. Track and report Gender Equity Indicators for each department and school.
The dean’s office has begun creating reports of key indicators that will be reviewed on an annual basis. Initial reports include newly hired tenure and tenure track faculty, average salaries by rank and gender, endowment holders by department and gender, faculty headcount by department, rank and gender, and tenured faculty earning less than the average within their department. Most of these reports were included in the dean’s written DPAC report.
Note: The college is very interested in the Gender Equity Key Performance Indicator report that the provost’s office is putting together. Some of the data that has been mentioned for inclusion in that report duplicates reports that were being considered for creation on the college level.
IV. Engage outside consultant on “career dissatisfaction” results of Gender Equity Report.
Slightly more than 40% of the women faculty in Fine Arts responding to the University’s Gender Equity survey question on “general career satisfaction” reported being “dissatisfied” with their “current position at UT.” That is one of the lowest satisfaction levels recorded among women faculty at the University. (By contrast, dissatisfaction among male Fine Arts faculty was approximately 24%.)
The dean wishes to bring in a neutral, third-party consultant to further examine and analyze issues of dissatisfaction among women faculty in Fine Arts. But this needs to be done in concert with a newly formed task force on gender equity.
