Wage Gap Widens for Women Despite Growing Ranks of Professional Women
Year-end reports offer a complicated portrait of how women are fairing in the job market. On a positive note, recently released figures from the 2000 Census show that women have made substantial gains across all professions, particularly high-status professions. More than a quarter of all doctors and lawyers are now women, though many professions such as police, fire fighting, and airline pilots remain male-dominated, according to a Washington Post report.

On the other hand, recent studies indicate that the wage gap between women and men has grown rather than shrunk over the past two decades. Luchina Fisher of Women's E-News reports that, according to a recent Congressional study, women now earn an average of 79.7 cents for every dollar earned by men, compared to 80.4 cents on the dollar in 1983. Another study by the National Association for Female Executives documents salary disparities-an average of $10,000 per year-between men and women with identical jobs and experience across fields, even in teaching, nursing, and other fields dominated by women. The study also calculates the financial impact of lower earnings for women over a lifetime: if invested at an interest rate of 10 percent over a 40-year career, that missing $10,000 in earnings per year could earn over $4 million.

Similar gaps persist in higher education, although those who study wage inequalities do not agree about their causes, according to a report by Piper Fogg. A 2002-3 AAUP study shows that male professors earn more than female professors across all ranks and institutional types. However, discipline-specific analyses complicate the wage gap discussion. While some research shows that men make only three percent more than women in the humanities, women continue to be underrepresented in higher-paid fields such as the natural sciences and engineering and, therefore, continue to earn less than academic men as a group. Further, some researchers and administrators argue that factors such as women's lifestyle choices, salary negotiation skills, and focus on teaching, mentoring, and service activities are more important factors in creating the wage gap than gender discrimination. Others contend that the existing data do not adequately explain the causes of the wage gap, though the possibility of discrimination should encourage institutions to carefully monitor decisions about salary offers and raises and set clear criteria for making such decisions.

Creating Options: Models for Flexible Faculty Career Pathways
With over one half of the current faculty retiring in the next ten years, U.S. colleges and universities are faced with the challenge of hiring a new generation of faculty. At the same time, the turnover offers higher education an opportunity to rethink and revise the current structure of faculty career paths.To that end, two Alfred P. Sloan Foundation-funded projects will investigate and promote family-friendly policies for faculty.

Creating Options: Models for Flexible Faculty Career Pathways, a project in the American Council on Education's Office of Women in Higher Education, seeks to develop faculty career path models that are more family-friendly, recognize "different stages in a faculty member's professional lifetime and acknowledge that not all faculty will reach career milestones at similar intervals." The two-phase project will begin with a two-year review of current research, campus policies, and implementation strategies and create a document highlighting the essential change issues and proposing new faculty career model(s). Phase two of the project will study the implementation of family-friendly and career-flexible policies at several institutions known for their models of good practice. Over the course of the project, Creating Options aims to spark a national dialogue about the faculty career pathways and serve as a catalyst for change in higher education.

Access to the Profession, a project of the American Association of University Professors, will support the development of policies, procedures, and resources that help both probationary, tenured, and contingent faculty better balance work and family responsibilities. The project, which builds on AAUP's 2001 "Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work," seeks to help probationary faculty participate in their families' lives while pursuing tenure and to help tenured faculty care for family members while retaining tenured status. Finally, the project will explore models of academic work that preserve academic freedom for contingent faculty.

Leadership for Social Justice
The Leadership for Social Justice Seminar at Mount Mary College, a FIPSE-supported first year experience course, is an interactive and reflective course focused on issues of social justice as they relate to gender, race, and class. The course is significant in its design and objectives as well as the assessment tools created to measure students' growth in social responsibility. Through readings, videos, discussions, oral presentations, and written reflections, students are introduced to Mount Mary's mission, values, and leadership model, learn about social justice issues, and explore their own leadership qualities. During the course, students engage in a Justice in Action service-learning project, meet positive women leaders who worked for social change, and learn from peer mentors as well as instructors.

Key objectives of the course include changes in students' attitudes towards fairness regarding social justice issues, knowledge about the systemic nature of social justice issues, and leadership in translating social justice theory into visible action. To measure students' growth in these areas, course instructors administered pre- and post-course assessment tools, including a survey and items asking students to respond to scenarios or advertisements presenting situations dealing with systemic issues of race, class, and gender. Results show significantly higher scores for post-course scenario responses. Likewise, survey results indicate that students believed the course had a strong impact on their understanding and attitude toward systemic social justice issues and that their leadership abilities had improved. Currently, the project leaders are developing a longitudinal assessment tool to measure the long-term impact of the seminar. For more information about the course and the FIPSE project, visit www.mtmary.edu/Leadershipclass.htm.