Nancy Rich said she had already tendered her resignation at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign when she decided she was not going to leave silently.

As chairwoman of the Chancellor's Committee on the Status of Women, Rich had labored to ensure that women had equitable working conditions on campus. But then in 1995, like many other women she watched over the years, Rich was quitting too. She told other female colleagues in a disheartening speech that "cumulative and unrelenting" bias against female academics was driving her out of the profession.

Now many of Rich's complaints have been confirmed in a study released last week that outlines disturbing statistics in the promotion, pay and hiring of academic women at Urbana, the state's flagship university.

The yearlong study concludes that female academics are paid less than their male counterparts in similar jobs, are less likely to be found in the top professorial ranks and are represented in limited numbers in university administrative posts.

The conclusions in the study conducted by Urbana's Committee on the Status of Women are similar to those found in a highly publicized report released earlier this year at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology that outlined systematic discrimination against faculty women there. At the time, the Urbana report was already under way, but the wave of response from women at other major research universities across the country bolstered the confidence of women involved in the Illinois study.

U. of I. officials said they would examine the report but also questioned certain "omissions" in the data that they said obscured progress the university has made in the treatment of women faculty.

The Illinois study found that among a group of 11 top-ranked universities in the Midwest, the Urbana campus ranks near the bottom in its representation of female professors. It ranked 10 out of 11 in the percentage of female academics working in the ranks of full and assistant professors and third from last in its representation of women at the associate professor rank.

"I have taught here for 40 years since I was a graduate student," said Emily Watts, an English professor who served on the Urbana committee.

"I am a part of this university community, and I don't want to cause trouble, but this is an issue that has to be addressed."

For many female professors, speaking out is becoming the mantra as more and more women enter the profession. The story of women's less-than-ideal status in academia is not new, but they say their growing ranks have given them leverage. The Urbana committee decided to go public with their study in hope of generating a quick administrative response like the one at MIT. There the university's president endorsed the study and acknowledged that changes had to be instituted.

But female faculty said last week that Urbana officials had been slower to react. Urbana's Provost Richard Herman said in an interview that two committees will study the report carefully. He did, however, criticize some aspects of the study, citing "omissions" in the data. The Urbana study included overall statistics for female faculty representation but did not detail statistics by university department, Herman said, which would have shown that the representation of women varies by discipline.

Herman said he also does not want the report to obscure the "tremendous" progress at Urbana in the hiring and promotion women.

Over the past five years, the number of women faculty at Urbana has jumped by 16 percent, he said. Pay-equity raises also have been awarded to female faculty when glaring differences in pay have been uncovered.

Herman said part of the reason Urbana lags behind some of its peer institutions in its percentage of female faculty is because the campus has long had a significant focus on science and engineering, disciplines with fewer women.

Still, many women involved in the recent study say that the inequities are real and cannot be explained away. They said changing the climate on campus is in some ways more important than pay and promotions.

"The problem is that as a university we are not as inclusive as we should be," said Susan Greendorfer, a professor of kinesiology who is chairwoman of the Committee on the Status of Women. "Our hope is that the university would adopt a specific plan that would help equalize conditions for women."

In the study, the committee issued three pages of sweeping recommendations, from establishing better recruitment programs to mentoring.

The study's proponents say one of the most serious consequences of a shortage of women professors on campus is that students receive inadequate exposure and guidance from women during their college years. The Urbana study reported that students are roughly four times less likely to receive exposure and guidance from women faculty than from men.

Meanwhile, similar studies also are under way on campuses across the country, including one at the University of Illinois at Chicago. In recent years, studies have been published at schools ranging from Purdue University to the University of Michigan -- but with varying results.

The chairwoman of the committee that authored Purdue's study, professor Judith Gappa, said "nothing happened" after her committee issued its detailed report in 1997.

But Carol Hollenshead, director of the Center for the Education of Women at Michigan, said several studies on that campus led to changes. "It is all about leadership and whether the leadership of a school plans to deal with the problem," Hollenshead said.

Women involved in such studies say the main difficulties in making significant progress are that male faculty fail to recognize women's concerns and many women are afraid to be branded as troublemakers.

"It can be true isolation," when you speak out, said Bettina Aten, a former assistant professor at Urbana who now teaches at Bridgewater State College in Massachusetts. She said she had little interaction with the all-male faculty in her department after she complained about ill treatment by a colleague.

"I was told, `You don't want to rock the boat,' " Aten said.

"Until a person receives tenure, they are only a phone call away from never working again," Rich added.

Rich, who was an assistant professor of kinesiology in Urbana, recounts incidents big and small, from having her comments at faculty meetings ignored by male colleagues to sitting on a search committee in which the female applicants' legs were a topic of discussion. She said the final straw came when three male colleagues compromised her research by essentially laying claim to a piece of equipment that Rich had obtained through a grant proposal.

Rich said she found little support from higher-ups and decided to use her background to pursue clinical work at a hospital in town.

"Now I get up every morning and I feel good about what I do," she said.