Wisdom, justice and moderation. The three pillars serve as a mantra for anyone and everyone involved in the University’s educational mission, but when it comes to women’s needs at UGA, the motto can be a misnomer.

Wisdom? More than 200 years after the University employed its first female faculty member, women are still underrepresented among professorial faculty at 32 percent.

Justice? Female faculty are denied any University-constructed policies on spousal employment assistance, maternity leave or child care, which leaves them with little choice but to find an institution that does.

Moderation? The University provides the bare minimum, federally-mandated options for any work-life needs women often look for.

University faculty – both women and men – have fought for equity for its female employees. But under a budget crunch, their woes have been quieted and taken off the back burner. They aren’t even on the stove.

“If you don’t want to make the moral argument, there is an excellent practical argument: In order to attract the best talent, you make the investment in these relatively low cost resources that will attract the best talent,” said Susan Mattern-Parkes, an ancient and medieval history professor at the University. “And if that talent happens to be female, then we are at a competitive disadvantage if we are losing talented women to other institutions just for something like that.”

According to the Georgia Fact Book, as of fall 2008, 39 percent (160) of the faculty on tenure-track were female, 28 percent (365) of tenured faculty were female and 21 percent (167) of the faculty with full professor status were female.

“We’ve known for some time that women, for whatever reason, have not been promoted as much as men at UGA,” Mattern-Parkes said.

Mattern-Parkes was the first female to be promoted to full professor status in her department – only a year ago.

“As you move up in the ranks, the percentage of women gets smaller.”

Arnett Mace, the University’s senior vice president for Academic Affairs and provost, said, despite the numbers, it is important to consider the increase of female faculty in the last decade.

“I came here in 1991 as a dean. If you looked on stage at graduation in 1991, there was one female dean and vice president for research at that time . The rest were Caucasian males,” he said. “I say all that to point out, I think there has been a significant change in terms of the number of female and minority members that occupy upper-level administrative positions at the University, particularly in the last 10 years.”

This academic school year, of 16 schools and colleges five deans are female.

According to the Fact Book: Of the executive, administrative and managerial staff positions, 32 percent (113) were held by women. Women hold 91 percent (1,285) of the clerical positions on campus.

“Whatever the reason for this is, we don’t know because we never asked the question. We didn’t check to see why [we have fewer female faculty],” Mattern-Parkes said. “And you can find out those things; other universities have done studies for why people leave, or don’t come in the first place. It should be possible to tell.”

Mattern-Parkes and other faculty have ideas why the University isn’t attracting, hiring and retaining as many women as it should.

But there was one thought she refuted without hesitation.

“There’s an argument that says 30 years ago, there weren’t as many [female] Ph.D.s, and so they haven’t had time to move up in the ranks,” she said. “I think that was a good argument 20 years ago, but I don’t think it works today.”

But Mace does.

“[Current female professors] were in an era where there was a smaller population of females who were pursuing advanced types of degrees,” he said.

But this is not so at the University’s peer and aspirational schools, which have moved light years ahead of UGA in providing what women seek from an institution of higher learning.

Spousal Employment Assistance

“WE CAN DO IT,” says a framed Rosie the Riveter poster behind Vicky Wilkins’ desk.

Wilkins, associate professor and MPA director in the Department of Public Administration and Policy, has done plenty of research into why it is important to have a strong female presence on campus as well as how to make it happen.

“I think what kills us at the very beginning is that there is limited help on campus for accommodating trailing spouses,” Wilkins said. “Our department did some research and we have quite a bit of data on this. We would have strong female applicants in our job pool, we would make them an offer and they would refuse it.”

According to Wilkins’ research, female faculty are more likely than male faculty to have highly professionalized academic spouses.

“This became a big issue. I can name case after case where we lost amazing female candidates because we couldn’t help their spouse find a job.”

Wilkins refers to programs several universities use as recruiting tools for talented faculty.

Michigan State University, considered a peer institution by the University’s Board of Regents, has a “Dual Career Center.” According to MSU’s Web site, “Assistance may be provided during recruitment or at any time during employment, including when retention is an issue. Assistance includes exploration of employment interests, discussion of job search strategies, and information and/or referral for employment at Michigan State as well as other Michigan universities, colleges and regional employers.”

UGA has an office dedicated to this function – the Office of Spousal and Partner Employment Assistance. But it is only used as a recruiting tool when the administration wants to fill challenging or difficult-to-fill positions. This means no faculty member, potential faculty member or their spouse can approach the office for assistance. OSPEA is only used when the administration assigns them to a spouse.

“We’re not working with every single position, and we don’t guarantee employment,” said Lindsey Van Note, an executive and faculty search group consultant for OSPEA.

“We typically work with nine to 10 people in an entire year.”

Wilkins noted Athens has a difficult job market as it is, so not providing this resource to any potential faculty can be a disservice.

“If you have an academic spouse, the University has to be extremely proactive and extremely flexible for long-term, forward thinking ways to accommodate a two-academic household, and that’s just not been the case at UGA. There have been universities that have made a mark by doing this – by bringing in strong academic couples,” she said. “It’s just very hard, and I think that would’ve helped our department immensely.”

Maternity Leave

Under the federal Family Medical Leave Act, UGA is required to offer faculty and staff 12 weeks of unpaid family and medical leave. But the University has no maternity leave policy, leaving female faculty who plan to have children in charge of orchestrating their own maternity leave.

One of the biggest issues with UGA’s family medical leave is whether or not a faculty member’s tenure clock is stopped if they utilize FMLA. Stopping the tenure clock allows faculty not to worry about reaching research goals while on leave.

“With [FMLA] there is always the opportunity for the dean or department to request a stop on the clock on tenure, depending on the length of time, the severity, a medical issue with that of the pregnancy, both for the partner and/or spouse that can be used,” Mace said. “You can request, through your department, subject to approval of the dean and the senior vice president for academic affairs and provost, for a tenure stoppage.”

But Mattern-Parkes said it wasn’t always that way.

“During the last few years, we fought very, very hard to get this language. [Psychology professor Janet Frick and I] actually had to go to the Board of Regents to get the language of this policy to allow a request for tenure-clock stoppage for maternity leave,” she said.

Mattern-Parkes said she is unsure how often it is granted.

“The problem with faculty is you can’t just go back into the classroom the day after you have a baby, so you have to negotiate something for the semester that the baby is born, and usually it’s not really an option to teach part of a semester and have somebody else take over,” she said. “So, what we do, is everybody negotiates their own thing.”

What usually is done, Mattern-Parkes said, is people use accumulated sick leave for maternity leave.

“It’s all done individually – it can be very, very unfair,” she said. “People end up with totally different situations, and some people have worked very hard, and some people get nothing at all, and it causes a lot of resentment. Chairs have to negotiate every single time somebody has a baby. It’s a huge waste of time, money and manpower.”

Wilkins said having a solid maternity-leave option transcended fulfilling basic work-life needs.

“It sends a message,” she said. “Even if it’s not a benefit you use. I remember when I moved here, I knew I would not be having any more children, but when I learned there was an issue of when you could stop your tenure clock for pregnancy and still continue to work, I remember being struck by that and thinking, ‘Wow. Is this a place I really want to be?’ And that’s not what you want people thinking, coming in.”

Again, Mattern-Parkes saw this as a potential recruitment tool for the University.

“It would just be so much easier if we could tell people when they come in, ‘This is our rational maternity leave policy, this is what will happen if you have a baby. And it won’t be a tremendously difficult process.’”

Child Care

The fight for a subsidized child care facility on campus is nearing its 8th anniversary, and despite the requests for one by faculty, staff and students, the University hasn’t started planning for one.

“As a society, we’ve pretty much agreed that child care is a good thing for 30 years now. And I shouldn’t have to make an argument over six or seven years that child care is a good thing,” Mattern-Parkes said.

Both she and Wilkins said having quality, accessible child care was one of, if not the most, important benefit to a woman applying for jobs.

“It may be more important than salary,” Mattern-Parkes said. “When my kids needed child care, that was by far the most important thing for me – more than salary, more than a library.”

While the University has the McPhaul Center, a child development lab, child care crusaders on campus say McPhaul simply isn’t enough to compare to what other universities offer.

McPhaul is a small center – only able to enroll about 150 children – and its tuition ranges from $160 to $195 per week.

“The issue is, if we want to serve our low-wage employees, which I think we do, and we have an obligation to our community, then it’s going to cost some money,” Mattern-Parkes said. “But I mean, [come on], child care is not a high-cost, high-profit thing. We’re talking chump change compared to what it costs to run Sanford Stadium.”

Mace also recognized the costs of a subsidized child care center.

“With child care, to pay off a debt load from base zero, the tuition for that child care would need to be at a level that would need to be above or equivalent to the highest [costing] child care. The theoretical role would be to have a sliding scale. Now, whether or not we’ll be able to do that, I don’t know.”

Mattern-Parkes said it’s time to stop making excuses.

“Obviously we have some budget issues right now, but, honestly, we’ve been waiting on a good budget year for 10 years. It’s time to suck it up and say, ‘we’ve got to do what we need to do’ without waiting for a good budget year,” she said. “We pay for health insurance that is arguably less important than child care. You can show up for work without health insurance. You cannot show up for work without child care. And, you know, we’re happy to pay to renovate a fraternity, but we don’t want to pay for early education for our under-advantaged children for our low wage employees. And I just don’t see how that is.”

John Curtis, director of research and public policy at the American Association of University Professors, said there are still universities such as UGA struggling with child care.

“In many cases there is simply not enough space available on campus, or the space hasn’t been made available,” Curtis said.

But Mace made it clear this is not the issue for UGA.

“The initial real costs lie in if you have to build a facility. And if it occurs the way I think it will unfold, I think it will be a very good facility that we won’t have to build,” he said. “I think within a couple of years … it’s going to occur. Would I like to have it today? Yes. Are we going to have it today? No. We simply aren’t able to do it right now.”

What now?

In a time when budget issues are at the top of the administration’s priority list, how does the University make work-life issues worthy of researching and spending money on?

“We make it a priority,” Wilkins said. “The case needs to be made for how the University would benefit. It’s not just about how we get good candidates, ‘so sometimes, yeah we lose a good female candidate, but we get a good male candidate so it’s OK,’ but that there is actual loss associated with that – loss not only in research activity and external funding, but also in wanting to have a more diverse faculty, and what that faculty means for the student body.”

Curtis said many universities present these issues in a monetary way by emphasizing the value of work-life benefits as recruiting tools.

“Several of them have turned the whole argument around,” he said.

“Rather than thinking of it as a cost, they’ve realized that by providing those kinds of facilities and policies … they are going to be in a better position to recruit new faculty, better faculty and also to keep the faculty they already have.”

This is where Curtis, Mattern-Parkes and Wilkins agree: If there is any factor, work-life related or otherwise, that inhibits a talented candidate from coming to the University, UGA needs to look into those factors and fix them.

“Missing out on talent? That’s hard to tell,” Mace said. “If we had a child care center opening tomorrow, it would be a positive for the institution and factor in the retention for some of our younger faculty,” Mace said.

Aside from increasing a female presence on campus and ensuring UGA has the most talented professors possible, the heart of the fight for work-life policies boils down to one: humanistic need.

“I think everybody looks for an employer who treats their employees with respect, that listens to their issues, that does their best to fulfill their real needs,” Mattern-Parkes said. “I think every employee wants to feel like they’re part of a community and an employer that is caring. I believe in this institution. If you take UGA’s faculty up against the faculty of any research university, and our peer or among our aspirant we do really well. We have great people, and they deserve respect, and they deserve better than what we’ve been doing.”