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Small Changes Make a Big Difference
Small Changes Make a Big Difference
Identify the barriers, focus on gender awareness training
and always base your work on collected DATA, not on perception. Remember
that even small changes can make a big difference and that men also benefit
from a better gender climate. Professor Joan Bathon from Johns Hopkins
University reported on the successful ”Hopkins experience”
that lead to higher female salaries and more female professors.
Gender discussions often tend to become very emotional but when Professor
Joan Bathon accounts for the gender improvement work that has been done
at her university she sticks only to facts. — The bottom line if
you want to change gender structures, especially
in the scientific world, is to collect data, hard statistic facts on salaries,
appointments,
fellowships etc. When we started our work we found huge salary gaps, sometimes
around 25 percent, between men and women doing the same job. Only six
percent of the department chairs were women and female professors and
assistant professors were very
rare. We decided to find out why women didnt progress up to the ranks,
why so many of them were likely to stay at very junior levels, says Joan
Bathon who at the time was a member and later Chair of the Task Force
on Academic Careers of Women in the Department of Medicine and participated
in the analysis of the gender structure at Johns Hopkins.
— We have to understand that both men and women operate under
the
same beliefs. Gender barriers are similiar across disciplines and probably
across cultures. Gender schemas are subconscious and many decisions are
unfortunately based on these schemas. But it is hard to see the invisible
barriers, the ”glass ceiling” and the
”sticky floor”, she continues. — When you work with
gender you will often be told not to make a mountain out of a molehill,
but many molehills add up to a mountain. All these ”small”
things, like women being interrupted more often than men, jokes and negative
comments about women, the informal male networking, women not being invited
to dinners etc etc, actually add up and form a pattern. At Johns Hopkins
they also found
that one of the more obvious reasons for women not making it to the top
was that they simply were not nominated for promotion by their division
or departmental chiefs.
— The leadership structure in the academic world is still anachronistic
and progress is rather slow but our work, which was a committed partnership
with the Chairman of the Department of Medicine, initiated a few significant
changes. To enhance the development of new women leaders we introduced
yearly reviews of all female facultys CV: s, to make sure that eligible
women faculty had not been ”overlooked” for nomination for
promotion. Our Department Chair also changed the medical rounds to Fridays
instead of Saturdays and mandated that no meetings should be conducted
after 17 pm. He also imposed a mandatory gender awareness training. The
result of what is now known as the Hopkins experience is that female salaries
today are more equal to male.
— They used to be 25 percent lower. It has improved but female
wages are still always lower. In 2005 Johns Hopkins recorded an all time
high of 18 percent female professors and 37 percent female Deans. Professor
Bathon who now is the Deputy Director of Division of Rheumatology and
the Director of Johns Hopkins Athritis Center underlines the importance
of committed leaders to alter structures. — Start to create changes
within your own institution, show new examples of leadership, encourage
an overall gender awareness and remember that very small differences in
treatment can result in large disparities in salary and promotion over
time.
Professor Joan Bathon
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