Professor challenges six University of Michigan programs that give ‘preferential treatment’ to women

Business and medicine opportunities and services unavailable to men

Mark Perry can credibly claim a role in ending the women-only study lounge at Michigan State University and faculty awards limited to women and minorities at the University of Michigan-Flint.

Now the crusading UM-Flint economist is going after six programs that appear to grant women “preferential treatment” in the University of Michigan System.

In an email he shared with The College Fix, Perry asked Associate Vice Provost for Academic and Faculty Affairs Pamela Heatlie to review the programs “for compliance with Title IX laws, Proposal 2 of the Michigan Constitution, and UM’s own statement of non-discrimination.” (Heatlie is also senior director of the Office for Institutional Equity and Title IX coordinator.)

They include the Och Initiative for Women in Finance in the business school, whose goal is “to increase awareness of and access to careers for women in finance,” and the Credit Suisse 2018 Women’s Mentor Program, a two-day program that tells “outstanding female sophomores” about summer internship programs at the financial services company.

The other four programs involve medicine: a program for faculty and administrators to “accelerate the development of women for senior positions in academic medicine and healthcare”; a women-only “cardiac treatment program,” which UMich calls “one of only a few in the country … specifically for women; the Women’s Respiratory Clinic, which is limited to “female patients” and says women’s “respiratory health deserves extra attention for multiple reasons”; and the Department of Psychiatry’s Women and Infants Mental Health program, which focuses on “the wellbeing and special mental health needs of women.”

Perry told Heatlie that the six programs appear to exclude and discriminate against “male students, patients, and faculty” in violation of state and federal law and UMich policy.