A new level of proactive, systemic planning and action is needed to move forward on the university’s gender equity goals. The Women’s Council makes five broad recommendations, followed by action steps, to suggest some of the means by which these recommendations might be implemented.

RECOMMENDATION #1
 

Action Steps:

• Deans and Vice Presidents, together with key administrators, directors, and advisers, should establish appropriate, specific, and measurable goals (both short- and long-term) for their units. Responsibility for ensuring progress toward these goals should be clearly assigned and made a part of annual performance evaluations.
• Establish the expectation that assessments of progress toward realizing gender equity goals in each unit be a part of each Dean’s and VP’s annual report.
• The President should regularly discuss these assessments--and his own evaluation of each unit’s assessment and progress--with the University Adviser on Women’s Issues, who should share with the President the Women’s Council’s evaluation of and perceptions of institutional progress and change.
• The President’s Staff should keep itself informed of national conversations on gender equity issues in academia and in the workplace, through regular workshops and discussions.

RECOMMENDATION #2
 

Action Steps:

• Encourage academic and administrative officers, directors, chairs, and supervisors to remain informed on the working of subtle as well as blatant forms of discrimination.
• Academic and administrative officers should assume responsibility for ensuring that individuals in their units understand and have opportunities to discuss the university’s policies on sexual harassment and consensual relationships.
• Academic and administrative officers, directors, chairs, and supervisors should be expected to support the institution’s commitment to gender equity and fair treatment. They should also assume responsibility for communicating—in annual meetings and other appropriate contexts—the responsibility each member of the Stetson community shares for working toward goals of equity and fairness.
• Deans should encourage greater awareness of gender equity issues among all faculty, but especially those who chair departments, who are appointed to tenure & promotion committees, or who serve on professional development or awards committees.
• Deans should identify appropriate strategies for encouraging the study of women throughout the curriculum, so that work on women is not marginalized or concentrated in certain fields of study. Such strategies might include focused hiring, or curricular workshops that encourage faculty to examine new research on women from different disciplinary perspectives.
• Consider increasing the number of sections of WGS 100 (Studies in Gender, Race, Class, and Sexuality) offered each year from 2 to 3.
• Develop more effective co-curricular programming on gender and diversity. Involve more men in efforts that aim to educate students.

Action Steps:

• Seek funding and resources to develop child-care programs and services; continue to explore the possibility of providing on-site child-care or developing partnership programs with local providers; appropriate administrators should work with the Child-Care Task Force to determine what resources are necessary and should pursue the possibility of donor support for facilities or programs.
• Establish and support the work of groups charged with studying the feasibility of offering other forms of family care programs and services, including (paid) parental and family leave, domestic partner benefits, tuition benefits for childless employees (such as the option to sponsor someone who is not a family member or dependent).
• Develop and consistently apply flex- and/or comp time policies.
• Ensure that service and committee work is equitably distributed; that compensation (in both faculty and staff ranks) for additional responsibilities is equitable and fair; that salaries of the lowest paid employees are not exploitive.

RECOMMENDATION #4
 

Action Steps:

• Administrators should develop strategies appropriate to their units to increase the number of women in areas where women remain underrepresented.
• Gender equity should be maintained in major speaker series, including commencement speakers, and in awarding honorary degrees.
• Ensure that women are well represented in university publications, and that both men and women appear in non-stereotypical ways.
• Adopt a non-sexist language policy for all university publications.
• Increase the number of women on the Board of Trustees.

Action Steps:

• Assess applicants for key administrative, staff, and faculty positions on their knowledge of, concern for, and experience with women’s and equity issues.
• Develop more effective mechanisms for identifying, understanding, and responding to the concerns of staff employees. Encourage the development of a representative body comparable to the Faculty Senate, where staff issues can be articulated and discussed.  Such a group would do more than represent women’s interests, but it would be an elected body where those interests could be represented or explored.
• The Office of Institutional Research and the Women’s Council should work together to keep annual statistical information on salaries, endowed chairs and awards, and number of women in various positions, departments, and divisions throughout the university.
• Provide professional development opportunities for all staff, with a special focus--until gender equity exists among higher-level administrative appointments--on grooming female employees for increasingly responsible and managerial positions.
• Conduct regular safety audits and publicize the results among members of the campus community.

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