Annette Shine was recovering from a broken rib when she received an email in mid-December from the dean of the College of Engineering, Babatunde Ogunnaike, requesting she vacate her office in Colburn Laboratory by Jan. 15. Shine, an associate professor of chemical engineering, was told her office was needed for “serious and immediate space needs,” and she would be relocated to another on the fourth floor of Smith Hall.

Worried she might further injure her rib, Shine got a doctor’s note recommending she wait three weeks until moving. But her request was refused, and she re-injured her rib while packing up her office.

Shine later discovered that she had been relocated so that a male engineering professor could move his second office space into hers.

Shine said this was the last in a series of episodes of gender discrimination she experienced after 23 years at the university. She called it the straw that broke the camel’s back.

“I like to put it, I’ve had six years of neglect and 17 of abuse,” Shine said. “At some point, I realized my only option is tolerate or to leave, and I opted to leave.”
Shine is one of several former female faculty members who feel mistreated or discriminated against by officials in the college of engineering. In more than a dozen interviews with current and former engineering faculty, both men and women, a divided view of women’s treatment in the college emerges.

Though some former women professors feel gender discrimination has historically been a part of the college’s atmosphere among faculty, current professors and administrators deny that the college has practiced systematic gender discrimination. A few professors believe Shine’s grievances stem from personality clashes between her and her colleagues, rather than gender discrimination.

College officials defend their record with women by outlining initiatives such as the ADVANCE program, implemented in 2009, which is geared toward increasing the number of women in the college and improving the work environment for female faculty.

“There is no way that this college can be accused of gender discrimination,” Ogunnaike said.

Currently, 17 percent of engineering faculty members are women, or 23 out of 134 total professors. Since 2006, at least seven women left the college, according to data Shine provided.

Despite their differences, former and current professors agree that women are heavily underrepresented in engineering programs across the country.


Shine’s story

Since signing a retirement agreement in 2010, stating that she would leave the university in two years, Shine said she had assumed the “abuse” would stop. Instead it accelerated.

On May 7, 2010, not long after she approved her retirement contract, Shine attended a departmental meeting. At the meeting, Shine told department members that faculty leadership positions, such as associate chair, should be better advertised to the faculty well in advance of any application deadline. Another faculty member also proposed that the position of associate chair be an elected position in the department rather than an appointed one, Shine said.

If Norman Wagner, chemical engineering department chair, advertised faculty leadership positions well in advance, more people could apply. Shine believes Wagner delayed advertising them so he could give little notice, and then appoint whomever he wanted to the position. Shine was told her comments angered Wagner.

“I had three different faculty members come to me, telling me that after the meeting they had personally witnessed [Wagner] shake that I had attended this meeting,” she said. “He was so angry that he was physically shaking.”
Eleven days later, chemical engineering department members received an email from then-college dean Michael Chajes, stating that Shine indicated she would retire, was currently on “administrative leave” and could not attend faculty meetings.

Kristi Kiick, deputy dean of the college, said she thought the email was unusual.

“I actually do remember the email coming around and reading it and going, ‘Huh, I didn’t know Annette was retiring,’” Kiick said.

Wagner said he has no recollection of this meeting and denies feeling any anger toward Shine afterward. Both Chajes and Wagner declined to comment about the email.

“I have no recollection of shaking or anything,” Wagner said. “But I mean, she’s no longer on our faculty. She’s on administrative leave and was on leave at the time.”
According to Shine, her confidential retirement agreement does not mention the term “administrative leave,” and states she did not enter retirement leave until Jan. 1, and will not officially retire from the university until Dec. 31. Until this year, Shine said she has maintained faculty status. Though she did not teach any classes, Shine gave guest lectures, advised undergraduate students and continued working on her research grant from the National Science Foundation, of which she was the sole Principal Investigator (PI).

According to the university’s Research Office’s website, PI eligibility requires full-time employment at the university.

“If I were indeed on some sort of ‘administrative leave’ that precluded me from having any duties in the department, then I could not be a PI on a research grant,” Shine said. “My department chair or dean would have to be named PI.”
Ogunnaike admits there may be some ambiguity to the term “administrative leave,” and that the department is in the process of examining all the policies in the departmental bylaws.

“The reason why we’re going over them is we want to make sure if there is any ambiguity, we take it out,” Ogunnaike said.

However, this instance is only one of several which adds to Shine’s feeling of mistreatment.

According to Shine, faculty who receive media attention for their research are often praised in departmental emails. Shine’s research about liquid crystals as electrorheological materials were mentioned in a September 1996 New York Times article in the science section titled “Chocolate: The Stuff of Shock Absorbers?” Despite this recognition, the article was not mentioned in any departmental email while the minor achievements of male professors were, she said.

Over the past 16 years, Shine has been assigned only one elective course to teach, despite complaints to Wagner over an eight-year period. Without elective courses, recruiting graduate students to help conduct her research became very difficult, Shine said. Many professors obtain graduate students for research via elective courses. According to Shine, she should have taught close to 20 elective courses in the span of 16 years.

Because Shine feels she was denied electives, and thus graduate students, her research quantity was below par and failed to meet the criteria for promotion to full professorship.

“I thought that the criteria as stated for promotion to full professor in my department required an extraordinarily high standard of research,” she said. “And I felt that my research, whereas the quality is excellent, the quantity is not so good.”
Shine’s negative experiences are not exclusive to her, but to other women too.


‘Total discrimination’

Judith Carberry arrived at the university in 1973, and taught in the civil engineering department. Though she enjoyed her time teaching and conducting research, Carberry said her engineering colleagues tainted her experience at the university, repeatedly “impeding my progress.”
“Total discrimination,” Carberry said. “That was never-ending.”
Although Carberry retired in 1995, her grievances are similar to Shine’s.

“Delaware had a terrible reputation,” Carberry said, “for not treating women properly.”
Carberry, 76, came to the university because one of the best environmental engineers in the country, Richard Dick, was at the university, she said. Together, they started the environmental engineering program at the university, which she said became “very successful.” Once her mentor left to teach at Cornell University, Carberry led the program. She was the only female professor in her department, and for most of her career, the only female among the more than 100 engineering faculty.

Carberry learned early in her career she received less pay than her male colleagues. She recalls one of her earlier department chairs pulling her into his office to inform her that she would receive a $5,000 raise because her salary was, as he put it, “appalling,” compared to the male faculty.

Carberry became close with Barbara Settles, a current professor in the family studies department, who was a grievance officer on the faculty union committee. Carberry often spoke with Settles about her experiences in the engineering college.

One year Carberry decided to go on sabbatical leave. When she came back, she found her office was turned into the faculty coffee room, Settles recalls.

“They just sort of invaded her space while she was gone,” Settles said. “Probably another tenured male faculty member who was on sabbatical would not have found his office being used as a coffee room. You know, it’s a funny kind of thing. You can’t be sure it wouldn’t have happened but you just kind of—it would’ve sounded strange; [it] didn’t sound so strange that hers was being used as a coffee room.”
Settles said Carberry took on a large, informal workload as the only female faculty adviser to female engineering students, but did not feel appreciated by college officials. Additionally, Settles said Carberry did not receive equal access to research equipment, and when she purchased her own equipment, others used it as if it belonged to the college.  
“She did not find it a completely fair deal in terms of the support for her research and her work,” Settles said.

Carberry criticizes the college for its female hiring efforts during her career. Although the college, under university rules, was required to interview at least one woman for every available position, she said the interviewers treated women with disinterest.

“They were treated as if well, you know, they had to be interviewed because that was the regulation,” Carberry said. “But they weren’t made welcome.”
The crux of Carberry’s complaints is focused around Ib Svendsen, the former civil engineering department chair. She charges Svendsen with repeatedly stealing her research money for his own use over a nine-year period from 1985 to 1994.

Carberry said DuPont Co. offered her environmental engineering program a $5,000 grant each year, and Svendsen consistently took it away. She claims he once went on a trip to Spain with her DuPont grant.

“I complained to the dean about it, and the dean said, ‘That’s his prerogative,’” Carberry said. “It was very demeaning.”
Carberry insists that Svendsen, who died in 2004, and other male faculty members cultivated a misogynistic environment in the college, describing them as “juvenile.”
When Svendsen was reappointed as the department chair in 1995, Carberry retired soon thereafter.

“He told his cronies that women shouldn’t be conducting research,” Carberry said of Svendsen.

    
Efforts to change

When Tripp Shenton arrived at the university as an assistant professor in 1994, Carberry was the only female faculty member in the department. Although he only worked with Carberry for one year before she retired, Shenton recalls hearing about some of the issues within the department.

“I mean I had just heard there were some issues [with Carberry]. I don’t know what they were,” said Shenton, now chair of the civil engineering department, which is a part of the environmental department.

Shenton has a different opinion of Svendsen than Carberry does. He does not think Svendsen promoted a misogynistic atmosphere.

“I don’t ever recall him saying those kinds of things after I joined,” Shenton said of Carberry’s allegation that Svendsen believed women should not conduct research. “He was a good administrator, I think the department ran well.”
Shenton does not know of any case gender discrimination in his department, but thinks the friendly work environment in his department may not be reciprocated throughout the college.

“Some things I hear about other departments would suggest that they are not as collegial as we are,” he said. “I mean, faculty, you tend to get a lot of people with big egos together and so you can imagine some of the things that might happen.”
Shenton said since civil engineering is traditionally a male-dominated field, it may create an unwelcoming atmosphere for women, which he believes can be true with any minority group.

“I think until you get a critical mass of women then, yeah it’s—I think no matter what you do, there’s going to be a certain, maybe level of, you know, being, maybe not feeling part of the group in the same way everybody else does,” he said.

According to associate dean of engineering Pam Cook, “critical mass” is considered approximately one third of a group—the point when those individuals start being seen as members of the group. Women make up just a third of all university faculty members, and the engineering college is 17 percent women.

“It’s definitely more than it was, but it’s not where we could be,” Cook said.

When Cook, who is a mathematics professor, became associate dean in the engineering college in 2002, there were two departments—civil and electrical computer engineering—with no female faculty members.

“There were only four or five women in the whole college, so it was very isolated,” Cook said. “It’s hard to even know what’s going on if you’re that isolated.”
In 2008, the engineering college received a grant from the National Science Foundation to create a program to increase the number of women in STEM (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) fields. Cook hosts two yearly workshops for faculty; one aimed one aimed at recruiting women faculty, and another at faculty mentoring between senior—mostly male—faculty and junior female faculty. ADVANCE seeks to improve the work environment for women.

On Monday, college officials announced that the Women in Engineering ProActive Network named Cook a “University Change Agent,” an award given to an individual who helps improve the climate for women in STEM fields. Cook said Monday it was the first external award she has received for her ADVANCE work.

“Both workshops include an element on unconscious bias and how we all do that,” Cook said. “Obviously we don’t have enough women yet to have as good representation in here as we would like from the women.”
But Cook and other current faculty members said this problem is not exclusive to the university.

“It’s a concern all across the country. That’s why NSF has this [ADVANCE] program, which is specifically targeted on women faculty,” she said. “There just aren’t enough women in STEM. There’s not enough students—computer science is terrible for women right now, they’re just not going into it.”
However, since 2009, when ADVANCE was initiated at the university, five female faculty members have left the engineering college. Cook said she thinks mentoring is a problem in some cases, which is why there is now a formal faculty mentoring program. Sometimes people leave for better opportunities, Cook said. But not in Shine’s case.

According to Cook, Shine had an outspoken character that often clashed with other strong personalities in her department, including Wagner, she said.

  “I think there are two strong personalities, let me put it that way,” Cook said of Shine and Wagner.

       Although Cook was not present at the May 7 meeting in which Shine spoke about the associate chair position, she said Chajes’ email banning Shine from departmental meetings is unacceptable.

   “I don’t think it’s appropriate. If you are a faculty member, you can go and probably are required to go,” Cook said. “But I don’t know the details of her retirement.”
Cook calls faculty who have been at the university for a long time, like Carberry and Shine, “pioneers,” and said it is sometimes difficult for them to realize and accept that the world can change.

  “Those of us who’ve been here for a long time remember the past,” she said. “I don’t think anyone would really say they were neglected anymore.”
    When Cook first arrived at the university in 1993, there were no family-friendly policies like there are now, she said. “Stop the clock,” a policy which Shine helped bring to the university, allows both male and female assistant professors to stop the tenure clock for one year if they are having or adopting a child. And ADVANCE was brought in with the initiative to hire, cultivate and provide support for female faculty.

While Cook recognizes there may have been instances in the past of women feeling mistreated, Ogunnaike dismissed any possibility of gender discrimination in the college, and said Shine’s grievances
are a result of tension between Shine and Wagner.

Ogunnaike described Shine as a “difficult woman” and said she has had conflicts with many people in the chemical engineering department. He believes Shine is unfairly generalizing the treatment of women at the university using her own experiences.

“In my humble opinion, I think she has taken some things and blown them out of proportion,” he said. “I’m saddened it has been portrayed this way. We’ve treated women very well.”
Ogunnaike said there have been male faculty members in the past who “have done things they shouldn’t do,” and as a result they have faced consequences. But that is why Cook was brought in, he said, and there is a reason why he asked a woman, Kiick, to be his deputy dean.

“She didn’t want to. I pleaded with her, ‘I need you here,’” Ogunnaike said. “There’s a reason. And so, we’ve treated women well.”

A national issue

In 1999, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology released a report conducted by its faculty members on the status of women faculty in its School of Science, which did not include the engineering department.

      The MIT report examined faculty demographics, showing that in 1994, a year before the report committee assembled, there were 15 tenured faculty women at MIT, versus 194 men. In fact, women had remained approximately 8 percent of the faculty in the school of science from 1985 to 1994. Since the report came out, MIT has almost doubled its female faculty, from 32 to 60 women faculty members.

The MIT committee concluded that its female faculty were discriminated against, and that gender discrimination “turns out to take many forms and many of these are not simple to recognize.”
The report discovered that “many tenured women faculty feel marginalized and excluded from a significant role in their departments,” and MIT officials sought to fix in the problem. In 1994, there were 252 male faculty at MIT and 22 women. Five years later, the faculty consisted of 31 women and 235 men—a nearly 30 percent increase for women and 6 percent decrease for men.

The New York Times and the Boston Globe ran stories about the MIT report on their respective front pages and the data along with the press it received opened the national conversation about women’s
representation in science and engineering.

A 2006 follow-up paper by an MIT professor stated that the original report helped shape the ADVANCE program. Since the program started at the university in 2009, the engineering college has hired eight women faculty members, Cook said. There are also nine full female professors out of 74 total in the college, which constitutes 12 percent. According to the Society of Women Engineers, a nonprofit organization, the national average of full female engineering professors is 8.1 percent.

Many of the college’s professors argue that hiring women is no easy task because of a pipeline issue. Engineering is not a subject that lures in many female students at the high school and college levels, Cook said.

As of fall 2011, 20 percent of the college’s undergraduates were women. Engineering companies and policy groups, such as the NSF, tend to attract more graduates than academia, and so the hiring pool for professorship shrinks because fewer women seek out a graduate education. There is then increased competition from other universities and industry to hire those women with advanced degrees.

“For example, outreach to high schools—if you’re going to wait till [women are] in high school and then convince them, it’s too late,” Ogunnaike said of increasing the base of female engineering students.

Ogunnaike said there are certain incentives the university can match with most schools. But at a certain stratosphere of academia, it can be hard to compete over female professors against
the most elite engineering institutions.

“We are all pursuing the same small group of women. So everybody wants to improve the number of women that they have,” he said.

Ogunnaike is determined to improve the number of women faculty and the climate for women in the college. He would consider giving his position to his deputy dean, Kiick, should she be
contacted with offers from other schools.

“She is an incredibly accomplished woman. If Stanford shows up today and says, ‘I want to take her to become the next dean of the engineering college,’ I will gladly get up from my seat,” Ogunnaike said. “I will do whatever I can. But you get to a certain point where a place like Stanford, if they really want to do something to you, what are you going to do?”
As a black man who represents a minority in engineering, Ogunnaike still contends that accusations of gender discrimination do not match up with the college’s increased efforts to hire and retain women.

       “How do we go out and seek and search to bring women and make sure that its part of what we do and then we’ll turn around and discriminate against women?” Ogunnaike said. “What sense does that make?”

Issues with retention

Azar Parvizi-Majidi came to the university in 1987 as a research assistant before joining the mechanical engineering faculty as an associate professor seven years later. Parvizi-Majidi said while she enjoyed her time teaching, quite a few female faculty left the college during her time there, and she soon realized that female faculty retention was a problem, particularly at more senior levels
Majidi said in her case, she can attribute her departure to one particular factor.

“Overall, I felt encouraged by the leadership at the university and college levels,” Majidi said. “However, I chose early retirement in 2005 because, while my interaction with most of my colleagues within the department was very positive, I had a somewhat discouraging experience with respect to promotion to the rank of full professor and did not feel that I received proper support or advice.”
Being discouraged from promotion is not exclusive to Majidi, Shine and Carberry.

Nily Dan, who joined the chemical engineering faculty in 1996, said she also did not feel any overt discrimination or mistreatment by her male colleagues because she was a woman.

During her time at the university, Dan received the NSF CAREER Award in 1999 for her project called “the Design of Synthetic Gene Transfer Agents,” another research grant that same year and published her work several times in highly rated journals. Yet, the new department head said she did not perform at the expected standards, and thus was not a good fit for the department, a reason she cites for leaving the college three years after being hired.

“My research productivity was high and competitive with my colleagues,” Dan said. “However, I cannot say whether the perceived deficiencies with my performance were gender-based or not.”
Dan now teaches in the engineering department at Drexel University where she says the scientific community is more open to collaborations than they are at the university.

“I found that I was collaborating with colleagues from UPenn in Philadelphia, and moving to Drexel helped strengthen these ties,” she said. “In contrast, colleagues at UD—even those whose work overlapped with mine—were not open to collaborations.”
Former professor Mary Galvin, however, said she did not have the same experience because she was hired as a full professor in materials science with tenure in 1998 after conducting research at AT&T Bell Labs. She left in 2002 when she was offered the opportunity to be a senior official at Air Products & Chemicals, Inc. and work on new product development. She said her experience working in the engineering industry beforehand provided her the negotiating skills women often lack when it comes to asking for a higher salary in the academic world.

“I was coming from Bell Labs where I had been fairly well paid because industry paid well, so I transferred in at a higher salary because they had to meet that and I learned to negotiate,” Galvin said. “I think what you find in academic institutions, most of them, is a lot of salary increases [are] gained by going out and getting offers from another university.”
Like Galvin, Kiick, the deputy dean, did not experience difficulties with promotion. Kiick was first hired as an assistant professor in materials science last year. She was appointed deputy dean by Ogunnaike around the same time she was promoted to full professor in 2011, which she said is early compared to the average promotion rate of full professorships.

Traditionally, when someone is hired as an assistant professor, the faculty member is at that level for approximately six years, Kiick said, until the professor submits their dossier, which outlines all their research and teaching experience to their department and the scientific community. If the promotion goes favorably, the faculty member is granted tenure, she said, and becomes an associate professor for another five to six years before reaching full professorship. But both Carberry and Shine said they were continuously denied or discouraged from promotion to full professor during their time at the university.

“She’s always struck me as someone who’s very engaged, very intelligent, very curious and interested in the workings of science and the university,” Kiick said of Shine. “With regards to some of the other questions around her experience at UD, I wasn’t directly involved with that. That’s not been my experience here at all.”
Still, Kiick said it has historically been a challenge for the college to retain female faculty, particularly at the higher ranks of the professoriate. According to Kiick, there are only three women in the college—Annette Karlsson, Anne Robinson and herself—who began as assistant professors and were promoted to full professors.

“We’re working hard to fix those things that may have been problems,” she said. “It’s true of all underrepresented minorities—female, African-Americans, all people of color—that an environment needs to feel welcoming in ways that embrace diversity.”
Kiick said she cannot judge another person’s experience.

“Annette’s experience is Annette’s experience. I can’t say that it’s common,” she said. “I can’t say that other people don’t feel that way. I think there are two sides to every story.”

Bitter ending

Shine admits she is outspoken about her negative experiences as an engineering professor. She also said she does not know if her male colleagues are misogynists.

Unlike her former colleague Carberry, Shine is satisfied with recent recruitment of women faculty. She sees the departures of female faculty members over the course of her career as a clear indicator that women are not treated as well as men.

Although some women in the college, like Cook and Kiick, currently hold senior positions, Shine contends that retention efforts of senior female faculty are weak.

“The college has done a remarkable job of hiding its overall treatment of women by highlighting occasional successes, and obscuring cases where treatment of women has been much worse than that of their male colleagues,” Shine said. “My entire time here, I’ve been outspoken and I feel I’ve suffered for being outspoken.”