Meeting Minutes July 11, 2001

Minutes of the AWC Steering Committee, July 11, 2001

Web site

For those of you who haven't seen it, our new AWC web site is off to a great start. It's at www.umich.edu/~awcwomen/. Carolina Delgado has done a great job of getting us started. If you have suggestions to fine tune it or for additional links, please let me know. What I have in hand, I'll pass to Carolina. Also, we discussed have 2-3 short clips from our video to make available for streaming over our web site.

Tenure Proceedings

Ann Larimore shared a copy of L,S&A's "tenure proceedings" documents--one for third-year and one for tenure review. For those who want a copy [I won't put this in the final minutes because I don't want to risk having to make masses of copies for people], let me know. [another question: should I offer these to AAUP, although Tom Moore probably has a copy already?]

Top Three Priorities for Barbara Butterfield

This was discussed at length and, though we didn't keep it down to three priorities, we did manage to keep it down to just a few key concerns:

* Ensure that there are women at every level of the academic stream of the organization. Although some progress has been made, there is still a long way to go. We need more women in departmental chairs and full professorships. Those are the primary stumbling blocks.

* Provide equal compensation. That includes the full range of salaries, benefits, lab space/equipment, availability of technology, and other perquisites provided to men.

* Review the situation for lecturers, research scientists, librarians, and other groups of low level teaching faculty and primaries. These groups include a large percentage of women and there is concern about marginalization of these groups as being somehow lesser than tenure and tenure-track faculty.

* Help with faculty development to tenure, particularly for women. While there is a Junior Faculty Network offered through CEW, help must come within departments. Women are frequently excluded from the mentoring available to men.

* Climate issues abound. The situation is not just chilly, it is often fearful, more in some departments than others.

We believe that some of these issues would be taken care of if we dealt with the baseline, which is a numbers issue. If women were more represented through the ranks and at the various levels of academic administrative positions, there would be a large enough critical mass to affect some of the other concerns.

[note to reviewers: I omitted the issue of inequities between schools because a) I think we have enough issues and b) it's difficult to bring this under the HR umbrella]

Aline Soules