Women's Solutions: Setting A National Agenda for the 21st Century

If, if you take your seats, I think we're going to go ahead and get started this morning. We appreciate having all of you here. It's been a pretty interesting week here in Portland and at our sites that had caucuses that complemented the work that was being at the national teleconference. There were 200 sites nationally, which Lavonne probably mentioned earlier. And we were so thrilled when we heard Janetta Cole's presentation on Monday morning, and then we followed that up with caucus activities that generated the issues that were important to the women of WSU. That national teleconference, "Women's Lives, Women's Voices, Women's Solutions" was sponsored by the University of Minnesota, and we were glad to be a part of that. It's good to see that our voices were added to it. We had five locations of WSU participants. They were at the branch campuses in Spokane, Tri-Cities, Vancouver, the Intercollegiate Nursing Center in Spokane, and here on the main campus at WSU in Pullman. Now our, our sister university in Idaho also had a site

that had 30 people participate, and so we have a representative from there as well. These five locations developed issues, in some cases fairly lengthy sets of issues, and then began to develop strategies for dealing with those issues. So this occasion today is an opportunity to hear the report from those locations. I think you're going to find some of the issues mentioned this morning are common to your own. I'm going to introduce our panel and then we'll get right into some reporting. With us today from the Intercollegiate Center for Nursing is Jackie Vanisic. To my right, Joan Menzies from Spokane. We have Margery Seit from Tri-Cities, Nancy Yolden from Vancouver, Deborah Love from Pullman, and Dean Thomas has joined us from the University of Idaho. Now to set the stage before we do our reporting. We've got a long history with women's issues here at WSU, and we invited Susan

Armitage to join us this morning for just a short while. She's going to jet off to Spokane. So if you see her disappear, it's not for lack of interest, she just has another appointment. But Susan is going to set some historical perspective for women's issues. And so we invite her to do that before we get to the reporting. As Nancy just told you, my job on this panel is to be the memory, to tell you where we've been, how we've gotten to where we are today, and to make it at least a few suggestions, drawing on that, about where we might go in the future. In the early 1980s, I was director of Women's Studies here on the WSU campus, and in that capacity I was a member both of the Association for Faculty Women and of the Commission on the Status of Women. And there were large group of us then who were deeply frustrated by the climate for women on the Pullman campus. There were very few women in leadership positions. There was a very high turnover

among women faculty and women staff. There was a really quite pervasive feeling among individual women of feeling isolated in their own department or units and feeling as though they weren't getting the respect that they and their work deserved, and a very, very high level of discontent. So when Sam Smith arrived in Pullman in 1985, the first thing he heard from women on this campus was how bad things were and how angry we were. And being a sensible man and a forward-looking one, he said, "Don't tell me about what happened before I got here. Give me some plans. Let's see how we can move forward." And there's no question in my mind that the women at WSU owe a lot to Sam Smith and to his very deep commitment to forward movement on women's issues. And I want to tell you very briefly some of the

things that occurred here, in about a five-year period from 1985 to 1980 in particular. They were very busy years, with a lot of issues and programs concerning women being put in place. The first thing that happened, and probably the most unusual, was the president's seminar series at which deans, administrators, provost, vice provosts, all of whom almost universally at that point were white males, were forcibly invited to a series of seminars in which the focus was on increasing their awareness of women's issues. In other words, the premise was that equity is a joint responsibility. It's not a matter of fitting women into the system.

It's a question of changing the system. And so that seminar series, among other things, discussed issues such as the lack of mentorship, isolation, the double day, and differences in communication styles between men and women. And they, these expert, these seminars were very well-funded. Important national experts came and led these seminars, and it was a very impressive series of meetings, from which most of us, all of the women who helped organize it, were excluded because we weren't high enough in the administrative structure to be invited. So we had to depend on various moles to tell us what had actually happened. That was only the beginning. There was an action program that came out of that. The Affirmative Action Office joined with women's groups after the seminars to do, to carry out a whole set of policies. Among them, an effective sexual harassment policy and a complaint

procedure, yearly salary equity reviews and adjustments, the establishment of a division of minority affairs with a strong commitment to recruitment and retention of students, a recruitment manual with clearly defined affirmative action guidelines for search committees, and a straight line of communication between the Commission on the Status of Women and President Smith. And then in 1987, as an outgrowth of that year's leadership conference, yet another set of task forces, chaired usually by deans and vice provosts, were created and charged, within a year, to come up with programs for recruitment, retention, recruitment, retention, and advancement of women faculty. And that, those groups were responsible for things like the partner accommodation policy that now exists; for orientation, mentoring and training, and internship programs

to train women for leadership; the development of non-sexist language guidelines for WSU publications; various publicity efforts to focus, to highlight, to spotlight the activities of women on campus, which had pretty much been ignored up until that point. And then another essential part of this program was providing better services to women students, and among them, the steps taken then, was a new structure of women's programs, including the creation of the Women's Resource and Research Center. And finally in 1992, in cooperation with the Commission on the Status of Minorities, the creation of the position that Ernestine Madison holds, which was originally called the Vice Provost for Human Relations and Resources. Diversity, we might say. And then, and

then because WSU was such a clear model, a statewide conference was held in the fall of 1987 in which community college and other college and university people gathered at WSU to discuss ways how, throughout the state, we might address all of these women's issues. And among the issues that were central in that particular conference were child care and parental leave legislation currently being considered by the state legislature, problems of classroom racism and sexism, inclusion of the new scholarship of women into the general curriculum, and changes in women's sports, because of course this was the period when the, the women athletes and coaches were, were in the final stages of the suit that has resulted in equity in

sports here on the, throughout WSU. In every one of these activities, women from the Association for Faculty Women, from the Commission on the Status of Women, from other constituencies were volunteer laborers on the various task force, forces, and believe me it was a very busy five years. And I look back on it now and I'm just amazed at all the work that we did and all of the programs that were put in place at that point. But what they did was that they changed the climate for women on the Pullman campus and I hope throughout the WSU system. So what I have learned from this is that every single piece of this structure that I've been describing and the other things that I've forgotten are, are all essential. And that the the parts add up to something, the whole adds up to something greater than the sum of its parts.

And I see the structure that's already in place as first of all probably needing some tinkering, some renovation. It's time to look at the parts and see how they're all working, see what can be improved and what should be changed. It's time to recognize that there are areas on individual campuses and within individual colleges where some may lag behind others in terms of gains. But basically this structure, put in place in the late 1980s, is the platform that I see as being a launching pad for the changes we all intend to make that are really in our hands in the new millennium. Thank you. Thank you, Susan. If you find that you hear an echo, it's because a lot of the issues that Susan was talking about are going to

be reiterated in our report process. Although we've made great strides at WSU, some of these issues are still on the table and so you're going to be hearing from our different sites about that this morning. We're going to start out with an overview on the, touching on the 10 issues that were developed. The University of Minnesota asked us to follow a format where we talked about an issue, develop strategies, address the benefits if those issues were taken care of, and what the challenges were. So we had a lot of work to do in a very short amount of time, in about two-and-a-half-hour block. So we're going to start this morning on the issue of balancing work, family, and school, and the site we're going to start out with is in Vancouver, and so Nancy Yolden will have an opportunity to talk about what her group worked on. This is a particularly important issue for WSU-Vancouver because, particularly for our students:

We have about 65 percent female in our student body, average age of about 31 if you look at both graduates and undergraduates together. It's clearly a very difficult issue for students, trying to balance and work, family, and also school. We think that a few of the strategies that we need to employ are, number 1, making sure people are aware of the resources that are in fact available. I think oftentimes, I discover that we've got resources that people simply don't know that they're there and I think we need to use a variety of mediums to make sure that they know what is available. I think we also need to dissect the problem so we know how we can help. Sometimes we start to solve problems without knowing fully what the issue is. But I think we need to do some surveys and try to better understand, not only our students, but faculty and staff. How can we provide either services or programs that will help them? I think another strategy that we would like to employ is to provide some support groups.

Sometimes when people find out, talk to other people who have similar issues, they tend, there's quite a bit of comfort in commiserating, and I think there's some value in that as well. And also if we can incorporate some services into staff meetings, into part of their day already, maybe in courses in some instances. I think those are the things that can help people who are trying to find a balance. It's not going to help to continue to add programs that they have to add onto their already busy days. Did you have a timeline for some of those issues to be worked on? One year. One year. Oh good, good. We talked about that a lot in Pullman too, being able to report out next year the progress that's been made. So I know the University of Idaho across the border also deals with, dealt with a family-friendly environment. So I'm going to ask Dean to talk about what happened in their discussion. We spent quite a bit of time on the family-friendly, balanced approach to work, and I think it received so much attention at the University of Idaho because with our very high-energy president, Bob Hoover, we, we are seeing so many changes so quickly, in

buildings, in campuses, in programs, in students, and I didn't hear people saying, "We need to do less." But I did hear people saying we need more flexibility in how we approach this, and we need approaches that then reduce stress. And the range of issues that were covered in this need included such things as flexible work schedules, for faculty consideration of delayed tenure clock when it's appropriate, time for family, vacation time, accommodation of staff and faculty. And there was a lot of discussion there about getting rid of the staff-versus-faculty and accommodating staff and faculty needs to work around family and home commitments, with the flexible work schedule, with the

balances of commitments in personal and professional time, with the sense that we can work better when we're accommodating schedules and being flexible, leading to less stress and benefiting not just women, but men too. So that is...Thank you. One of the really important issues nationally that was discussed both in the reaction panel on Wednesday, and again it showed up many times on their Web site bulletin board from the University of Minnesota, was the issue of mentoring, and so I'd like to ask Joan Menzies in Spokane, because I know that her group dealt with this issue. How do we adequately support faculty, staff, and students through mentoring? Well, our group... there were about nine of us and represented both students, faculty, and staff... talked quite a great deal about how do we support and encourage and retain those women that we have attracted to our campuses, and did quite a bit of

talking about what exists now, recognizing that some, especially tenure- track faculty, do have formal mentoring programs through their departments. But being on a branch campus often that that mentor is in Pullman and the visits are infrequent, and that on a staff level, we've had some programs that we've started, and the whole issue seemed to lack consistency, and... There also seemed to be a need for flexibility when we were designing these programs, rather than a rigid one-size-fits-all kind of program that... We started looking at another model that's worked for another group that I know Dean and I are involved with, the Women in Higher Education Roundtable, and they have a mentoring program that really matches up a person with a mentor, but then allows those people to set the parameters of how many times they want to meet, how formal they want that relationship to be, and

whether it's a job shadowing or just a straight interviewing, "What is your job like and what are the pros and cons?" So what we decided was to really solicit volunteers and to start this immediately in the summer, try to get a group of women that were willing to welcome other women, and that this process could address both the formal kind of orientation issues that might be needed, but also the informal relationships and building up support networks and familiarizing someone with the campus culture. It would be beneficial on all of our campuses actually. The next issue is a big one. And I was the, I served at the site where all of this information came into and when I started looking at all the reports, it became very evident that recruitment and retention was an issue that was dealt with at multiple sites all across our state.

And so we're going to hear various aspects of this issue from people at several sites. Deborah Love is going to be the first one and I have asked Deborah to talk about some specific issues of family support and benefits, so let's hear what happened in Pullman. I know the conversation was rich. We had a lot of issues in Pullman. Yes. On Monday about 25 of us gathered to hear Dr. Cole's speech and the panel discussion that followed, and by the time we got to the caucus discussion, there were about 10 of us. However, we still had a, quite a rich discussion, and there's a lot of work that took place. I'd like to share with you a couple of the other issues that we developed. There were 14 issues, actually, that we came up with, but there are three that stood out, and one in particular that we're going to discuss here, the recruitment and retention issue. But we also brought out the issue that we need to have more buy-in from the university, showing that the university is committed to women, having a visual commitment to women in its

strategic plans, and a modeling of commitment to women through behaviors on all levels. In addition, the, this issue received a lot of attention, increasing the number of women of color at WSU. This would involve recruitment of women of color and having women of color represented at all levels in the institution. I wanted to share that with you to let you know that we just had a rich discussion and there were a lot of issues that were brought out. But we focused primarily on the need to develop and implement strategies for the retention of faculty, women faculty, staff, and students, and specifically we looked at these strategies. We want the university to look again at the benefits package offered to employees, including the, improving rather the health care program, the dental care program. In addition to that, we would like to university look at the partner/spousal accommodation policy. It's fairly limited. It's not widely disseminated and used, and we'd like to be able to explore other alternatives, for example, partnering possibly with other public

agencies, colleges, and universities to develop in the area, to create positions for spouses and partners. We also talked about considering single-family housing to increase the number of single parents at WSU. In addition to that, we understand that the financial needs of single parents can be very different from our traditional students, if you will. So we'd like the university to take a look at that issue as well. At the national teleconference level, there was a discussion regarding family assistance service, and we picked up on that and thought that WSU certainly could take a look at that. Family assistance service would include such things as counseling, family counseling, financial counseling, discussions and help with regards to elder care and other kind of benefits. We do have an Employee Assistance Program, and it is in effect, I believe, at the branch campuses, and we want to look at expanding that substantially. In addition to that, we talked about the issue of WSU needing to do regular assessments of our

activities for accountability. We need to go back and look at those things that we've implemented, as Sue mentioned earlier, and find out what's working and what needs to be changed, what needs to be improved, and we've done a little of that, but certainly a lot more needs to be done. Thank you, Deborah. I know that Vancouver also dealt with that, Nancy, and they had a little bit different twist on it, so I want you to add a few of the pieces that came out of your site. I think we had a different twist in part because we had our H.R. director there, so it was really timely. But a couple of the ideas we had for strategies for retaining, recruiting and retaining women faculty, staff, and students was to make sure you conduct exit interviews. Once again, I think it's so critical to dissect the problem and really understand it before you kind of randomly try to solve it. Also, improve the interview process. If we do a better job up front of making sure that we're getting people where it's a good fit, I think there's a greater chance, an opportunity for people to have some longevity in terms of employment. Obviously we need to look at and explore opportunities for flex

time and where possible also offer job sharing. Those are a couple of the key things I think that we talked about, and the really good news in terms of timeline is this H.R. director that was at the caucus. She said she'd do it all, within a year. Terrific. That's a real plus to have her on hand. Maybe she said she'd give it a start. Maybe not all, I'd hate to misrepresent. I know that the Tri-Cities felt very strongly about child care and the benefit of adding that type of support. You know, the changing face of our student population, it means that, you know, in the past we thought about them as 18-year-olds that came to campus or 17- year-olds that came to campus, and that isn't always the case now. We have a lot of returning students. The face of that's changed. IC&E talked about a lot of their population being students that have families, so it's really important, this child care issue, and I know Margery's site talked about that. Our caucus group was from the Tri-Cities. We also had guests from the Columbia Basin Community College. So that made it particularly rich because we

spread it across the broader spectrum. We started out with about a dozen potential issues, and we just realized that we needed to focus for depth on one issue. So we selected childcare, which is with our nontraditional students, and also our, our faculty and staff, a real challenge on the... At present we have no onsite child care. We have no childcare assistance for students, and of course not for staff and faculty. We looked at cost, location. We realized that it probably would need to be an on- site location to accommodate everybody in the campus community, that the hours would have to be quite extended, like from 7:00 o'clock in the morning till midnight, to accommodate our really broad spectrum of needs. So in that we realized

that we were going to need to get assistance from the campus dean, who I know is aware of this concern that our campus has. And also we would like to pull in the Columbia Basin Community College, and the president at that site is also aware that this is a community-wide need. We see in having an onsite facility the ability to recruit more students, to recruit staff and faculty. We have lost over the years, of course, several faculty and staff because of inadequate childcare availability in the community. And of course we all know that the child-care concerns do prevent a lot of students from attending college. Thank you, Margery. One other little focus twist is female

students that are in the graduate programs. We've long talked about them being an important resource for our university, and yet we could step that up and actually increase their potential for the future. And Joan Menzies at the Spokane site talked about that a little bit. Well, we were big on mentoring when we discussed. And another idea that was brought forth was, or a strategy was, to recruit a network of alums working with our alumni association up in the Spokane area to match some of our graduate female students. And actually it could be a program that was open to all graduate students; we, in discussing it, also felt that men could certainly benefit from this. But our discussion focused on women and the idea of matching them with women in their field, especially maybe starting out with a small program in some of those areas where women are under-represented, trying to match them with females in their profession, so that they could, you

know, do some job shadowing, perhaps talk with someone who had been through the process of selecting a thesis topic and some of the ideas and processes that that entails, that we'd really be working not only to retain our women graduate students by providing them one more piece of support, but we'd be promoting their success and hopefully developing some future alums who would appreciate what we had given them and would be willing to give back to other students after they had graduated. OK. There are three other issues that we're going to touch on. And it was dealt with at four different sites, and they have to do with campus climate. It sort of is where Nan-, where Susan Armitage started this morning's conversation: Campus climate, the types of programs that we have that are supportive of our women faculty, staff, and students, and, and, then the

lack of flexibility within a hierarchy to actually be creative, change, evolve over time so that we can put in place the kinds of supports and climates that, that we're really wanting. And so we're going to talk with four different sites that dealt with issues similar to this. University of Idaho had a lot of issues on, on campus climate. But let's start again with Spokane and Joan's group dealt with climate, and then we'll come back to the University of Idaho. I think our discussion reflected some of what Susan was saying in her opening remarks, and that was the need to really assess the climate. All of us have anecdotal information and stories to tell, but not a lot of hard facts about what exactly are the problems and barriers for women, especially on our branch campus. I recognize the Commission on the Status of Women does a 5-year report. But often I think our conditions are

sort of amalgamated into the whole report, and things can be very different in departments and colleges and branch campuses, and really wanting to look at what is the situation, what are women feeling are the needs and are the problems, before we, as Nancy said, just start designing programs, so a lot of ours would be, you know, establishing some sort of a survey that assessed the climate, especially on our campus. We do it with our students right now. And I found it to be a great way, when you're trying to get resources put towards a certain project, to be able to follow that up with with facts, and not just that I think this is a great idea and we ought to put money or resources into it. And then somehow build in, I think in this and all of the projects, one thing we wanted to emphasize was some sort of a reward structure, not necessarily monetarily but rec-, recognizing the people that are putting the time and effort into some of these programs that are outside of their job area.

In fact in our conversation in Pullman, if I remember, Deborah, we talked about the fact that there are some rewards at certain levels within our institution but not necessarily at the staff level in the amount that we would like to see to reward those, those people for the work that they do. The University of Idaho had eight issues that were developed with their group. And when Dean was going down through the list this morning, we discovered that many of those had to do with climate. And so we ask her to jump in at this point and share the information. I'd be happy to. This, the reason we focused so much on issues that are related to climate is because Athena, our University of Idaho professional women's group, has studied climate and has presented the results in a couple of stages to the president and the provost, and those studies, which have really been headed by Diane Phillips Miller, professor in our

counseling program and herself a licensed psychologist. Diane has believed in the importance of talking directly to people to find out by survey, not by survey, but by interview, first starting what their feelings are, people who have had problems, people who are just moving along normally in the system, and so on a relatively small scale, we've presented the results of these climate studies to central administration. So, with that as a background, that had really happened before we came into the University of Minnesota teleconference, and... but many of the issues that had come up in the climate studies then came up again in our discussion in the caucus. One of the important ones again was the study of salary equity and the fairness of salaries. There's a feeling that we must

explore much more closely gender equity and balance among and across positions and job titles. And in addition, the sense that we must take more action, whether it continues through the climate studies through Athena, or perhaps is broadened then to the administration actually taking over some of the, the studies. I always find this an interesting position, because I am in central administration, but I also am in Athena. But I think the idea of actually taking more action and, whether it's in the form of task forces, committees, charging an ad hoc group with studying a problem or an issue, coming up with a plan to follow through and implement change. It's one thing to sit on a one-time basis and suggest strategies

for implementation. It's quite another to develop a group that goes on across time and actually brings about some of this change. So we talked about there being a route clearly outlined to implement new ideas and programs and to make them realities. So carrying this out into action, rather than letting it be a one-time, really healthy discussion that then stops at that point. And goes nowhere. So we don't want to see it stop. We want that continuation. In fact, one of the national speakers reflected that, when she was asked, she said the issues are new and old. She said they're old from the point of view that we hear them again and again. But she says they're new now, because the lives of women have changed, the numbers of women in the workforce have changed. And perhaps we're at a juncture where we're better prepared to step forward and take some action. Susan reflected this morning she hoped that was the case. So our next site that actually dealt

with that, in part, was going back to Vancouver, and they talked about programs, or the lack thereof, that were very supportive for women. Well, it's interesting being on a campus that, although we're connected to WSU, as a single campus we're only 10 years old, and I think we have a unique opportunity to, Number 1, create a climate, instead of just reacting to something. But then also, and that I think comes through, creating the kinds of programs that serve and support, particularly women in this case. And we're, we're in a metropolitan area. I think it's important that we look sometimes at what are the services that our students need and are there ways that we can contract services. Particularly with money, sometimes it's difficult to create and get the infrastructure necessary to have a whole counseling department, but we can contract out. So I'll go back to the thing I keep saying, which is we have to really understand what the needs of our students are. And it's, it's changing. We have a pretty diverse student body. Although I mentioned to you that the average age is about 31. We're seeing a

lot more students that are coming directly from community college and are more traditional in terms of the services they want and also their needs. So I think we have to assess that very accurately, respond to it. Maybe some of the services will start with small, kind of informal groups and then develop from there. And again I think contracting too could be something that we need to look at, instead of create it, creating everything on our own campus. IC&E was a site that also dealt with this, more specifically on the inflexibility of the structure that may be in place. When you work in a hierarchy, it's a little difficult to get the kind of creative and innovative approaches you may want. So Jackie site dealt with that. Thank you. I think our site is kind of interesting, in that 95 percent or more of our faculty are women. Most of our administrators are women. Probably 80 percent of our students or so are women. And most of our staff are women. So we, and we are similar to WSU Vancouver. We're sort of an

entity in and of our ourselves, which, which would imply that we should have a fair amount of autonomy in figuring out our programs and doing those those kinds of things. However, we are probably more inflexible perhaps than many of the other programs on campus. And I think that one of the things, issues that we really need to look at is why that is, why, when we have such a large majority of women, that we are not, and our profession, as a nursing profession, is really focused on caring aspects and family and and psychological health and various things, why is it that we maintain a structure that is so unhealthy for our women faculty, staff, and particularly students? Now we had a small group of faculty and one staff person. We had no students at our discussion. So I guess it may also be interesting that most

of our discussion centered around student issues. That's the nursing part of us too, probably wanting to caretake for our students. But we, I think, need to change our terminology. We don't, we do not, our traditional students are nontraditional. We don't have very many straight out of college, you know, types that are being funded and and don't have children. The great majority of our students are married. And as a, as a women's profession, and people see themselves as, see it as a women's profession, we do have many single women, many women coming from very poor backgrounds, and we don't have support services for them. And on top of that, we lay a structure on them through our curriculum, which we also have fairly complete control over because we are in an operative program, and we should be able to manage it in some other way, but we don't. We stick with hospital structures that make them be

there at 6:30 or 7:30 in the morning. We have all of our classes over WETS, and the WETS dictates our structure, or at least we allow it to dictate our structure, and we have a very inflexible system that makes it very difficult for particularly women who, who do, I think, bear most of the childcare responsibilities and who are almost all working. So they're trying to do school, family, work all at the same time, and we continue to expect them to behave like the non-encumbered student and our, our strategies are to look at ourselves and why it is that we continue. Because we should have the power within our structure of women primarily to be able to change that. So that's one thing that we, we first need to do and to really assess the students to see what are their issues. We are making a lot of assumptions about what

they need from us, but we haven't specifically asked them for that. And to really look at our WETS system and the way we deliver our program to make it more flexible, more asynchronous, allow more flexibility on the part of the student, without making it more ornery for our predominantly women faculty, and I think those are two things that are often at odds. Students may find weekend classes more accommodating to their work schedule, but faculty don't. And those issues, I think, among the faculty can't be ignored. You know, Susan had to leave today, but in our earlier discussion she did add some comments for this juncture in our, in our program, and she said if you're going about assessing or examining your programs, your structure, your climate, looking at the needs of the students, in that assessment process, don't, don't fall into the trap of assuming that a general, broad assessment or survey is

going to give you a true reflection of some, some really isolated pockets of your culture, because, she was saying, that at least here at WSU, within the climate in sciences for women, it may be different than the climate within liberal arts for instance, or for women of color it may be different yet again. So we need to be cautious when we do broad surveys, that we are not forgetting that there are some isolated pockets of people, even the specific one that Jackie was talking about, where it's an all-women campus, would be a little bit different skew. Well, almost all. Now I know there are some male nurses. The recruitment issues there are backwards. That sort of ends the reporting part. I'm going to talk a little bit about the national issues and how does WSU fit with that. But I'm going to give an opportunity for the people that were reporting and did an excellent job of facilitating in our sites to add some final comments, so... I told them this would be voluntary, and I don't want to put them on the spot, so I need volunteers. Joan.

Well, one of the issues that I was struck with in the national discussion, and it also came up in our group, because we had a person from Eastern Washington University join us, was the idea of collaborating across campuses and that we as women are... And I think that became clear, listening to U of I, and I'm sure if we talk to women on other campuses and what we heard nationally, we're all facing some of the very same issues. And are there ways we can work together and support each other more than we do now? Others? Just this quick comment, I'd like to say that I was impressed with the work that we did here in the Pullman campus, the caucus. However, I know a lot of you would like to participate but because of other obligations, classroom, teaching, work, so forth, you could not, and I would like to give a call to action. And we have a new administration, as you know, coming in and taking over, whatever the case may be. If you have comments about these issues, or maybe we didn't explore some of the issues that you feel we need to,

I would suggest that you write them down, and make sure you make it clear in your evaluation form. That's one avenue. Or get the information to Nancy or to the Commission on Status of Women. I think it's really important to you take advantage of this wonderful change that the University is experiencing at this time and make sure that your issues are also heard. I was amazed at the rich discourse that occurred with small numbers and I, but I also was struck with horror, thinking if we had had 100 in the room, how would we have done all these caucuses and had facilitators so... Others that would like to do closing thoughts? Dean. I would like to add to Joan's comments about the mentoring. One of, one of our issues goes back to the base and talks about not just the mentoring of young faculty members, new staff members, graduate students, all of which is important and which we have talked about, but going clear back to

young women, preschool women, elementary-age women, and paying attention to not preprogramming them into the traditional disciplines and giving a lot of encouragement all the way through, preparing and supporting them in science and technology and mathematics and engineering. We have an engineering program at the University of Idaho for, uh, students between their junior and senior year. It's called the GEMS program. And Jean Teesdale has done a wonderful job with that program. She rules with an iron hand and says half of the students coming into GEMS will be women and watches for that. And she's made a difference there and has really promoted the Society of Women in Engineering. Programs like that, that reach out and encourage women to go into the nontraditional areas. So I think we need to go clear back, as we look at

our mentoring and encouragement, and take in everything, from what age, where should we set the lower limit? Three? Two? We won't set one. Very young. Okay. Others? Nancy, I would add just a piggyback comment to what Sue said about assessment, since I've been talking about how important assessment is. I think oftentimes with anecdotal information, we collect it, but we always don't do anything with it, and I think the blend of anecdotal information with your assessment, you're going to get more at the heart of the problem. So I think that's important. And one other thing that I took from the teleconference is, if I can't quite remember this story, I'm sure someone else will help me. But one of the women talked about being bold and taking risks, and she relayed the story or conveyed the story of Tony Blair, the prime minister in England, that his wife publicly, she must be pregnant, said something about you need to take up paternity time off, you know, and it seems like a risk, but to do things like that and to take

risks I think is an important message probably to all of us. Right. Right. Nationally we were not alone in this discourse. There was a rich, rich set of information that was developed at the 200 sites across the nation, and the categories that they created to put that information in ended up being teaching and learning, work and life, partnership and outreach, and leadership in a new century. The types of things, I mean I saw a lot of congruence between the thinking that was happening at the sites here in Washington state and those issues that emerged at the national level. So in closing this morning, I want to just go through a little bit of that so that you can see that what's happening here in Washington and at our university and our branch sites and at the University of Idaho, we're not alone in this. I mean, there are a lot of women that are talking about the same issues all over the nation. In work and family life, they talked about improving campus climates. We touched on that. They talked about eliminating sexism, racism, ageism, classism, and the list goes on

and on. They also talked about what Pullman focused on, and Tri-Cities, that childcare issue, and how do we support people doing elder care and maternity and paternity leaves? I hope they figure that one out in Britain. Fostering an inclusive community that really respects and appreciates the differences we have from one another and appreciates the diversity that exists, both and in culture, ethnicity and in our ideas. We also need to set very realistic goals. We started out with that balancing work and family issue, because many of these issues that emerged... I looked at the list and I said, you know if you take the word woman out, they are workplace issues. They are workplace environment issues. They are family issues. They are issues that touch everyone, because students have extended families and other issues beyond their schooling to deal with. So we have to set realistic expectations for that and then follow through on, on

those things. We also, they also had a section on on leadership for the new century, and in leadership for the new century... Gosh I've lost my notes. They focused on what type of leaders are needed and what type of action is going to be needed to propel us to the point where we can actually take action. I mean, when the women reflected on the fact that we've had a decade or more of working on women's issues and how far we've come, they were saying there still need to be professional development opportunities. We need to create networks that empower people to deal with workplace issues. We have to look at those needs of non-traditional students. Jackie has a whole lot of issues with nontraditional students. The recognition and rewards, I'm glad that Joan mentioned that or Nancy mentioned it, because they talked about that nationally. We have a changing leadership paradigm. Women are now here, and that's changed the leadership at all levels in our institutions.

We need to create an environment that's safe and welcoming and flexible. That lack of flexibility is no longer something that's tolerated. In teaching and learning, we touched on it briefly, preparing women students for success, making sure that they can come back and be a part of our academy or institution when they have completed their studies, responding to their changing needs. They touched briefly on embracing technology, and on the Wednesday reaction panel, one of the women talked about, one specifically talked about that differing use of technology between men and, males and females, and how women need to embrace technology and move forward with that is as one means for discourse and work and study. They also briefly touched at the end on the balancing of teaching, research, and the service components of our land grant institutions and re-examining the value that's placed on each of those activities. Women generally are very good at engaging in the service component, and often that

goes unrewarded and unacknowledged. So those were the primary focuses for the, for the national discourse. And in closing, what I want to say is, it is time for action. The face of the work issues obviously hasn't changed, as Susan reflected that some of the same things are emerging now. But I do want to leave you with these words. One of the spokespersons on the Wednesday reaction panel had this to say. She was Ambassador Lynda Tarweelen. She is from the Center of Policy Alternatives. And in her estimation, the very next action that needs to take place can, can actually be done by every one of you that are here today, and that is be supportive of the women that are around you. Be the example. Model the type of expected behavior that you want to see in others and in yourself. Reach out when you see a woman or another co-worker, regardless of gender, struggling with a workplace issue. Reach out and help them resolve that. Bring that issue

to the forefront so that it can be dealt with. And in closing, you know I'm going to go right back to Janetta Cole. We were so inspired by her conversation and presentation on Monday. It is in our hands. It isn't going to be work that's going to be done by someone else out there. If these are our problems, we can take the action that's needed to, to resolve them. So that ends our report. And it, it was a wonderful set of three days to enter into this discourse with other women. Any other closing, thoughts, comments? OK. We thank you very, very much for being here this morning to hear this panel's report. And this information, I know Lavonne mentioned it, is going to be posted on the Web site, the 10 issues that were developed with strategies, timelines, benefits. Go there, look at that web site. Hopefully we can also get out the notice on the national web site URL, because there is a lot of rich discourse that occurred at that level

as well. So, thank you very much. I'd really like to thank our panelists, Deborah, Margery, Jackie, Nancy, Dean, Nancy, Joan, and especially Nancy Sanders, who pulled all this information from the national teleconference together, so that we could have organized caucuses locally, and then stepped in at the last minute also to moderate the panel, so thanks to all of you. We're going to take a short break. I think we have a good 15 minutes to have a break, then go on, go on to the concurrent sessions, whichever your choice is in the program. Thank you.