Imagine you are a female faculty member, new to campus, and have yet to get acquainted with other women faculty and staff.

Iowa State’s Faculty Women’s Network and University Committee on Women provide an opportunity to meet other women faculty and staff, and to gather some very beneficial information.

The Faculty Women’s Network is a place where women faculty and staff members can come together and discuss concerns, successes and benefit from the occasional speaker. Faye Whitaker, assistant provost and associate professor of English, said it is ” … a time when women can get together and talk about issues that are important to women particularly, or to the university in general.”

Whitaker has been involved in the Faculty Women’s Network since its beginning three years ago, providing administrative support from the provost’s office. “I have been working to assist faculty women getting to know one another to build a support network to help young women who join the faculty make connections with other women … that’s helpful to them establishing their professional lives at Iowa State.”

Whitaker said attendance at the meetings varies. “There are some people that participate in it regularly, and so I think it’s important, that if it serves the needs of even a small group of women, that’s helpful.”

Kris Gerhard, associate professor and librarian at Parks Library, agrees that numbers aren’t what’s important. “It can be anywhere from 10 people to 40, depending on the topic,” she said. “There’s a core of people who are usually there, but it tends to vary a lot, and there’s always somebody we haven’t seen before who’s there, which is really nice.”

The Faculty Women’s Network meets monthly, and various topics are discussed, from child care to time management and promotion and tenure issues. “We’ve had updates on changes in the Women’s Studies Program. We’ve had a program to honor the women who made full professor, and have had them talk some about what the process was like, so we’ve done quite a variety of things,” Gerhard said.

Gerhard has been vice chair and chair of the University Committee on Women, and participates regularly with the Network. “You get to know women in a lot of other departments and areas of campus that necessarily the people you would only work with on a day-to-day basis.

“We’ve got departments and programs where there’s large concentrations of women faculty and then we’ve got areas where there’s maybe two … faculty members in a department that are women, and it’s very easy to be very isolated. So it’s a way to make connections, and we hope to make the process of acclimating to ISU easier to new women faculty,” Gerhard said.

The Faculty Women’s Network is a creation of the University Committee on Women. Tanya Zanish, vice chair of the University Committee on Women, is a liaison between the two groups.

The University Committee on Women monitors publications, and has helped sponsor and initiate events and projects in an effort to improve the status of women on campus, whether they are faculty, staff or students.

These projects include task forces on isolation, race and safety, and sponsoring the Gender Equity Forum, which hopes to create a campus climate survey which will provide a more accurate sense of the status of women on campus, and which would then be presented to the university for further consideration.

A concern of the University Committee on Women deals with salary and promotion. Zanish said she hopes the survey will provide some information regarding the promotion of women on campus.

“Historically, it’s been true that women were hired on at lower positions, and then a lot of times they were the first to be let go, or they didn’t necessarily get promoted. I don’t know if it’s true now, but I think it’s something that the [climate] survey … will show us, whether that’s going on or not,” Zanish said.

Gerhard said several years ago an attempt was made by the president’s office and the provost’s office to move away from using adjunct and temporary people. “I don’t know what effect that’s had on the numbers. Historically and traditionally in academia, those are the women that are following their husbands and can’t get permanent jobs, even though they’re qualified for them. It’s very frustrating.”

The University Committee on Women had a retreat last February to discuss some of these issues.

Funded by the provost’s office, it was held in a church basement for one and a half days and concentrated on focusing energies and efforts for change.

Gerhard said the group wanted to have time to strategize and recharge energy for making change on campus, and making the university a better place for women faculty, staff and students.

“It’s been a long and sometimes very frustrating struggle to make change,” Gerhard said.

An important involvement for the University Committee on Women has been sponsorship with the ongoing “Women in Touch” series, featuring speakers from throughout the university. The last guest speaker, Carla Espinoza, vice president for Human Resources, spoke on communication styles.

Upcoming speakers include Debra Marquart, assistant professor of English, and Dianne Bystrom, director of the Carrie Chapman Catt Center for Women in Politics.

The next meeting of the University Committee on Women will be Thursday Dec. 12, from 10 a.m.-noon in the large conference room in Catt Hall. Everyone is welcome to attend.

The next meeting of the Faculty Women’s Network will be Monday Dec. 9, from noon-1p.m. in the Gold Room of the Memorial Union. All women faculty and staff members are invited to attend.