Women Employee Organization Criticizes Unequal Admissions

Women Employed at Harvard (WEH), at its organizational meeting last night, called on Harvard to admit more women as undergraduates and to establish an office for channeling complaints registered by female employees.

Ann Michelini, assistant professor of Classics, told the group of 30 women that equality for women employees is closely linked with the University's admission policy. "As long as we work for an institution that admits women separately from men, all women here will be in a bad situation," she said.

"We on the Committee on Women are supposed to be concerned with the quality of education of female undergraduate students," she added. "The hiring of women faculty is not enough, as long as there is a low number of females here."

She also said that the discussion of a merger of Radcliffe and Harvard which is scheduled to be brought up this year is "likely to be as disastrous as the last time, because a small group of people will make the decisions in a dark back room. They can do this because the women here aren't organized on a day-to-day basis."

Mary Rowe, special assistant for women and work at MIT, described her duties as an ombudsperson for both women and men employees of MIT. "The greatest problem we have the abysmal lack of feedback between secretary and supervisor," she asserted. The supervisor, who is supposed to meet with secretaries every six months to hear complaints, "does no more than leave her week's paycheck on the desk and leave," she said.

Rowe, who was a junior member of the Faculty at Harvard before moving to MIT, said that she has received 27 complaints from women employed at Harvard. She explained that such a situation has developed because Harvard has no position comparable to hers for channeling grievances.

WEH was established in May 1973.