In this article: Hiring | Tenure and promotion | University leadership | Committee work
When she started in Academic Affairs in 1988, Tammy Reid, now associate professor of English, found that there were not many women at senior levels of the institution and there were departments without women at all. Yet during that time and since, the student body has nearly always been more than 50 percent female.
"The question we asked was are we modeling appropriately for our female students," Reid said.
During the past decade, Reid said she observed a more concerted effort to hire tenure-track female professors and to get past the idea that they were being hired only because they were female.
The gender study published in 2005 encouraged the university to pay attention to hiring, said Michael Le Roy, vice president for Academic Affairs. Most hiring has been on par across genders for about 10 years, Le Roy said.
In 1998, a third of the 144 faculty members were female. Between 1994 and 2002, 77 new faculty members were hired and 46.8 percent of them were female, according to Institutional Research.
Currently, the faculty is comprised of 57 females and 85 males, according to the Fall Tenth Day Enrollment Report. This means women make up approximately 40 percent of the faculty.
Reid said she's pleased to see a better gender balance in the faculty.
"Hiring is a very statistical way to mark change. The less obvious is the attitudinal," Reid said.
Reid highlighted the theology and philosophy departments as ones that have made efforts over the last decade to gain female faculty members. The department, which at times has had no female faculty members, now has two.
Gender parity has been increasing in many areas from more equitable hiring patterns, said Dolores Humiston, director of Human Resources. Whitworth does not have specific goals to achieve 50/50 hiring, Humiston said.
Since it is illegal to hire on the basis of gender, Human Resources advertises to a lot of diverse groups of people in hope of getting a diverse pool of applicants, Humiston said.
Head athletic trainer Melinda Larson said she does this when searches are going on for faculty for the kinesiology and athletics department
"Something I do and plan to do is recruit really good female candidates. You can't hire based on gender, but you can recruit candidates," Larson said.
Humiston and Le Roy train hiring committees on how to avoid potential discrimination and find the best person for the position in the pool, Humiston said.
Other ways to find female candidates for positions have been to continue searches that do not produce a diverse pool.
"There were a couple of searches where if there were not strong female candidates in the pool, we asked the search committee to keep looking," Reid said. "Departments have tried very hard, but in some disciplines, there just aren't that many women with Ph.Ds," Reid said.
This is also difficult in more non-traditional hiring for staff positions, such as getting women to apply for grounds positions or men to apply for program assistant positions, Humiston said.
Some students and faculty members see improvement in the the ratio of male and female faculty as something Whitworth has done well in terms of gender.
"One of the things we've done well is to be intentional about hiring a greater diversity of voices on the gender issue - not just women but men who take it seriously and women with a variety of styles," said Julia Stronks, professor of political science.
Senior Emilee Langbehn said it seems Whitworth is trying to improve on the ratio.
"I think we are doing a really good job at bringing in good, highly-qualified female professors," Langbehn said.
Departments
Still, some people have noticed that some departments seem to have a gender imbalance.
In half of the departments, one gender makes up less than one in three faculty members in that department, according to data from Institutional Research.
The physics department is currently the only department with no female faculty members. The department has four male faculty. There are currently no departments without a male faculty member.
Senior Brad Hoine said he has noticed that faculty in academic departments seem to be dominated by one gender or the other.
"I wonder if that affects [the gender] of the students who go into those majors. If it balanced out, would more males come to the department because they see a guy doing it?" Hoine said.
Most search committees are at least aware of the issue, said Dale Soden, vice president for planning.
"[Faculty ratios] are probably where people may fault the university for not being more aggressive or for creating benchmarks," Soden said.
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