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Tuesday, 6/24/97 Women's studies course focuses on professions ACADEMICS: Class traces historical trends, issues of women in workplaces

By Hannah Miller Summer Bruin Senior Staff In Professor Mary Niles Maack's field - librarianship - there appears to be little bias against women. "The field is 80 percent female," Maack says. "When I went to find out how women entered the field, I began to find differences in the literature about professions." Although educational opportunities exist, the level of success that women can achieve within the many professions greatly varies, explains Maack. Fields historically known as professions are those requiring graduate work and implying a degree of public service. They include engineering, law, medicine and social science. These fields are to be the focus of Maack's new course, titled "Women in the Professions: Historical Perspectives, Contemporary Issues." The summer-session course "is half academic, half practical," according to Maack, who formulated the class after doing research into how professions are defined, and the degree to which they are open to women. "You have to look at the ethos of a field," Maack said. The ethos that guides a given profession can be either female-friendly or male-oriented, Maack explains. 'High authority' fields like clergy, medicine and law, according to feminist writer Judi Marshall, involve giving directives to clients or performing services that clients cannot perform themselves. These tend to be male-dominated when compared to 'empowering professions' like social work, counseling or physical therapy. "In empowering professions, there is an 'ethic of care,'" Maack explains. "In social work, for example, the goal is not to have a 'repeat client,' but to teach the client how to effectively deal with the problem. It's parallel to the idea of parenting." Empowering professions tend to be more accessible to women, and some were created and developed largely by women. "Gender is learned behavior," Maack says, and for women, that means a focus on relationships, connectedness and even nurturing behaviors. Those ethics find their way into the training, goals and the workplaces of a field. Neomia Lowe, a guest speaker for the class, came up against gender barriers in the workplace when she entered the field of aerospace engineering. Only eight percent of U.S. engineers are women, although the number is steadily increasing. After eight years of running a 24- hour lab with very little time off, Lowe quit her job in order to go back to school and start her own business. "I left because of the inequalities I felt," she says. "I wasn't being paid as much as my male-coworkers for the work I was doing." Lowe's dilemma is typical of women who become frustrated with their careers. "I love engineering - I love the work - but I wasn't getting what I felt was appropriate compensation," she says. Unequal pay - although it is has been the focus of feminist activism for decades - is one of the more evident challenges women face. They also face a limited scope of positions open to them, Maack says. For those women who have made inroads into male-dominated fields, they often find themselves 'territorially segregated' - limited to special niches within a profession. "For example, many women who go into medicine specialize in general or family practice, a field which has less prestige that surgery," Maack says. Even within the field of librarianship, which is 80 percent female, there is still a prestige barrier. In law librarianship - which carries a higher level of prestige - only 20 percent. of the librarians are female - although law school enrollment is 40 percent female. The counterpart to this is hierarchical segregation, where women are kept at a certain management level and not encouraged or allowed to rise. "A lot of women don't make partner, even though they go to work in these high-powered law firms," Maack says. In a male-oriented field like engineering, Lowe experienced this firsthand. "I had wanted to go into management but after three or four years there, I realized that it wasn't going to happen," she says. "I didn't have access to the old boys' network." This happens even in women-dominated fields, Maack argues, because it is part of gender-role expectation. "Men tend to be pushed into management, even if they don't want to do it," she says. "It's, 'you're a man, don't you want to head the library?'" Even when measures like affirmative action are in place to equalize womens' opportunities, those who benefit are often tokenized. While women and minorities benefit from affirmative action by gaining a place within an organization, they often are treated differently than other employees when actually on the job, and expected to 'speak for' the group that they represent, Maack says. "When I was hired, I was the only black woman working at Rockwell, and only one of four women," Lowe says. "If it weren't for affirmative action, I don't think the company would have hired me. Most of the women who worked there were secretaries or lab techs," and not engineers, Lowe said. But in the end, Lowe said she didn't want to be too negative in speaking to women hoping to enter the field. Her advice? "I would say to be ... very realistic," Lowe says. "It is a very hard road, to try to move up in the field." The class will be offered on Tuesdays and Thursdays at 2 to 4:30 of Summer Session A, for six weeks. PATRICK LAM/Daily Bruin Professor Mary Niles Maack is teaching a women's studies course this summer investigating the history of gender in the workplace. Previous Daily Bruin Story Story on gender ratios of different majors, November 3, 1995 Previous Daily Bruin Stories: Story on gender ratios of different majors

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