U of Ideas of General Interest -- February 1999
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Contact: Mark Reutter, Business & Law Editor (217) 333-0568; [email protected]
UNIVERSITIES Female professors still face biases in tenure and promotion
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. -- While overt discrimination against female professors has diminished in U.S. colleges and universities, subtle forms of bias persist in promotion and tenure, causing a persistent gap in the proportion of male and female faculty members who reach senior rank.
Marianne A. Ferber, professor emerita of economics and women's studies at the University of Illinois and a pioneer in the study of women and work, said that examples of "backsliding" are not difficult to find among the most prestigious research institutions.
"Continued progress cannot be taken for granted in academia in general and particularly in fields that have remained predominately male," she wrote in a paper recently delivered at Radcliffe College. Several studies show that the increase of women on faculties has slowed in the 1990s and that female faculty members are more likely to be terminated than men when departments "downsize."
What's more, women dominate the pool of low-paid, part-time faculty hired to teach specific courses with little or no chance of winning full-time appointment.
While feminist criticism has tended to concentrate on salary difference between male and female faculty members, Ferber said an even more crucial problem is the continued low proportion of women in many fields, especially in elite research universities. "Representation of women is smaller at the more prestigious institutions where the opportunities for research productivity are greatest," she said.
Ferber reported that although women receive about 11 percent of all engineering doctoral degrees, females make up less than 7 percent of full-time engineering appointments. Similar disparities were found in the natural sciences where 31 percent of all doctorates are awarded to women, but women account for only 19 percent of faculty members. "Even though it would be expected that the representation of women among faculties would be lower than among new Ph.D.'s, the gender gap remains very large," Ferber said.
A re-evaluation of the rigid schedules of academic tenure is one way to help level the playing field between the sexes. "Present rules were devised at a time when the vast majority of faculty members were men who were either married to full-time homemakers or single; they urgently need to be reconsidered under the very different conditions that prevail today.
"Universities could adopt a wide variety of programs to reduce the conflicts that face faculty members with family responsibilities, ranging from more generous maternity, parental and family leaves and assistance with child care and elder care, to rollbacks of the tenure clock."
But "it would be a serious mistake to make any of these benefits available to women without extending them to men as well," Ferber cautioned. "Not only would it be unfair to men who take on their fair share of family responsibilities, but it would give universities an incentive to avoid hiring women because it would be more expensive to hire them than to hire men."
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