News-Letter

Media Credit: Conor Kevit City Council President Stephanie Rawlings-Blake spoke at Hopkins about female leadership. Hopkins hopes to increase its female faculty.

The University has pledged to provide at least $5 million over the next five years to help departments both hire and retain outstanding female and minority professorial candidates through a pilot program, the Mosaic Initiative.

University-wide, women currently comprise 38 percent of full-time faculty and less than 20 percent of full professors. The numbers for underrepresented minorities are even lower, comprising a mere 6 percent of full-time faculty members and less then 4 percent of full professors.

"One of the most significant reasons [for the Initiative] is that diversity of the faculty on all dimensions enriches the educational life we give to students. I am inclined to think as broadly as possible about what it means to diversify the faculty ... I think the goal is to enrich the faculty," said Adam Falk, dean of the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences.

Compared to 2004 numbers, 206 more women and 45 more members of underrepresented minorities have been appointed to Hopkins's full-time faculty of 3,519 for this academic year. United States citizens or resident aliens who are Native American, African American or Hispanic American are considered to be underrepresented minorities.

At Homewood, the Krieger School of Arts and Sciences has a total of 261 faculty members, 65 of whom are female. The Whiting School of Engineering had in the past less than 10 percent of its faculty as women; the current statistic is now close to 20 percent. The gender division varies by subject field and school.

Women tend to be better represented within the humanities, but underrepresented in the science disciplines. Falk says that this trend is representational of the national scene. He explained that academic careers tend to be very long, and there are issues that influence the number of women in academic professions.

In engineering, the pool of potential faculty members who belong to certain minorities, such as Native Americans, are so small as to be almost nonexistent. This makes it increasingly difficult to identify and hire these minorities, perhaps accounting for the fact that the percentage of underrepresented faculty members in engineering is very small. The school was, however, recently able to recruit a Hispanic- American woman to the staff.

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