The number of women faculty at University Park has increased in the past 10 years, according to a recently released report.
The Commission for Women, an advisory group to Penn State President Graham Spanier on the state of women at Penn State, published the report last month and distributed 5,000 copies at University Park and Commonwealth Campuses, as well as to alumni, said Molly Wertheimer, chairwoman for the Commission for Women.
The number of women professors has risen 7 percent from 1997 to 2007, and the number of instructors has risen 3 percent, according to the report, titled The Report on the Status of Women at Penn State.
However, the numbers are broken down into various colleges and, based on national trends of women's involvement in the fields of engineering and science, still have room for improvement, according to the report.
"When you read through and look at the stats, you have to be happy because from 1997 to 2007, practically everything went up. That's the good side. The bad side is that some of them are pretty low," Wertheimer said.
Forty-five percent of the undergraduate student population and 55 percent of the full-time employees at University Park are women, according to the report.
The report has a section that compares the percentages of female faculty, broken down by position, from 1997 to the percentages in 2007. When comparing the two years, it was found the percentages have generally increased; however, the commission feels there are places in which improvement could still be made, Wertheimer said.
"From 1997 to 2007, the number of women faculty has increased at every rank and every location within the Penn State system. For most locations the percentage of women represented at each rank also increased. The College of Medicine is the most notable exception," according to the report.
In the College of Medicine, the number of women faculty went from 32 percent in 1997 to 29 percent in 2007.
"There's room for more women students in the sciences, and what can we do to attract women students into those fields? That would be something that I would ask myself," Wertheimer said, noting she does think the university is trying to address that with the Women in the Sciences and Engineering Institute.
The number of women studying in these fields needs to increase before a faculty increase can occur, said Penn State spokeswoman Annemarie Mountz.
Mountz, a former Commission for Women member, said she believes the commission does a lot for the women on campus.
"The Commission for Women here at Penn State does some really wonderful things," she said. "They do a lot to enhance the status of women at Penn State and to report the current status of women."
The commission's report was modeled on the Status Report on Women that is produced by Ohio State University annually, Wertheimer said.
"We used Ohio State's report as a template, and that gave us ideas about what kind of measures to use, what would be the indicators of achievement," Wertheimer said.
Big Ten schools Ohio State, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Illinois and Michigan have similar groups that report directly to university presidents on the affairs of women on campus. Other Big Ten schools have similar groups to represent women at their universities, though they might not report directly to university presidents.
The commission is hoping to release another report in the next two to five years, Wertheimer said.
