How to Discriminate Against Women Without Really Trying
by Jo Freeman

Based on research done in 1969 at the University of Chicago, this paper was published in Women: A Feminist Perspective, first edition, 1975, pp. 194-208; second edition, 1979, pp. 217-232.

"Any girl who gets this far has got to be a kook," one distinguished (male) member of the University of Chicago faculty told a female graduate student who had come to see him about being on her dissertation committee.
This was just one of many such statements collected by women students at the University in the Spring of 1969 to illustrate their contention that "some of our professors have different expectations about our performance than about the performance of male graduate students— expectations based not on our ability as individuals but on the fact that we are women." There were many others. They included:
"The admissions committee didn't do their job. There is not one good looking girl in the entering class."
"They've been sending me too many women advisees. I've got to do something about that."
"You have no business looking for work with a child that age."
"I'm sorry you lost your fellowship. You're getting married, aren't you?"
"We expect women who come here to be competent, good students; but we don't expect them to be brilliant or original."
"I see the number of women entering this year has increased. I hope the quality has increased as well."
And most telling of all: "I know you're competent and your thesis advisor knows you're competent. The question in our minds is are you really serious about what you're doing." This was said to a young woman who had already spent five years and over $10,000 getting to that point in her Ph.D. program.
These comments hardly contribute to a student's self-image as a scholar. Often made in jest, they are typical of those used by professors on the University of Chicago campus and other campuses to express the only socially acceptable prejudice left -- that against women. But if you were to ask these same professors whether they discriminate against women students and colleagues, most would answer that they do not.
Until a few years ago, most women would have agreed with them. Since then, many of the women students and faculty toward whom these comments were aimed have looked at the actions behind the words and concluded that most professors discriminate against women whether they are conscious of it or not.
Women in one social science department openly declared that their professors frequently discouraged them from going to or staying in graduate school. They said the attitude of their professors indicated "that we are expected to be decorative objects in the classroom, that we're not likely to finish a Ph.D. and if we do, there must be something wrong with us." They pointed out that no woman had held a faculty position in their department since the University was founded in 1892 and that this lack of role models was hardly encouraging to women students.
At the time the University community was recovering from a massive sit-in the previous quarter (winter 1969) caused by the firing of Marlene Dixon, the first woman to teach in the Sociology Department in nineteen years. Though women's issues were not the primary concern of the protest, they had been raised publicly for the first time during the course of it, (thanks largely to the efforts of Dixon herself and of the campus women's liberation group), and had generated the greatest response from the University community.
One such response was from the students, who began to organize into departmental caucuses, put out position papers, and confront the faculty with their new feminist consciousness. The other response was from the faculty and the administration. The Committee of the Council of the Academic Senate appointed a Committee on University Women (COUW) to study "the situation and opportunities presently enjoyed by women in the University community." The COUW created a student subcommittee (SCOUW) of six students and three faculty members, of which I was chairperson.

THE STUDY

As part of its duties SCOUW developed a detailed, self-administered questionnaire. The design of the study¹ involved distributing the questionnaire to a sample of approximately 50 male and 50 female respondents from each of the seventeen graduate and undergraduate divisions and professional schools at the University of Chicago at the beginning of the following fall quarter (1969-70). These numbers were chosen to provide adequate samples for comparison. In the final tally each 100-person unit was weighted to represent the actual relative strength of its school or division in the University. The sampling intervals were determined individually for each unit and sex, and the sample was drawn by selecting every nth name from alphabetical lists of students registered that spring.
Although the expected 30 percent loss rate was compensated for, the inevitable elimination of the drop-outs in itself involves a bias: our study excluded the University's casualties, who may well have been those most fruitful to examine. This is analogous to studying the effects of a disease by looking only at its survivors. Although the study no doubt included many who would later drop out, the possibility of bias still exists. One could maintain that those women who perceive discrimination most sharply or get the least support from the University environment are the ones to leave. To a certain extent we are dealing with a group of self-selected women who have at least partially adapted to the system.
The questionnaire took about twenty minutes to complete as most of the questions had precoded answers from which the respondent picked one or more. Students maintained their anonymity by turning in their completed questionnaires separately from a card with their name on it. When a name card was received, the respondent's name was removed from the sample list. Thus at any given moment we had a list of those who had not returned their questionnaires and who could be followed up by phone calls.
The overall response rate was 77 percent. The loss was due partially to nonreturning students and partially to failure to turn in the questionnaires. Unfortunately, the rather low response rate was not the only problem the study ran into. Other problems that could bias its results were encountered in three spheres:

1. The Administration. The staff had received assurances from intermediate level administrators that if the questionnaire was not offensive, it would be distributed at registration. Unfortunately, the Provost later decided to avoid any possible complications of the registration procedure and rejected the questionnaire without even looking at it. It might be noted that it is not uncommon for material to be distributed and studies undertaken at registration time. Only four years previously, permission had been given for a study requiring every registering student to fill out a questionnaire on teeth-gnashing. Other studies using the registration handout procedure had been done in the interim. Our low response rate can be attributed largely to this administrative reversal, for the officials of some of the professional schools gave us full cooperation and those units had response rates near 90 percent.

2. The Faculty. The study was originally intended to be a far-ranging one that would probe the causes of the problems women students faced in general. Unfortunately, a majority of the faculty members of COUW and SCOUW felt the survey should be used primarily to determine the extent to which women perceived overt discrimination in the classroom and in university services. It was felt that only items leading to explicit recommendations to the University should be included. For example, questions on the amount of time spent in child care were opposed on the grounds that there was nothing the University could do about any sex differential that might exist here. The Null Environment Hypothesis which will be discussed in detail below, was one of the few nonspecific concerns to survive this weeding out.

3. The Students. Members of the campus women's liberation group decided to boycott the questionnaire for political reasons on which they did not elaborate. Most of them were undergraduate women in the social sciences, and this is where we found our lowest return rate -- 62 percent. Some differences in return rates were certainly due to the different distribution and follow-up methods we had to use. However, the procedures used in this unit were identical for men and women, and the men had a response rate of 81 percent. There is good reason to believe, therefore, that the boycott was effective and that the responses from this unit do not adequately represent the militant feminist viewpoint. Nonetheless, the results were quite striking.

THE NULL ENVIRONMENT HYPOTHESIS

The Null Environment Hypothesis was a response to the contention of one of the faculty members of SCOUW that the faculty did not discriminate between women and men students -- they treated them all poorly. Succinctly put, the hypothesis states that an academic situation that neither encourages nor discourages students of either sex is inherently discriminatory against women because it fails to take into account the differentiating external environments from which women and men students come. As Horner has pointed out, many women enter school with a "motive to avoid success" because they fear social rejection or find academic success in conflict with a feminine identity.² Even those who have not internalized this notion often find little or no support for intellectual aspirations -- particularly at the postgraduate level -- because their endeavors are not taken seriously. Thus women enter with a handicap which a "null" academic environment does nothing to decrease and may well reinforce. In other words, professors don't have to make it a specific point to discourage their female students. Society will do that job for them. All they have to do is to fail to encourage them. Professors can discriminate against women without really trying.
Obviously, we first had to find out whether the hypothesized null environment existed at the University. Did the faculty provide a supportive environment for the students or did they not? Did they strongly encourage them to develop their potential or did they not?
We asked students how they thought the faculty felt about their going to or being in graduate or professional school and about their having a career. We interpreted a response of "very favorable" to mean that a student felt he or she received positive support. As can be seen in Tables I and II, only 47 percent of the male students and 32 percent of the female students felt they got positive support or encouragement for postgraduate education, either from the male 94 percent or the female 6 percent of the faculty.³ Even fewer felt the faculty were very favorable to their having a career. Thus if we define a null academic environment as one with a significant lack of positive support, we can say that such an environment did indeed exist at the University of Chicago. The lack of positive support for women was especially evident. Only a little over two-thirds as many female as male students thought the male faculty were "very favorable" to their having advanced education and a lesser proportion thought they were favorable to their having a career.
If students do not receive support from faculties for going on with their education and careers, where do they get it? Much of it comes from personal commitment. The presence of this internal support mechanism is always assumed in men. Women are supposed to be less deeply committed, and this supposition is often used both as an explanation of their lesser success and as a justification for preferential treatment for men. Ignoring for the moment the self-fulfilling prophecy inherent in such an assumption, we wanted to know exactly how deeply committed our women students were.
We found that they were more deeply committed than the men students. When asked how they themselves felt about having a career, 75 percent of the women as against 60 percent of the men were very favorable. When asked "If you could have a choice, would you choose to have a career at all?" 92 percent of the women compared to 81 percent of the men said yes. So much for the "women have no career commitment" myth.

There is another myth which says that women will drop out before completing their degree. We had no way to test what our subjects would do in the future, but we could test how strongly they felt about the possibility of dropping out. We discovered that 62 percent of the women said they would be very disappointed if they left school before completing their education, whereas only 53 percent of the men said this; 31.6 percent of the men said they were in school primarily to stay out of the draft.
Further support comes from the external environment, the general atmosphere and mores of the society. We are all aware that our society is more favorable to men's getting advanced education and having a career than to women's doing these things. We also know that we are influenced by these values. But we had no real way of measuring the amount or importance of this influence. This variable had to remain undetermined.
We could, however, measure the perception by our students of positive support by specific people. We could determine whether they felt their relatives, friends, and spouses were very favorable to their education and their career. This was not adequate to measure the total influence of the nonacademic environment in which our students lived, but it did give us some indicators. Therefore we asked the same questions about the attitudes of these other people as we had about the attitudes of the faculty.
Here, too, the difference was quite apparent. As seen in Tables III and IV, men in all cases perceived more support than women —in most cases considerably more. The difference is greatest of all on the question about careers. This should not be surprising: it is much more socially acceptable for a woman to be well educated than for her to earn money with that education.

TABLE III
Response to: "How do you think these people feel about your going to (being in) graduate or professional school?"
		Very favorable	Somewhat favorable	Not too favorable	Don't know
Yourself	M W	66.9% 67.6%	24.1% 23.1%	6.1% 4.1%	2.9% 5.2%
Father	M W	74.6% 47.5%	18.7% 37.0%	4.6% 6.1%	2.0% 6.1%
Mother	M W	79.1% 49.3%	17.3% 33.4%	1.0% 10.9%	2.6% 6.4%
Siblings	M W	52.7% 33.8%	31.3% 27.4%	1.5% 5.2%	14.5% 33.6%
Other relatives	M W	61.1% 20.8%	25.2% 30.6%	1.1% 13.7%	12.6% 34.9%
Most friends opposite sex	M W	43.4% 22.9%	37.6% 45.8%	1.7% 10.8%	17.3% 20.5%
Most same-sex friends	M W	42.9% 30.7%	39.9% 45.1%	2.5% 7.5%	14.8% 16.7%
Spouse, boy- or girlfriend	M W	64.5% 62.8%	26.4% 23.4%	2.7% 6.0%	6.5% 7.8%
Male faculty member	M W	46.7% 32.2%	20.0% 22.8%	2.1% 5.2%	31.3% 39.8%
Female faculty member	M W	37.1% 34.8%	15.8% 12.7%	0.9% 1.0%	46.2% 51.4%
Any significant older people	M W	56.2% 44.9%	19.1% 21.1%	1.4% 3.3%	23.3% 30.8%

TABLE IV
Response to: "How do the following people feel about your having a career?" by sex
		Very Favorable	Somewhat favorable	No too favorable	Don't know
Yourself	M W	60.3% 75.3%	24.1% 15.1%	11.1% 6.1%	4.4% 3.5%
Father	M W	77.0% 47.5%	19.0% 37.0%	0.8% 6.1%	3.1% 9.4%
Mother	M W	79.1% 17.3%	17.3% 33.4%	1.0% 10.9%	2.6% 6.4%
Siblings	M W	52.7% 33.8%	31.3% 27.4%	1.5% 5.2%	14.5% 33.6%
Other relatives	M W	61.1% 20.8%	25.2% 30.6%	1.1% 13.7%	12.6% 34.9%
Most friends opposite sex	M W	43.4% 22.9%	37.6% 45.8%	1.7% 10.8%	17.3% 20.5%
Most same- sex friends	M W	42.9% 30.7%	39.9% 45.1%	2.5% 7.5%	14.8% 16.7%
Spouse, boy-or girlfriend	M W	62.0% 51.1%	29.4% 32.2%	2.1% 7.8%	6.5% 8.9%
Male faculty member	M W	46.3% 26.6%	26.6% 30.6%	1.1% 1.9%	26.0% 41.0%
Female faculty member	M W	35.3% 26.6%	22.3% 19.5%	0.7% 0.6%	41.6% 53.3%
Any significant older people	M W	53.8% 35.5%	25.0% 28.1%	0.3% 1.8%	21.0% 34.6%

Much more surprising was a comparison of the attitudes of faculty, nonfaculty and the students themselves toward their graduate education and career. First, for the most part the weakest support of all came from the faculty -- the very people from whom students should have reason to expect the strongest support. Not only is this further confirmation of a tendency toward a null environment at the University of Chicago, but it implies that it is well within the faculty's power to significantly increase the total support students receive for going on with their education.

Second, the men frequently reported more favorable attitudes from others than from themselves. This could imply that the encouragement (or pressure) they receive from parents, spouses, and friends makes up for what they do not receive from the faculty. The women, by contrast, always report a more favorable attitude from themselves, with the difference most noticeable in the case of attitudes toward a career. Obviously women need their higher levels of internal commitment. The cognitive dissonance between their attitudes toward their own potential and the attitudes of others toward it must create a stress endurable only with the help of a strong personal determination to pursue both education and careers.
To test our hypothesis further, we had to know whether the faculty were openly discouraging the students, male and female, or whether their attitude was, in fact, null. The tendency toward the latter was confirmed by the very low percentage of students who felt that the faculty were noticeably unfavorable to their pursuing graduate education or careers and by the very high percentage who answered "Don't know." Among women in particular, this was the most frequent response to the two questions. Among men, however, "favorable," though low, had the highest response rate.
The University of Chicago is essentially a graduate and professional school that prides itself on its low student- faculty ratio. Even undergraduates, less than a third of the student body, are expected to attend mostly small lectures and seminars and do a good deal of guided independent study. Therefore we wanted to check the extent of student-faculty interaction and the effect this interaction had on students. One way we did this was by asking students whether a faculty member had ever revealed to them his/her opinion about the students' seriousness, academic progress, suitability for the field of work, intellectual ability, and the other concerns students have about faculty estimations. From 43 to 93 percent of both women and men students answered that not a single faculty member had expressed an opinion, or implied one, on any of these matters. The intellectual environment was indeed very parched.
Yet the overall picture appeared more sterile for women than for men. The number of "don't know" responses given by women indicates that not only do they experience low levels of support, but they do not get enough feedback from the faculty to know where they stand. The University does not care enough about the women within it even to respond negatively. Its discouragement is much more insidious: it fails to respond at all.

TABLE V
Response to: "Since you have been at the University of Chicago, has any faculty member in your department (or collegiate division) ever told you or given you the impression that he thought ... ?"
			No one	Yes, one faculty member	Yes,more than one faculty member
That you should apply for a scholarship or fellowship		M F	55.8% 56.4%	18.8% 22.2%	25.4% 21.4%
That the rate at which you are moving through the program is too slow 30%		M F	84.6% 88.4%	5.4% 9.7%	1.1% 2.7%
That you are not working up to the University's standards		M F	93.5% 88.4%	9.7% 8.9%	3.3% 2.7%
That you should switch to another field		M F	47.9% 87.3%	19.4% 11.1%	1.1% 1.6%
That you are well-suited for the field you are in		M F	89.8% 89.3%	7.5% 8.5%	2.7% 2.1%
You are one of the best students in one of his classes or department		M F	57.5% 59.8%	26.1% 27.6%	16.4% 12.6%
That you write well		M F	52.9% 49.4%	24.4% 23.5%	22.7% 27.1%

This discouragement by default manifests itself in many ways besides lack of faculty encouragement for women students. The very structure of the University is geared to meet the needs of men and those women whose lives most closely resemble men's. Since the life-styles of the population of intellectually qualified women are more heterogeneous and the demands made upon them more diverse than those of an intellectually similar population of men, fewer can comfortably fit into the University environment.
The two most obvious examples of this are lack of child-care facilities and lack of female role models among the professors. The University will deliberately keep a balance between younger and older faculty because some students relate better to the former and some to the latter. It will also try to have representatives from various fields within a discipline. But it sees no need to provide a sexual representation. The result is that few women have examples before them of how to be a female professional. The idea of meeting the different needs of different students with different backgrounds is nothing new or radical. Traditionally the University has provided, within limits, fellowships, loans, and jobs for those who need money; housing for those who are married or are undergraduates and can stand dormitories; jobs for student wives (though seldom for student husbands); remedial courses for those whose academic background is scanty; special programs for those who find the traditional ones too confining; sports programs (primarily for men), recreational facilities; health services (usually without gynecological care); and a host of other opportunities.
What the University fails to acknowledge is that all of these needs are met within the confines of male standards. Because most of academia is male it has never stopped to consider that what is good and necessary for most men is not always good and necessary for most women. Thus the University proved very understanding and flexible in its readiness to accommodate men with draft problems. It gave them draft-exempt jobs, letters of recommendation and standing, showed them as enrolled in courses they were not taking to preserve their deferments, and, if worst came to worst, held their fellowships for them until they came back. But a pregnant woman will often have to drop out -- or be forced to leave by losing her fellowship -- because the university feels no responsibility to provide child-care centers. Even when she does not leave school, or has her children before she enters, she usually has the major responsibility for their care and this can be quite detrimental to full academic involvement.
This sex-related difference was clearly evident among our students when they were asked how children affected their academic work. Of all those who were parents, 15 percent of the women and only 1 percent of the men said children had a very unfavorable effect. Conversely, 16 percent of the men and a predictable zero percent of the women felt children had a very favorable effect. This is just one example of how the specific needs of women students are not met because the needs of men students provide the standards the university feels obligated to meet.

THE EXTERNAL ENVIRONMENT

Most important for our study, however, is the fact that students are presumed to come from and exist in a supportive external environment. In reality, that presumption is far more valid for most men than for most women. In many different ways men have been expected and encouraged to go on with their advanced education and need little mental effort to picture themselves in a professional role. Their parents, their undergraduate professors, their friends, their other role models, their spouses, all contribute to this environment. Even if they have neither positive stimulus nor positive goal, their draft boards (at the time of this study) and the gnawing realization that they will, after all, have to do something with their lives, provides a negative spur that is only slightly less effective than a positive one.
For women this is not the case. Instead, the general social atmosphere in which they function tends to work against them. They learn to see women who achieve in the traditional sense of financial success and professional advancement as deviants and correctly perceive that such success often costs more than it gains in personal terms. Several research projects (in addition to the Horner research cited earlier) have documented what most women have always known. Beatrice Lipinski showed that women students think of success as something that is achieved by men⁴ but not by women. Others have shown that women are reluctant to violate this social standard. As Kagan and Moss have noted, "The universe of appropriate behaviors for males and females is delineated early in development and it is difficult for the child to cross these culturally given frontiers without considerable conflict and tension."⁵ These barriers account for Pierce's finding that high achievement motivation among high-school women correlates much more closely with early marriage than with success in school.⁶ Those women who do cross the frontiers must, according to Maccoby, pay a high price in anxiety and "it is this anxiety which helps to account for the lack of productivity among those women who do make intellectual careers." She feels that "this tells something of a horror story. It would appear that even when a woman is suitably endowed intellectually and develops the right temperament and habits of thought to make use of her endowment, she must be fleet of foot indeed to scale the hurdles society has erected for her and to remain a whole and happy person while continuing to follow her intellectual bent."⁷
Thus it should not be surprising that women tend to aspire at a lower level than men and to require even greater stimulus from the academic environment. As Gropper and Fitzpatrick have pointed out, "Women appear to be less influenced than men by their high grades in deciding in favor of advanced education. But they are more influenced than men by their low grades in deciding against advanced education."⁸ As a group, women are deprived of the rich external environment of high expectations and high encouragement that research indicates is best for personal growth and creative production. Unless they have exceptional backgrounds, they have little to go on but their own internal commitment.

Copyright (c) by Jo Freeman

¹ The study was directed by Ellen Fried, formerly of the National Opinion Research Center, assisted by Nancy Hartsock, then a graduate student in political science at the University of Chicago and now teaching at the Johns Hopkins University. The responses to the questionnaire have been published in Women in the University of Chicago (May 1970), available from the Office of Public information, University of Chicago.

² Marina Horner, "Why Bright Women Fail," Psychology Today, November 1970.

³ Female faculty members scored identically to males, for instance (see Table IV), in the percentage rated "very favorable" to women graduate students' having a career, and only 2.6 percent higher in "very favorable" attitudes toward women's being in graduate or professional school.

⁴ Beatrice Lipinski, Sex-Role Conflict and Achievement Motivation in College Women, unpublished Ph.D. dissertation, University of Cincinnati, 1965.

⁵ Jerome Kagan and Howard A. Moss, Birth to Maturity: A Study in Psychological Development, (New York and London: Wiley 1962), p. 270.

⁶ James V. Pierce, Sex Differences in Achievement Motivation of Able High School Students, Cooperative Research Project No. 1097, University of Chicago, Dec. 1961.

⁷ Eleanor Maccoby, "Women's Intellect," in Farber and Wilson, eds., The Potential of Women, (New York: McGraw Hill, 1963).

⁸ G. L. Gropper and Robert Fitzpatrick, Who Goes to Graduate School?, (Pittsburgh: American Institute for Research, 1959).

⁹ R. Rosenthal and L. Jacobson, Pygmalion in the Classroom: Teacher Expectations and Pupils' Intellectual Development, (New York: Holt, Rinehart, 1968).