Legal Advocacy Fund

A priority of the OML Branch, the Gloria Weston Campus Outreach Fund was started in 2003 by our own Gloria Weston, a former President of this branch and a longtime supporter of LAF. A graduate of the University of California at Berkeley, Gloria (pictred at left) is now in her eighties and still going strong!

After years of devoting both time and money to LAF, Gloria came to the conclusion that more resources should be devoted to preventing litigation, through education or other creative means, by addressing sex-based inequities at their roots. As 20% of all LAF-supported cases originate in California, pro-active measures are obviously needed.

After three years of fundraising, the Gloria Weston Outreach Fund sponsored its first program at California State University at Fresno in 2005. Prior to this program, CSUF had been investigated twice by the Office of Civil Rights for Title IX violations, and sued at least three times under Title IX by female coaches/administrators. It also had no mandatory sexual harassment training, except after a sexual harassment charge was made against a faculty member. Further, a survey of 120 CSUF students found that less than 5% knew where to go to report sexual harassment and none knew that a Title IX complaint could be filed as part of a sexual harassment complaint.

Read more about the Gloria Weston Campus Outreach Fund here.

Dr. Kathryn Forbes on the Impact of the Gloria Weston Fund on Fresno State

The Gloria Weston Campus Outreach Fund supports campus education programs that bring equity experts to campuses in order to empower women faculty and students to make concrete changes at their universities. This education includes: 1) common forms of discrimination in academic settings; 2) equity policies that can help move a campus to equity. The programs are meant to begin or elaborate on a campus conversation about women's experiences. While a university may be home to great minds that can find solutions to complex mathematical problems and propose answers to philosophically vexing dilemmas, universities are not made up of folks who know how to analyze institutionalized gender inequities or how to implement programs for social change. Bringing equity experts to campus addresses this gap in expertise. And as one equity expert told me, even when there are equity experts on campus, administrators and faculty decision makers often already have dismissed them as grumpy complainers. Outside experts are not so easily discounted.

The first campus outreach program was held on my campus in the spring of 2005. I teach at California State University, Fresno. You may have heard of us. We are becoming famous for our handling of gender equity issues. The Office of Civil Rights is wrapping up its investigation into Title IX violations in our Athletic Department-the second investigation in just over a decade. Two winning female coaches are suing the university: one claims that she was fired in retaliation of a sexual harassment complaint she made; the other claims that she was fired for her forthright advocacy of Title IX. A former senior female athletic department administrator also is suing CUSF. She also claims that she was removed from her position because of her Title IX advocacy. A CSU systemwide 2000 survey found that our campus had the lowest job satisfaction rates among female faculty and staff in all of the 23 campuses. In response, Fresno State conducted a handful of focus groups on the employment experiences of women faculty and staff but the administration did not formulate new policies to address issues raised by women nor did the administration release the findings from the study to the campus community.

As you can see, our campus desperately needs help. In April of 2005, the Women's Studies Program partnered with AAUW to bring Dan Seigel, Mary Burgan, and Leslie Annexstein to campus. Dan Seigel, as many of you know, specializes in representing plaintiffs in discrimination suits involving universities. Mary Burgan is the former president of the American Association of University Professors and has helped formulate family friendly tenure and promotion policies. Leslie Annexstein is the former director of LAF. In our campus outreach program we held three events: 1) a lunch with administrators; 2) a panel presentation for faculty and students; 3) a dinner for supporters of gender equity.

The education program addressed three issues: The first was maternity leave policies and the tenure clock. Among other organizations, AAUW Legal Advocacy Fund has identified the need for educational institutions to improve women's ability to balance family and career as one of the primary ways that we can improve the work lives for women. For women faculty, the maternity policies hinder career advancement and progress toward tenure. As is the case with many universities, the length of maternity leave at CSUF is less than half the length of the semester. Women who give birth or adopt at the beginning of the semester and choose to take maternity leave either must resume their teaching duties in classes that have been taught by someone else or must take unpaid leave for the rest of the semester. There are maternity policies that do not punish women. In the outreach program, faculty members learned that the AAUP supports maternity leave policies that consists of eight weeks of regular maternity leave and five weeks of "active service modified duties" in which teaching commitments are relieved but other duties resume at a modified level. This types of maternity policy includes a provision that, unless otherwise requested, the tenure clock automatically stop when probationary faculty take maternity leave. The AAUP recommended policy reflects a nuanced understanding of the fact that all too often women in academia are stigmatized for taking maternity leave and caring for children. Perhaps this helps explain why nationwide only 38% of women who achieve tenure have babies after receipt of their Ph.D, and perhaps this explains why in 2004, I was the first woman on my campus to stop my tenure clock when I went on maternity leave. (Let me say on a personal note how revelatory this portion of the outreach program was for me. Hours researching whether or not I could stop my clock, how difficult it was, etc. Confirmed my experience of discrimination but more importantly showed me how it could be different).

The second issue the equity experts addressed was sexual harassment policy and litigation. We learned that despite the fact that sexual harassment of women faculty by male faculty and male administrators was quite common in university settings, universities often have inadequate sexual harassment policies and even more inadequate means of implementing these policies. CSUF follows this trend. We have had an inadequate interim sexual harassment policy for years. Until the passage of AB1825 last year, CSUF had no mandatory sexual harassment training for faculty members. In fact, sexual harassment training was only offered or mandated to a faculty member after a sexual harassment charge was made against that faculty member.

Finally, the campus outreach program at Fresno State used cases supported by the AAUW Legal Advocacy Fund illustrate the shape and scope of discriminatory evaluation practices and rubrics used by academics to evaluate women for tenure. As stated in the LAF publication "Tenure Denied" which was presented at the CSUF outreach program, "Universities do not have straightforward publication or teaching standards that guarantee tenure." As a result, decision making about tenure and promotion can be influenced, sometimes easily, by sexist attitudes. Unfortunately for women, the blatant sexism of yesteryear is now much more stealth. While it is the case that outright sexism in evaluation procedures persists, much more common are evaluations of women's performance that appear objective but in reality are discriminatory in nature. For instance, Clark in "Antifeminism in the Academy" documents the ways that feminist research is systematically devalued in educational institutions as it is thought to be not as rigorous as supposedly non-political work. The outreach program also emphasized that women faculty members often are burdened with time intensive university service activities that prevent them from fully concentrating on their research objectives which need to be met for tenure.

Many women faculty identified with these issues citing that all too often they were saddled with the domestic duties of committee work and that their applied work was admonished even as the university continues to sell itself as having a commitment to the community. Women spoke of having enormous advising duties because their male colleagues thought that they were more nurturing of students. Women who were the only female faculty member in their department spoke of the tensions between serving female students and making sure that they completed their own research. Women identified instances in which research on women or the work done on women's issues was either belittled or ignored.

Thus, the Gloria Weston Campus Outreach Fund raised a number of pertinent issues for female faculty and it helped forward a conversation about gender equity on our campus. So what has happened since then? More than a year later, what progress for women can we see on our campus? I would like to say that we have moved from 36% of the tenure track faculty to 50%. I wish I could say that we now have a maternity leave policy that does not punish women. And it would be great if I could say that sexual harassment on our campus is a behavior of the past. Unfortunately, I cannot. But as I remind my students social change, institutional change, is incremental and slow. Universities are hulking bureaucracies that are highly accountable. The problem is that they are accountable to their own past interpretations of policies and procedures rather than to their clients or to their marginalized members. With that said, I would like to briefly identify a couple of concrete changes that have been made to improve gender equity.

First, women's studies faculty have led the charge and have been the main shapers of the new sexual harassment policy. It promises to be the most comprehensive and well-researched policy in the entire CSU system. Using the Stanford policy as a model, myself and another Women's studies faculty member have succeeded in thoroughly revising the policy both to improve the ways that complainants can access the reporting system and to attend to student to student sexual harassment. AAUW's report "Drawing the Line" has proved invaluable to us in these revisions. Preliminary research on sexual harassment on the CSUF campus suggests that our campus reflects the national trends found in the AAUW study. Although no CSUF student filed a formal complaint of peer to peer sexual harassment in 2004-2005 calendar year (personal communication, CSUF Title IX officer), a pilot study on sexual harassment conducted by Women Studies undergraduate majors in the Spring 2005 found that sexual harassment between students is commonplace. Students reported being sexually harassed in the Free Speech area-nicknamed "the isle of judgment." Others reported being grabbed in the library and at campus sporting events. A companion qualitative study in the same semester observed and interviewed female students who identified several places on campus they avoided due to sexual harassment. A survey of 120 CSUF students found that less than 5% knew where to go to report sexual harassment and none knew that a Title IX complaint could be filed as part of a sexual harassment complaint. These preliminary findings, coupled with the AAUW study, have highlighted the need for a comprehensive policy designed to eliminate sexual harassment as a part of campus culture.

Second, we were able to place an AAUW and Title IX advocate on the search committee for a new Athletic Director. Because of her, questions about Title IX were directed to interviewees and Title IX compliance history was one of the main issues on which candidates were judged. As a result, CSUF hired a candidate with an excellent record on Title IX.

Third, maternity leave is procedurally easier to obtain and Family Medical Leave is understood as a federal right. In addition, the university is now beginning to discuss family friendly work policies in relationship to the retention and recruitment of female faculty. Indeed, the fact that our campus seems to have trouble retaining female faculty is finally on the university's radar screen.

Of course, we have a long way to go but I firmly believe that the LAF Gloria Weston Outreach Program launched us on the road to gender equity. I heartily thank you all for supporting this fund and making women's work lives better. Female faculty members and women undergraduates need you for inspiration, for your authoritative voice on gender equity, and for your moral support.

Kathryn Forbes