Women advance in higher education, still lag in some areas

Published 6:37 am Monday, April 2, 2012

Just a few generations ago, college was only a distant possibility for most men and an even more unlikely prospect for most women.

Today, more people than ever are attending college, and females — who were once shut out of many institutions of higher learning — now make up the majority of students. Several speakers in the annual Dicksie Bradley Bandy Memorial Colloquium at Dalton State College on Friday discussed female advances in higher education in Georgia.

Dalton State Vice President for Academic Affairs Sandra Stone said some 57.5 percent of students in the University System of Georgia are female while 63 percent of students in the Technical College System of Georgia are female. Stone attributed the rise in women enrolling partly to a shift in the way society views women’s roles and partly to the fact that many women in college simply have a stronger work ethic.

Yet overall pay for women in higher education is on average lower than what men are paid, and the percentage of females in top administrative and professorial positions still lags significantly behind that of their male counterparts, she said, citing research from the American Association of University Professors.

One reason for that is blatant discrimination, Stone said. She said she remembers applying for a job earlier in her career in which she was offered $40,000 less than the man she was replacing in the same position. Another factor is that women have to decide during their childbearing years, which also happen to be when they’re at a critical point in their careers, whether to set their career aside for a time to focus on building a family.

“When you get to the tenure promotion point, you may not stack up as well as your male counterparts,” Stone said. “It’s not that you’re not working as hard. It’s just that you’ve got other things to do.”

Dalton State psychology professor Michael Hoff said he hasn’t witnessed discrimination at the college, where his wife also works, but he’s seen it at play elsewhere. Many years ago, his wife applied for a job in Dalton Public Schools and was told by a former superintendent she wouldn’t receive as high a salary because she “didn’t need as much money because she had a husband.” Hoff said his wife told the human resources director what happened and the problem was eventually resolved.

Hoff said when his wife was hired recently to teach at Dalton State she was offered the same salary as a male hire with similar qualifications. Yet he acknowledged that in colleges in general, average female salaries are still far lower than average male salaries, partly because of women taking time away from their careers to focus on their families.

“I don’t know if there’s a good thing you can do about that because the reality is women make babies,” he said, but he added administrators need to be aware of that reality and try to support and accommodate women.

Males aren’t the only ones who have provided formal education for boys before providing it to girls. Jennifer Dickey, an assistant professor of history at Kennesaw State University who used to work at Berry College, said Berry College founder Martha Berry opened a private school exclusively for boys before she opened a girls school.

Dickey said Berry began her foray into education with just a couple of boys who happened by a little log house on some property her father had given her. She invited the boys inside for Bible study and soon started a Sunday school inside the building. Later, she began a day school for the poor male children in Floyd County and the surrounding area. The boys worked their way through school, paying for it by building their own dorms and furniture, raising their own food and cooking their own meals.

Famous in part for meeting with and getting the support of several U.S. presidents for the school, Berry once received a letter from Teddy Roosevelt that said that there was “no school in the South” in which he took greater interest than hers. “My only regret is that you do not have a school for girls, too,” Roosevelt wrote.

“So Martha Berry took that as a dictate to go ahead and start a school for girls,” Dickey said. She did it against the wishes and recommendations of her board of trustees, which gave its official endorsement six months after the decision, she said.

Berry went on to secure donations from several wealthy figures, including Andrew Carnegie. The Ford buildings at Berry, which are now girls dorms, were built with a donation from Henry Ford, the famous owner of the automobile company.

For many years, girls came to the high school at Berry to learn homemaking skills that would help them escape a life of poverty when they married, Dickey said. Berry expanded to include a four-year college in 1930. Today, nearly 70 percent of Berry students are female.

John Fowler, director of the Bandy Heritage Center for Northwest Georgia that presents the annual lecture, said it just makes sense to dedicate time to learning about women’s contributions to society. There is no other series like it in Georgia, he said.

“I just thought that was kind of ridiculous given that it’s half the population of the state and given the contribution that women have made,” Fowler said.

He said his superiors three layers up are all female, something that in previous decades would have been highly unusual.

The lectures used to be presented in a symposium spread out over several days. Fowler said they will be offered through a one-day colloquium going forward to make attendance easier for more people. Several dozen people, including some students, attended the all-afternoon event.