How prevalent is gender bias in academia?
May 2, 2008
In researching a story the other day about a former professor’s lawsuit against the Johns Hopkins University’s medical school, I came across a report on the university’s Web site that outlined a “longstanding” history of gender inequity.
The 2006 report, Vision 2020, was JHU’s latest in a long series of attempts to address the issue since 1985, when a committee was formed after “an egregious incident on the Homewood campus.”
Vision 2020 found the climate at the university to be “at best indifferent and at worst hostile to the concerns of women.”
Hopkins has apparently been working on implementing the suggestions of the Vision 2020 report, although it declined to comment on those efforts for my story. (It also declined to comment on Dr. Anne C. Fischer’s gender bias lawsuit; however, according to The Sun, it has since issued a statement denying Fischer’s allegations.)
For example, Vision 2020 highlighted a lack of women in executive positions at the school, saying the university tied for dead last among its peers in the number of women in leadership roles in 2005. A year after the report came out, the school appointed its first female provost: Kristina M. Johnson, an electrical engineer, was dean of Duke University’s Pratt School of Engineering prior to joining Hopkins.
Since running the story on Fischer’s lawsuit, though, I’ve received feedback from readers who question how different things really are now compared to a few years ago.
Given how open the university has been about past criticism, and the reader accounts I’ve received, I have to wonder how persistent this problem is — and if it is pervasive, is it limited to medical academia alone?
BEN MOOK, Assistant Business Editor
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Women are welcome and even dominant in many places in the academy but there are always holdouts. Hopkins still has a reputation for being an inhospitable place. It is not alone in that regard, but it is no longer representative.