Women faculty at Cornell are generally less satisfied than their male counterparts with their jobs, says a recent report by the CU-ADVANCE Center.

The National Science Foundation (NSF)-funded center, which relied on data from a Faculty Work-Life Survey and from Cornell's Office of Institutional Research and Planning for its first year-end report, is dedicated to increasing the traditionally low numbers of women in engineering and other science disciplines.

The report contains what the NSF calls "baseline indicators" that describe such issues as percentages of women in science disciplines, gathered in the three years leading up to the grant's start in November 2006.

According to the report, women are underrepresented at Cornell in the sciences, engineering and math, constituting 10.2 percent of full professor positions, 23.4 percent of associate professors and 32.2 percent of assistant ranks.

In social and behavioral sciences, the rankings were 22.8 percent, 43.5 percent and 37.2 percent.

The center will use this data to create benchmarks of success and needed improvement, according to Shelley Correll, associate professor of sociology and co-principal investigator for ADVANCE.

The data on women's job satisfaction was gathered just prior to the start of the ADVANCE grant, largely through a survey conducted by the Provost's Advisory Committee on Faculty Work Life in 2005. According to the survey, which had about a 65 percent response rate, women are less likely to feel valued in their departments and feel less likely to be listened to.

"These are measures that really get at the social and psychological experience people are having in their departments at Cornell," Correll said. They are issues that add up to what sociologists call the "climate" of academic units, she said.

According to the data collected, one issue that does not seem to be contributing to women's job dissatisfaction is salaries. There is no evidence of gender bias in the salaries of men and women, nor is there in the allocation of research space, at least in the initial studies.

"That was reasonably good news in terms of a starting place," Correll said. However, she added, women report feeling more stressed by department politics and more ignored within their departments -- and these factors contribute to the lower satisfaction of women faculty.

"We are working on ways to improve department climate through mentoring and emphasis on training of department chairs," Correll said.

Because the numbers of women in science disciplines are low, the ADVANCE center's mission is clear: increasing that representation and also educating the campus and wider world about the importance of that mission.

College of Engineering Dean Kent Fuchs said he is encouraged that the college is "on the right trajectory" in the area of promoting women to leadership positions. For example, five years ago, there were no women department chairs in engineering; now there are three, out of a total of 12.

The engineering college is honing its recruiting strategies to try to increase the number of qualified women in academic positions. For one thing, Fuchs said, search committees are being told to focus more on recruiting women in senior tenure-track levels, as opposed to more junior faculty, as has usually been the aim.

Furthermore, the college now has a strategic oversight committee that approves every search process in order to increase communication between departments and to streamline recruiting. Finally, faculty members are encouraged to follow best practices for mentoring of junior faculty.

"Mentoring is not the solution for retaining people, but it is a core process," Fuchs said.

The ADVANCE report also noted that although it was no surprise that representation of women in engineering and math fields was low, it was also relatively low in other sciences, such as social and behavioral fields.

In the social sciences (which includes economics, political science and sociology), the number of women represented was lower than the rate at which women were receiving Ph.D.s in those disciplines.

The full report is available at http://advance.cornell.edu/resources/Year-End-Report-Aug-1-07-for-web.pdf.