Publication Date: Wednesday, June 08, 2005
Our Town: Gender bias at Stanford?
Our Town: Gender bias at Stanford?
(June 08, 2005)
by Don Kazak
Denise Johnson, a Stanford University Medical School assistant
professor and surgeon, filed a gender and race discrimination lawsuit against
the university in May.
It feels like déjà vu all over again,
as former baseball great Yogi Berra is famous for saying.
Gender complaints and lawsuits continue to plague Stanford.
Coincidentally, the U.S. Department of Labor has reopened an investigation into gender discrimination at the university that was first begun in 1999.
The federal investigation was never really closed, according to a Department of Labor spokeswoman in San Francisco. "It is still open and on-going," she said.
It's a mystery why it has taken the federal agency so long to wrap up an investigation that began six years ago.
"The investigation has been dormant for more than four years," said Tom Fenner, Stanford's deputy general counsel. "But we recently heard the Department of Labor wants to restart it, although we do not currently know what precisely they are interested in looking at."
The problem with trying to find out what the feds are doing is the feds don't say anything.
Reports back in 1999 were that as many as 30 past and present Stanford women were part of the federal complaint. Later reports were that some have since dropped off, making individual settlements with the university.
A university source said there were actually nine names on the complaint in 1999, two were added in the next year and four later dropped off. Four of the seven on the complaint are, or were, from the med school. Two are still there.
The consequences of the Department of Labor finding wrongdoing at Stanford are unknown -- the feds aren't saying. But Stanford gets a huge amount of federal research dollars, and federal contractors aren't allowed to discriminate by gender or race.
This has been a song that has been playing for a long time.
Frances Conley, a neurosurgeon, shocked Stanford in 1991 when she resigned her professorship, citing gender discrimination. She rejoined the faculty after about six months, but the once-forbidden had been spoken.
Conley, now retired, published her story in a 1998 book aptly titled, "Walking Out on the Boys."
Most of the complaints about alleged gender bias have come from the medical school and the traditionally male-dominated world of medicine.
An interesting footnote of the federal investigation is that Stanford, while confirming there are seven people listed on the federal complaint, won't confirm that they are women.
But if there is a federal investigation into alleged gender bias at Stanford, it is presumably not because men are complaining about being discriminated against by women.
Since the mid-1990s, the university has grappled with the fact that it has fewer women faculty than most of its peer institutions of elite, private research universities. Stanford has defended itself on that count because the makeup of tenured faculty is slow to change.
Less than one-quarter of all Stanford faculty -- 23 percent -- are women, but even fewer -- 17 percent -- of tenured faculty are women.
Because of those concerns, the number of women faculty is reported every year to the university's Faculty Senate. In 1998, the Women's Coalition for Gender Equity, a faculty group, released its own report that was harshly critical of the university for not hiring and retaining more women faculty members.
The low number of women faculty, lawsuits and a federal probe all seem part of the same whole.
Stanford is progressive in many ways, including the racial and gender diversity of both its undergraduate and graduate students. So the issue of faculty gender bias seems like an anomaly, like the bad uncle who embarrasses the family and is only brought out at Thanksgiving and then says the wrong things.
Johnson, the surgeon who filed the lawsuit last month, was the subject of a highly complimentary profile published in the April 17, 2002 issue of Stanford Report, the university's weekly newspaper.
Her lawsuit alleges that her surgery caseload dropped 77 percent after a new chief of breast surgery took over last November. Johnson is also part black and part Native American.
Weekly Senior Staff Writer Don Kazak can be emailed at dkazak@paweekly,com.
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