Document 77: "Education," in Susanna Downie, Decade of Achievement: 1977-1987: A Report on a Survey Based on the National Plan of Action for Women (Washington, D.C.: National Women's Conference Committee, 1988), pp. 28-31.
p. 28
EDUCATION
NATIONAL PLAN PRIORITIES
•enforcement of all laws prohibiting discrimination at all levels of education •opposition to any weakening of these laws and regulations •gather data by sex as well as race or ethnicity (in school surveys) •bilingual vocational training •state school systems should: review books and curriculum, including Women's History in the curriculum, and institute non-sexist and non-racist counseling at every level of the system.
In some respects women have made more gains in this area than in almost any other, at least in Higher Education. Women achieved parity with men in undergraduate colleges nationwide in 1977, and have since maintained or exceeded parity (50-51% of enrollments, 52% in 1984). In 1982, 15% of enrolled women were members of minority groups; among Blacks, Native Americans, and Hispanics (but not Asian Pacific students) women's enrollment exceeded that of men (minority groups total about 18% of the population at large). It was not until 1982 that females earned 50% of all bachelor's degrees, up from 43% in 1970. For Master's Degrees: in 1970, women earned about 40%; by 1984 they were earning 49%. For PhDs granted, the proportion of women rose from 13% in 1970 to 33.5% in 1984.
In the early seventies, the percentage of female enrollment in first professional degree programs (Law, Medicine, Dentistry, MBA, Divinity) began to rise, and shows the same pattern as for other post-baccalaureate degrees:
| DEGREES GRANTED, PERCENTAGE OF WOMEN, OF TOTAL DEGREES AWARDED THAT ACADEMIC YEAR (totals approximate) |
||||
| 1975 | 1985 | |||
| Field/Degree | percent women | total degrees | percent women | total degrees |
| Business (MBA) | 8% | 36,240 | 30.5% | 67,500 |
| Dentistry | 3% | 4,780 | 20.7% | 5340 |
| Medicine | 13% | 12,450 | 30.5% | 16,000 |
| Law (LLB orJD) | 15% | 29,300 | 38% | 37,500 |
| Computer Sci. (MS) | 14.7% | 2300 | 26.6% | 7100 |
| Engineering (ME) | 2% | 15,350 | 10.7% | 21,500 |
| Engineering (PhD) | 2% | 3100 | 6.4% | 3200 |
While the above figures represent the choices of (mostly) young women, it is also important to note that the fastest growing sector of post-secondary enrollments is "re-entry women", who are usually at least 5 years older than the 18-22 year olds who dominate undergraduate populations, and who are returning to school after having interrupted their education to have children.
The Higher the Fewer: But the well-known phenomenon of "the higher, the fewer" does seem to be alive and well, especially when we look at the upper end of the pedagogical spectrum. Between 1975 and 1985, the number of women college or university president doubled, from 148 to 300, about 8% of whom are women of color. But 300 is only 5% of the total of such positions. Of a total of 400,000 full-time faculty in 1983, women accounted for 27.3%, up from 22.3% in 1972. But at the full professor level, women went from 9.8% in 1972 to only 10.7% in 1983. The WREI Report (1987) points out that this apparently slow growth is due in part to the fact that a greater proportion of women were promoted to full professorships in the 1940's, and now that those women have retired or are retiring, younger women are not moving into senior positions fast enough to both replace them and increase the total proportion of women.
Secondary Schools: At lower levels of the educational system, the picture is less clear and less positive. Only 71% of all students beginning high school (9th grade) actually graduate (1984). Graduation rates are not available by sex and race, but a 1983 US Dept. of Education report indicates that the dropout rate for females is almost as high as that for males. And females list as one of their reasons for dropping out: "getting married" or "pregnancy" (where the males list "going to work").
Females who fail to complete high school suffer higher unemployment rates than males: in March, 1985, among females aged 25-64 who had not graduated from high school, only 44% were employed, while for male nongraduates of the same ages 73% were employed. In addition, tracking continues to channel females into lower-wage occupations. In secondary school programs, nearly 70% of the girls are enrolled in programs leading to below-average-wage jobs, and less than 10% are enrolled in programs leading to the highest paid jobs (1985).
Education may be worth less to females than to males, but there is a strong correlation between lack of education and poverty. In 1981, the poverty rate was 49% for those with less than 8 years of school, 27.8% for high school graduates, and 16% for those with one or more years of college. (For more information of this type, please see the 1986 PEER Report Card, a State by State survey of women and girls in America's schools, and PEER Issue Overviews, address listed under Resources., below).
p. 29
WOMEN'S RESPONSES TO THE PROBLEMS
Another way to measure progress is to look at what new organizations have emerged to deal with educational inequities:
WOMEN'S EDUCATIONAL EQUITY ACT: Enacted in 1974, with a $10m budge in 1980, WEEA has had its budget slashed every year since then. Continual attack from the Reagan Administration included the firing of Leslie Wolfe, the dynamic and hard-working proponent of educational equity who served as Director from 1979 until 1983, when the program was downgraded and her position was eliminated. Between 1980 and 1983, WEEA grants funded: The Black Women's Education and Policy Network (at Wellesley), the Asian Women United Project, the national outreach program of the Women's History Week Project (q.v.), the Three-states project at PEER in 1980, the Bay Area Bi-lingual Education League, the DREDF survey and conferences on/for disabled women (the first of their kind) (see Disabled Women), and a directory, a survey and networking among Native American women which resulted in the formation of the Ohoyo Network.
The Reagan administration would have zeroed WEEA out altogether, but Congress has kept up funding, though at ever lower levels. In 1987, WEEA supporters were fighting to keep the $3.4m 1986 budget from being further cut.
THE PROJECT ON EQUAL EDUCATIONAL RIGHTS (PEER) was founded in 1974, with Ford Foundation grants, and with Polly Knox as founding Director, to watchdog enforcement of Title IX. It has become a prime resource for information and advocacy on a broad range of issues, such as teenage pregnancy (and its devastating effect on women's education), computer literacy, vocational education and other major areas of inequity in girls' education. They conduct research, produce action kits for use at the grassroots level, and work to affect policy at the federal level.
NATIONAL WOMEN'S STUDIES ASSOCIATION
One of the clearest stories of the decade is the growth and maturation of the National Women's Studies Association. Founded in 1977, NWSA began as a network of 276 Women's Studies programs. It is now (1987) a full-fledge professional organization linking 503 Women's Studies programs, 64 of which give Master's degrees in W.S., and 26 of which give PhDs. Caryn McTighe Musil, the current Coordinator, estimates that 250,000 students are enrolled in at least one W.S. course each year.
NWSA has always been concerned with issues of racism, and has worked to include women-of-color perspectives in its scholarship. This year NWSA held its 10th annual conference at Spelman College in Atlanta GA, where 30% of the presenters were women of color.
The national office has been through at least one serious fiscal crisis, when they had no paid national coordinator; but with the 67% growth in membership since 1984, and membership now at about 3500, the office has 3 paid staff and is about to add 4 more. Development plans call for newly strengthened research activities, bibliographies, and a large data base survey on Women's Studies programs. A standing issue at NWSA is "main-streaming" - how to integrate feminist scholarship into existing curricula.
A NEW DISCIPLINE, A NEW PEDAGOGY: In the US, Women's Studies has been busy creating a new "discipline", which is so deeply and necessarily interdisciplinary that it is still "invisible" to some guardians of academic orthodoxy, and the battle for recognition as a "true discipline" is still going on.
Meanwhile, women in traditional disciplines have organized a Women's Caucus (or equivalent) in every major professional academic association in the country. Some of these groups became so strong that they split off from the parent. For example, the Association for Women in Psychology formed in 1969 at an American Psychological Association meeting, with a handful of women and a few men. They became independent and held their first national conference in 1973, and by 1978 had 1500 members. This story can be told, with variations, for many other disciplines, particularly in the Social Sciences and Humanities.
INTERNATIONAL WOMEN'S STUDIES NETWORK: IWSN got its start at Copenhagen in 1980, at the mid-decade conference. At Nairobi in 1985, Women's Studies panels and workshops ran back to back for the whole ten days of the NGO Forum. Dr. Florence Howe, founder of The Feminist Press, and one of the Foremothers of IWSN, estimates that there are at least 300 Centers for Research on Women worldwide, and a survey and directory of these Centers is in the works. For more information on IWSN, see International Affairs.
FEMINIST JOURNALS AND FEMINIST TEACHER: There has also been an explosion of journals for women's scholarly publications, strongly related to the above mentioned growth of NWSA and other women's professional academic associations. There are at least 30 of these new journals, all founded since the mid-70's. The first was Signs in 1975. But since scholarly articles typically do not deal in current events, and academe in general emphasizes publishing over teaching, there was a need for a periodical that addressed the specific problems and issues and news of feminist pedagogy.
In 1984, Feminist Teacher was born. It comes out three times a year, averages 44 pages, has a mailing list of about 700, and goes to teachers and some librarians and administrators, who want news, reviews, course syllabi, and columns about feminist teacher issues and events, including legal cases and legislation. Paula Krebs, the editor, says FT is for anyone teaching Women's Studies, but is especially targeted to feminist teachers who are not lucky enough to be teaching in a Women's Studies Program, people who teach regular history, or literature, or social studies and want to do it in a feminist and non-racist way. The magazine is very much reader-developed, and each issue carries a "Feminist Teacher Network" section, with names and addresses of new subscribers so that people can get in touch with each other.
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WOMEN'S HISTORY MONTH: Another success story of the decade is the phenomenal growth of the Women's History Project, which began as Women's History Week in Sonoma County, California, in 1977, and is now Women's History Month and is nationwide. It was started with three volunteers (Maria Cueva, Mary Ruthsdotter, and Bette Morgan) and Molly McGregor, who was a staff person for the county. In 1980, they got a grant from WEEA to go national. US Public Law 100-9 (1986) made Women's History Month official for the whole country. They now have a paid staff of 9 (the project is non-profit) and a mailing list of 38,000. Bette Morgan estimates that this list is 65% public school K-12 educators. In 1980, the project's offerings fit on a one-page flyer; now they send out a 36-page catalog, listing curriculum guides for public school classes K through 12, and their now familiar posters and materials for organizing the Week or Month in your area. They also do teacher training nationwide.
COMPUTER EQUITY, A MAJOR ISSUE: One educational issue that has emerged clearly since 1977 is the whole problem of women and technology, particularly the problem of how to keep girls in science, math and computer science classes in primary and secondary schools, so that they will at least have the option of going into the technical and scientific fields which pay well and offer greater opportunity than the fields which so many young women are forced to choose because they do not have the necessary preparation for anything else. All scientific fields now require fairly sophisticated use of computers at ever earlier and earlier stages of training.
The pattern of inequity here is even greater for minorities, particularly minority females. Boys outnumber girls 2 to 1 in high-school computer science classes; of the nation's 2.7 million scientists, only 5% are women, only 1.5% are minorities (50% of whom are Asian, 40% of whom are foreign born and educated). Bias at all levels of the system is pervasive and increasingly well-documented, and is such that by the time they get to highschool, girls as well as boys see Math, Science, and Computers, as "male", and not appropriate subjects for girls. In spite of this, as early as 1981, girls accounted for an average of almost 37% of enrollments in High School Computer Programming Courses (in a three-state study conducted by PEER, in 1981-2).
Some positive efforts to address the problem of computer inequity:
•Girls Clubs of America, in 1987, received a $221,000 Ford Foundation grant "to develop new models of intervention and service in math, science and technology education for inner city girls". This grant supports the GCA Project SMART program, which was started in 1985, and has published a report on case studies of the relationships between Girls' Clubs and schools in providing math and science education to girls age 9 through 14 (reports available from GCA National Resource Center, 441 West Michigan St., Indianpolis IN 46202.)
•Women's Action Alliance (WAA) has a Computer Equity Program, which was started in 1983, and was funded by WEEA, to develop, test and publish school based strategies for eliminating girls' computer avoidance at the middle school level. In 1986, WAA conducted a pilot study to test some materials they had developed in earlier stages of the program. Five schools participated. At the control school, where no changes were introduced, there was no increase in girl's computer use. At the "Attention" control school (where "they got everything but the book", ie the teacher did a few things differently), there was an increase of 14%. At the three experimental schools however, there was a whopping 144% increase in girls' computer use. The materials and methods used in the experimental schools were designed to be replicable in any school setting. Jo Sanders conducted this study and reports on it in The Neuter Computer: Computers for Girls and Boys, available from WAA. Jo Sanders also reports that the public media attention to this topic is "staggering". She has gotten hundreds of calls from reporters, from all over the country. Paula Krebs, of Feminist Teacher (above), has observed a similar trend, a big jump in numbers of articles and people concerned about the issue just in the last three years.
The Neuter Computer documents one very clear answer to the problem of girls' computer avoidance.
Computer EQUALS: Perhaps the most important Computer Equity program in the country is Computer EQUALS, based in Berkeley CA. EQUALS started in 1977, to address the problem of "math anxiety" in girls and minorities. They specialize in teacher training, and as of this year, have trained 1400 educators in California, and 9000 in 36 other states. They have just received a 3-year $900,000 grant from the National Science Foundation to conduct an intensive program to six California school districts (three of which will be predominantly minority districts) focusing on math education in grades 3 thru 8. The study will involve use of computers and calculators, but it will also explore innovative methods for evaluations, such as having the students keep journals. One of their many excellent publications Off and Running., a book of off-line activities designed to encourage girls to get their share of computer time when the opportunity arises.
SEX-EQUITY & VOC. ED.: If sex segregation in vocational education could be eliminated, a large part of the wage gap between men and women would also be eliminated. Over 70% of females do not go on for post-secondary training, and it is in junior high and high school that they are tracked, or just slide, into the low-paying dead-end female-dominated jobs that account for much of the wage gap.
The 1984 Carl D. Perkin's Vocational Education Act
provided much needed revision of the 1976 Voc. Ed. Act, which permitted but
did not require states to spend a percentage of their federal funds to end sex
segregation in vocational training and education. "Perkins" not only requires
states to spend federal money on this purpose, it also specifies the percentage
of state voc. ed. grant money to be spent on sex
p. 31
The National Coalition for Women and Girls in Education recently presented their third annual awards to five states for exemplary sex equity programs. One award went to New York State, for its Single Parents Project, which targeted AFDC recipients and has set up 14 programs in communities around the state to provide 10 to 20 weeks of individually tailored services including vocational assessment, remedial education, child care, job development and referral, transportation to training sites, counselling and group work, and internships. The program has a strong focus on non-traditional careers and career planning. Mary Ann Etu, Sex Equity Coordinator for NY estimates that the success rate for this program is about 80% (50% is considered very good for similar social services).
Wisconsin is another state with outstanding Sex Equity programs. Other states that got awards from NCFWGE are: Idaho, Maine, Texas and Utah.
A nationwide assessment of the Perkins amendments, which was mandated by the law, is currently underway and should be ready in 1988 or early '89.
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY WOMEN: AAUW has always been active on educational issues, but the pace has quickened under the leadership of Sarah Harder. In 1989, the AAUW national convention will focus on "Early Equity"; AAUW branches in CA, WI, and UT are already taking the lead in working with state sex equity coordinators to set up programs and involve other community based organizations (CBOs) to support sex equity in education.
CIVIL RIGHTS RESTORATION ACT: Since the Grove City Supreme Court decision in 1984, which effectively gutted Title IX of the Civil Rights Act and 52 other anti-discrimination statutes, proponents of educational equity have worked for passage of the Civil Rights Restoration Act (CRRA, HR 1214, S. 557). CRRA will restore full coverage to Title VI (race discrimination), Title IX (sex discrimination), Section 204 (disability), and the Older Americans Act, Anti-equity forces have tried to stop CRRA by attaching anti-abortion amendments. When CRRA passed both the House and the Senate by wide margins, President Reagan vetoed it. Finally, on March 22, 1988, Congress overrode the veto (73-24 in the Senate, 292-133 in the House). CRRA is now law.
ILLITERACY: Official figures (U.S. Census Bureau) give the literacy rate for the U.S. as 99.5%, based on the assumption that anyone who completes fifth grade is functionally literate. Recent studies, principally Jonathan Kozol's Illiterate America, suggest that as many as 33% Americans 18 years old or older are functionally or marginally illiterate. Of these 60 million Americans, about 60% are women. 16% of whites are illiterate, but the figure jumps to 44% for Blacks and 56% for Latinos. Nevertheless, 2/3 of all illiterates are white. Programs to address the problem are scattered and inadequate. The two largest volunteer tutoring programs together only reach 127,000 clients a year (according to a 1987 study by the Education Commission of the States). Only half of the states have even defined illiteracy. The federal government has taken no effective action to address what is clearly a national crisis.
—with help from almost everyone named in this report, plus my friend Heidi
Swarts, who used a day of her vacation time to help me gather data.
RESOURCES:
ORGANIZATIONS:
AMERICAN ASSOC. OF COLLEGES, PROJECT ON THE STATUS AND EDUCATION OF WOMEN, 1818 R St. NW, Washington DC, 20009. (202) 387-1300. Newsletter: Equal Opportunity in Higher Education
AMERICAN COUNCIL ON EDUCATION, OFFICE OF WOMEN IN HIGHER EDUCATION, One Dupont Circle, Washington DC 20036. (202) 833-4766.
PROJECT ON EQUAL EDUCATION RIGHTS (PEER) (of NOW LDEF), 1333 H St. NW 11th fl., Washington DC 20005. (202) 682-0940. Monthly newsletter: Equal Education Alert.
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION OF UNIVERSITY WOMEN, 2401 Virginia Ave. NW, Washington, DC 20037. (202) 785-7700. 1989 Conference: Early Equity.
NATIONAL WOMEN'S STUDIES ASSOCIATION, University of Maryland, College Park, MD 20742. (301)454-3757. Quarterly newsletter.
WOMEN'S ACTION ALLIANCE, 370 Lexington Ave., New York NY 10017. (212)532-8330.
COMPUTER EQUALS, Lawrence Hall of Science, University of California, Berkeley CA 94720. (415)642-1823.
NATIONAL WOMEN'S HISTORY PROJECT, P.O. Box 3716, Santa Rosa CA 95402. (707) 526-5974.
THE FEMINIST PRESS, at CUNY, 311 East 94th St. New York NY 10129.
SEX EQUITY COORDINATOR FOR NEW YORK STATE: Mary Ann Etu. (518) 473-7892.
PUBLICATIONS:
PEER Computer Equity Reports, & Equity Action Kits; also, annual PEER Report Card s - State by State Survey. From PEER, address above.
Off and Running (computer equity for girls) - from COMPUTER EQUALS, above.
The Neuter Computer: Computers for Boys and Girls (1986), from Women's Action Alliance (above).
Feminist Teacher, Paula Krebs, ed., Ballantyne 447, Indiana University, Bloomington IN 47405. (812) 335-3042. Three times a year, by subscription.
Everywoman's Guide to Colleges and Universities (an Educational Project of the Feminist Press), ed. by Florence Howe, Suzanne Howard, and Mary Jo Bochm Strauss. The Feminist Press, Old Westbury, NY, 1982. Dedicated "to Title IX, on its tenth birthday". Rates schools and colleges for their hospitableness (or lack thereof) to women, with ratings on curriculum, support services, faculty, record of dealing with sexual harassment, tenuring of women, teacher/student ratios, etc. Very basic.
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