Today, Penn will release an update on last year's controversial Gender Equity Report. The update details the steps Penn has taken over the past year to ensure that the hiring process is as "equitable" as possible. Penn Provost Bob Barchi elaborated for the Daily Pennsylvanian:

Departmental accountability was among the many steps identified in the report. Barchi said he is working with deans to ensure that all searches for new faculty members comply with gender equity guidelines.

Although the University does not make hires based solely on any applicant's gender, Barchi said the University is striving to make gender equity a priority in all search processes.

"We want to make sure that every hire appropriately takes into consideration opportunities for women and that we provide every opportunity to make sure that we have gender equity in every one of our searches," Barchi said.

Specifically, Barchi said the composition of faculty search committees should reflect the number of women in the given field. He added that search committees should strive to compile an applicant pool that accurately mirrors the gender distribution in the respective field as well.

The update reveals that several problematic search processes have arisen in the last year.

"In several instances over the past year, deans have identified search processes that were not designed to promote gender equity sufficiently," the report states. "In those instances, the deans asked that the search process be corrected to assure the appropriate consideration of women candidates."

Barchi said that this type of hold-up in the search process would discourage departments from not seeking an appropriate composition of candidates.

In addition, the update details ways the University has created incentives for establishing gender equity. For example, the University established a new fund to support the recruitment and retention of women faculty.

Addressing "inequity" by engineering proportionality is bizarre enough in debates about college admissions. It's positively surreal in this context. The flawed logic is breathtaking:

1) Academe is not representative government. Its emphasis is supposed to be on excellence, not on modelling demographic distribution. A department can pursue an ideal gender distribution or it can pursue an ideal mix of scholars. It cannot do both at once. The implication seems to be that departmental excellence can be maintained--or even acquired--by making a candidate's sex a primary factor in his or her job candidacy. But unless academic excellence is synonymous with demographics, the logic does not hold.

2) The logic of the plan does not even hold if you look at it on its own terms. The requirement that search committees mirror the gender distribution in the field in order to bring departments into line with the numbers elsewhere cannot, by definition, be met. Penn is instituting this rule in large part because other schools have made more "progress" toward "equity"; in other words, because the numbers in certain departments do not measure up to the numbers elsewhere. The only way to make search committees in "under-feminized" departments conform to this requirement is to put women on them who are not experts in the field. This is insulting both to the women (who are there as tokens and whose presence is supposed to inhibit the discrimination that would presumably take place in their absence) and to the legitimate members of the search committee (whose ability to judge candidates fairly and impartially is not trusted). Not ethical, and not even workable: departments with comparatively few women will be put in the impossible position of vastly overworking those women faculty they do have. In the name of gender equity, they will be compelled to exploit women faculty.

3) It does not sound from the Provost's comment as though logic was a high priority in devising these new policies. It does sound, however, as though punitive inconvenience was. I've written before about Penn's institution of "disincentives" to hiring men, and we see here what those disincentives are: failure to conform to the policy results in arrest of the search, which in turn means that no hire gets made and that at best the search will have to be repeated the next year, at great cost of time and energy to all. Worst case scenario: the deans don't approve another search, having decided that the department either can't run one properly or is functioning fine without a new faculty member, or both. Hiding behind the new requirements for equitable hiring practice is the threat of departmental decimation: hire women, the policy seems to say, or you may not be hiring at all.

There's much more to say. But for now, I'll just say I'm disappointed and point readers who want more to my earlier postings on this issue.