The passage of Proposition 209 in 1996 has led to a drop in the percentage of women faculty members hired by the University of California, a number of female professors told a state senate panel last week.

Faculty members who spoke before the Senate Select Committee on Government Oversight said the proposition, which ended gender and racial preferences given in public hiring, has allowed the universities to no longer see the low numbers of women faculty members as a problem.

"The fall-out from 209 is that we are back to normal," said UC Davis law professor Martha West. "There is no leadership, no pressure to hire women."

West, a member of the campus Chancel-lor's and Provost's Task Force on Faculty Recruitment, cited UC hiring statistics before and after Prop. 209 passed. The committee has been meeting since December 1999 to study the issue of diversity in UC Davis faculty hiring.

In 1996, 36 percent of the new faculty members hired by the UC system were women. The next year that figure dropped to 27 percent. Although the percentage of new women hires rose to 32 percent in 1998, it has remained below 30 percent since. In recent years, women have constituted more than 40 percent of U.S. citizens receiving doctorates.

West's message was echoed by professors from across the university system, like Marge Schultz and Angela Harris, professors of law at UC Berkeley. Once women are hired at UC, they also face additional challenges, said Harris, the only tenured female African American professor at Boalt Hall. They deal with childcare issues and pressure to take a short maternity leave.

Because women often specialize in emerging areas of the law such as sexual harassment and assault, they end up teaching more classes and serving on more committees than they can handle, she said. Their research suffers.

"The result of this is … an overstressed workload," Harris said.

UC Santa Cruz Chancellor M.R.C. Greenwood, who represented UC President Richard Atkinson at the meeting, said that for female faculty hiring in some academic areas-such as the arts and the humanities -the university system outpaces its peer institutions. In other fields, like mathematics and science, UC falls behind.

"We do have a problem that will require field-specific and university solutions," Greenwood said.

She unveiled a multi-point plan from Atkinson designed to create a more diverse faculty at each university. In the proposal, each campus chancellor will:

• Establish a new goal for the number of ladder-rank women faculty.
• Conduct an analysis of future faculty demand in different disciplines and estimate, by gender and ethnicity, the hiring pool available.
• Submit a plan for achieving future hiring goals.
• Allocate money to support the plan.
• Report the plan results, and be accountable for its completion.
• Work with provosts and deans to demonstrate campus leadership's commitment to the plan.

The Office of the President will establish a systemwide database of dissertation-stage graduate students to "mine our own pool of potential faculty," Greenwood said.

Atkinson has discussed his plan with each of the 10 campus chancellors, said Abby Lunardini, a spokeswoman for the Office of the President. It will be up to each campus to develop a timeline to institute the measures.

"President Atkinson is asking all the chancellors to look at these new proposals and take them to heart," she said.

UC Davis Vice Provost for Academic Personnel Barry Klein, who heads the campus's faculty recruitment committee, said he would be meeting with the group on Feb. 28 to talk about Atkinson's plan.

The Senate hearing did reinforce some of the areas the campus should be looking at when recruiting and hiring. But many of the issues discussed have already been taken up by the task force, he said. "We have to overcome this pervasive feeling of hopelessness in the face of 209," Klein said. "To the contrary, there are many things we can do."

Senate Committee Chair Jackie Speier, D-San Mateo, said she would see that Atkinson's measures are turned into legislation. She encouraged campuses not to embark on long-term study of hiring issues, but rather to act quickly to change their attitudes toward women faculty.

"The number of women faculty not only affects the research that is done but the questions that are asked," she said.

For transcripts of Chancellor Greenwood's Jan. 31 testimony, see www.ucop.edu/acadadv/testimonyindex.html