More childcare options, a Civil Service advisory council and formal exit interviews across the university are top priorities for the President’s Commission on the Status of Women this year.
Jill Griffin, co-chair of the commission, opened the annual retreat Friday at the Lewis Alumni Center.
Past progress will be detailed in a five-year report released later this year but, Griffin said, continuing progress is dependent on more reliable and extensive data collection that allows comparisons across campus and from institution to institution and even internationally.
“We want solid data collection by every unit that is comparable across campus,” she said.
Commission co-chair Kathleen Hagen said the commission will continue working on creating a family-friendly environment at WSU. That includes not only expanded childcare opportunities, she said, but more flexibility for employees who are struggling with a host of concerns, from elder care to college tuition.
Obtaining funding for additional childcare facilities is an ongoing concern, Hagen said, but a new priority is the need to establish a universitywide forum for staff concerns. Several groups that were previously represented by collective bargaining units voted to decertify in 2005, she said, so now there is renewed interest in reviving the Staff Senate, a body that functions much the same as the Faculty Senate and AP Advisory Council.
Hagen said the Commission on the Status of Women subcommittees were restructured this year into five areas of emphasis: recruitment and retention; family-friendly environment; sexual misconduct, harassment and discrimination; advancement and leadership; and data collection.
While every subcommittee has a handful of concerns to explore and make recommendations on, in the retention and recruitment area, she said, systematic exit interviews are a high priority. Knowing why people leave WSU is crucial in developing practices or policies that make employees want to stay.
The family-friendly environment subcommittee will continue pushing for funding for a new childcare center, while also working on a host of other concerns, from creating a tuition reduction/scholarship program for dependents of WSU employees to creating consistent maternal and paternal leave policies.
Buttressing the theme of “much has been accomplished, much more is left to do,” Melynda Huskey, the assistant vice president for research, assessment and initiatives in the Office of Equity and Diversity, was the keynote speaker during the morning retreat.
According to Huskey, WSU is behind its peer universities in a number of areas, including student retention rates and racial and ethnic diversity of both students and faculty. The one area where WSU is at the head of the pack is in the percentage of women faculty, broadly defined to include tenured, non-tenured, part-time instructors and adjuncts. With that broad definition, she said, the percentage of women is 38.7 percent. If you consider just tenured and tenure-track faculty, she said, women are at 28.7 percent.
“Is that the best we can do?” she said. “I think that’s outrageous. I mean, it’s great that we are the highest, but if you’re at the top of a pack of losers, that’s still not that great.”
According to the Commission on the Status of Women’s 2001 report, women comprised 37.1 percent of the faculty in 2000.
