The Academic Senate will join Chancellor Albert Carnesale and Vice Chancellor of Academic Personnel Norman Abrams in supporting the creation of a joint task force to follow up on the recommendations and continue the work of the Gender Equity Committee.

Senate Chair Stephen Yeazell proposed that the task force should place among its priorities a special emphasis on appointments of new faculty.

“The single most important task ensuring gender equity on this campus will involve the hundreds of new appointments that we’ll be making over the next 10 years,” said Yeazell, addressing the first Legislative Assembly of the academic year Nov. 14 at the Faculty Center. “We must make sure that all our colleagues are treated equally and fairly once they are here. But we can’t afford to miss the opportunity represented by these new appointments coming at a time when thousands of talented women have earned doctoral and professional degrees to qualify them for appointments at first-rate universities.”

The meeting gave Senate members their first opportunity to discuss what steps to take next, following the release of the committee’s report last month. While the 12-member Gender Equity Committee found few salary disparities between female and male Senate faculty who have been on campus for the same length of time, it did find differences in rates of promotion. Chancellor Carnesale has accepted the committee’s recommendations and said he intends to pursue all 10 recommendations. In some cases, he has already taken action and has agreed to create three joint administration-Senate committees to look at gender issues not included in the study.

“This is not a situation in which we can turn to a responsible administrator and say, ‘Do something about this,’ ” Yeazell said. “Faculty appointments and promotions are deeply embedded in the traditions of shared governance. They originate in departments. And they move through layers of administrative and Senate comment. That means that these are issues that we all have to define and address.”

The report raised concerns about reviewing agencies beyond departments that may not be paying enough attention to the breadth of the search process, about the lengthy time it takes for the grievance process, about patterns of grievances and whether women faculty were appropriately represented on major committees.

Yeazell said he has asked the Senate’s Council on Academic Personnel (CAP) and other key committees to look into these concerns and report on possible ways to address them. To recommend other steps that should be taken, a panel that included two co-authors of the report, committee co-chairs and Professors Janet Currie and Margaret Kivelson; Carole Goldberg, law professor and chair of the Association of Academic Women; and English professor Jonathan Post discussed issues and invited the faculty to comment.

The position of vice chancellor for academic personnel should be restructured after it is vacated by Abrams to make explicit a mandate to make the faculty more diverse, Currie suggested, speaking as an individual.

“I would like to see the Senate discuss how CAP could be restructured to ensure more minority and female represention,” Currie proposed.

Goldberg said that goals for gender equity should be identified in the hiring of new faculty, “taking into account where we would be in our faculty hiring if we were fully utilizing the graduate women who are available in the hiring pool.

“We need to be mindful that in all of our searches, appointments and review processes that we pay attention to the matter of gender equity,” said Goldberg, adding that this can be done without setting quotas.