Hanover

On May 20, the Valley News published an op-ed by the organization Dartmouth Community Against Gender Harassment and Sexual Violence about the persistent gender imbalances in the faculty of the college’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences.

On May 28, the provost of Dartmouth, Joseph Helble, and dean of the faculty of arts and sciences, Elizabeth Smith, responded with a letter that, while admitting that recruiting and retaining diverse faculty were challenging, claimed our original analysis was inaccurate and incomplete and expressed satisfaction with the record of hiring in the department. “Through the efforts of many deans over many years,” the wrote, “Dartmouth has worked toward increasing the percentage of women on the tenure-track faculty, and is now ahead of many peer institutions on this measure.”

We are disappointed that Dartmouth has chosen to confront the problem of retention of women faculty in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences with further denial and obfuscation.

Some basic facts: Of department faculty hired in the past 20 years, only one woman has been promoted to tenure and no women have been hired with tenure, whereas 13 men either have been promoted to tenure or hired with tenure. In other words, only 7% of these new tenured department faculty were female.

We have compiled statistics and supporting documents related to the hiring and retention of faculty in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences from 1975 to the present, with summary tables distinguishing between faculty hired in the past 20 years and faculty hired before 1999.

As the data demonstrate, asymmetrical outcomes for women faculty have actually worsened over this time.

Prior to 1999, 40% of department faculty who were hired with tenure or promoted to tenure were women, compared with 7% in the last 20 years. As a result, only 25% of current tenured department faculty are women — the lowest percentage of any psychology department in the Ivy League. The three tenured women faculty currently in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences were hired 35, 25 and 13 years ago, and only one has an active research program.

The letter from the Dartmouth administrators excludes data relating to faculty who have left before completing tenure review. They write simply, “faculty leave for many reasons,” without further examining the reasons for these departures. Academic tenure conversion failures are often managed by encouraging tenure-track faculty to leave before completing tenure review. Departures of female tenure-track faculty are the primary reason for the dramatic drop in tenure conversions for women in the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences. To avoid distortion of data, any calculation of tenure statistics must include an analysis of cases where faculty depart prior to completing tenure review. In our original op-ed, we referred to this exclusion of relevant data from the administration’s calculation of tenure statistics as “cherry-picking.”

For example, the administrators wrote: “Dartmouth is now ahead of many peer institutions” in terms of the percentage of women on the tenure-track faculty. In the Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences, the current percentage of women among tenure-track faculty (37.5%) is actually below the median for Ivy League institutions (Dartmouth ranks sixth out of eight).

The administrators also wrote that “different fields of psychology are male-dominated to differing degrees.” Psychology actually is female-dominated in terms of doctorates granted.

Further, they wrote that, “The national representation of women in computational neuroscience, an important focus of the Dartmouth Psychological and Brain Sciences Department, is only 17 percent.” Computational neuroscience does not refer exclusively to computational cognitive neuroscience, but rather is a much broader field that includes molecular and cellular neuroscience. The important focus in Dartmouth’s Department of Psychological and Brain Sciences is on computational approaches to cognitive and social neuroscience, not computational neuroscience more broadly. The quoted statistic is irrelevant to the department’s hiring practices.

Finally, the administrators’ letter noted, “Over the past 20 years, 75 percent of women … who stood for tenure received tenure.” It appears from the data that two of the three women the administration includes in this calculation were hired before 1999, one in 1994 and one in 1997. Moreover, one of these two left immediately after receiving tenure because of dissatisfaction with treatment by her Psychological and Brain Sciences faculty colleagues. (Among other troubles, faculty in the department initially voted to deny her tenure.)

According to a 2017 article in Slate: “In the mid-2000s, three of the department’s most promising young female professors — Abigail Baird, Jennifer Groh, and Jennifer Richeson — departed for other schools. Richeson would earn a MacArthur ‘genius’ grant the year after leaving; Baird was named a ‘Rising Star in Psychological Science’ in 2008; and Groh received a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2009. They now direct labs at Yale, Vassar, and Duke, respectively. … By January 2007, the (department) website included just three women on its list of 16 faculty members.” This is hardly a satisfactory record.

We are glad to see the college state that “recruiting and retaining a diverse and talented faculty are critical to the strength of the Dartmouth community and the effectiveness of learning and leadership at the college.” We are disheartened, however, by Dartmouth’s refusal to acknowledge fully the cultural failures of the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department.

Ridding the department of three individuals whose alleged behavior was reprehensible does not address the full scope of problems. Considering and investigating the causes of these failures, rather than denying them and diverting attention with evasive statistics, would represent real institutional courage and allow the transparency needed to regain trust and usher in a new era of gender equity in the Psychological and Brain Sciences Department.

This piece was written by Ruth Cserr and Ida Gobbini in collaboration with other members of Dartmouth Community Against Gender Harassment and Sexual Violence.