Faculty Bulletin - Impediments to Advancement

Faculty Bulletin

Impediments to Advancement

Why Do Women Spend More Time, on Average, at the Rank of Associate Professor?

Ruth M. Colwill

Professor of Cognitive, Linguistic and Psychological Sciences

Chair (2020-2021), Committee on Faculty Equity and Diversity

Justice is about making sure that being polite is not the same thing as being quiet. In fact, oftentimes the most righteous thing you can do is shake the table.

–Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez

What do we know?

A 2003 report on Princeton faculty found “the gap in promotion rates to be largest between 6 and 7 years after appointment to associate professor, by which time nearly 80% of the promotions for males but only 45% of the promotions for females have occurred." Research on faculty advancement in the US has established that it takes women longer than men, by 1 to 3.5 years on average (depending on the Carnegie institutional classification), to be promoted from Associate Professor (AP) to Professor.[1] The delay is longest at PhD-granting institutions. According to one report,the situation may be getting worse and not better. At Brown, gender disparity in advancement (GDA) to Professor exists across all four of our academic divisions.[2] Now, more than ever, as the pandemic and its fallout are amplifying existing disparities, it is time to shake the table at Brown and stop accepting this status quo as inevitable and immutable.

Why does it matter?

Aside from the obvious detrimental impact on compensation and benefits, including retirement income, delays in advancement to the rank of Professor not only fuel lower self-esteem and job satisfaction but pose a significant threat to diversity and innovation.[3] The voices that need to be heard simply don’t make it to the table, and access to the leadership positions with the power and opportunity to advocate for others and to effect meaningful change is often beyond the reach of those held back at the rank of AP. For this reason alone, it is imperative that we take steps to dismantle the structural impediments that perpetuate GDA. Addressing this inequity may also benefit the increasing numbers of faculty of color now achieving tenure from likely encountering similar barriers to advancement to Professor.

What are the barriers?

Much has been written about why women spend more time than men as APs. The three most frequently cited reasons are 1) ambiguous promotion criteria, 2) an increasing workload that detracts from research, 3) and gender schemas that downplay the value of women’s achievements while inflating the value of identical achievements of men. Other reasons mentioned in the literature include women being more reluctant to initiate a promotion review, women postponing pregnancy until after tenure, and women having more difficulty balancing home and work life.

1. Promotion criteria. One of the major impediments to advancement appears to be analogous to the ‘hidden curriculum’ problem. Research indicates a lack of transparency and clarity in the criteria for promotion.[4] Since women are less likely to have access to the informal mentoring and networking that men have access to through their largely white male senior colleagues, they may not know, for example, what their departmental culture is around timing for a promotion review. They may also not know who to turn to for advice about interpreting ambiguous promotion criteria.
2. Increased workload. Women faculty report that the time they have for research is severely reduced after getting tenure because of amplified demands on their time for service, teaching and mentoring, all of which are activities that benefit the university but which are insufficiently recognized when it comes to promotion and compensation. In one study that statistically controlled for rank, field of study, and race and ethnicity, women were found to do significantly more service work (1.5 more tasks on average) than men. In another study that surveyed faculty at UMass Amherst, women APs reported spending approximately eight hours more a week on teaching, advising and particularly service than men did.
3. Gender schemas. The distinguished psycholinguist and gender equity expert Virginia Valian defines gender schemas as “expectations or ideas, more neutral than stereotypes, that permeate a culture and are carried by both men and women.” In the Academy, they cause us “to slightly, systematically overrate men and underrate women." The cumulative effect of these small, barely visible disparities “is to provide men with more advantages than women." Evidence for the operation of gender schemas comes from studies which show that men and women evaluate the same material (e.g., a job application or an audition) more favorably if it is thought to represent the work of a man.[5]

What are the remedies?

Much has been written over the past decade or so about addressing GDA. There is widespread evidence of tangible steps taken by many universities to increase awareness and understanding about the promotion to Professor process. Removal of other barriers, however, remains elusive.

Several universities have created centers to educate tenured women about advancement to the rank of Professor such as the Susan Bulkeley Butler Center for Leadership Excellence at Purdue University and the Gender Equity Project at Hunter College. Others feature relevant resources on dedicated websites, e.g., Berkeley, Emory, and The Women’s Place at The Ohio State University.

One of the most impactful programs that a university can implement to demystify the promotion process is the advancement workshop. The Butler Center at Purdue, for example, holds an annual Conference for Associate Professors. These conferences feature an external invited speaker (e.g., a researcher or senior administrator specializing in gender disparity in the Academy), a panel of experts from within the institution (e.g., a department chair, member of the University tenure and promotions committee, a dean and a recently promoted Professor) and breakout sessions for planning, writing and building community. At the suggestion of Brown's Committee on Faculty Equity and Diversity (CFED), the Office of the Provost generously covered registration for all Brown APs to attend the Butler Center workshop held online this year.

A substitute for the informal mentoring that male APs may disproportionately receive and benefit from is to implement formal mentoring programs open to all APs. The goal of such programs should be to make the path for promotion transparent and to identify and help obtain the resources the AP needs to get there. The University of Massachusetts Amherst runs a Mellon Mutual Mentoring program that embraces a network approach. Others have adopted the conventional 1:1 or peer mentoring programs, e.g., University of Houston, University of Colorado Denver and University of North Carolina Charlotte. More ambitious initiatives have been implemented by Michigan State University and University of Missouri–St. Louis.

Where does Brown go from here?

To my knowledge, with the exception of the NSF Advance program for STEM faculty (2006-2011), there are no formal programs at Brown to explicitly confront and address GDA. Previously, the faculty passed motions, once in 2008 and again in 2013, to combat the chronic stalling of both men and women at the rank of AP. There are no data about the effectiveness of either recommendation. As of now, the Faculty Rules and Regulations mandate an assessment of readiness for promotion of an AP in their seventh year post-tenure.

Some have expressed concerned that the types of remedies discussed above implicitly try to ‘fix the women’ so that they can succeed in a system that traditionally privileges white men. However, if the University is truly committed to shared governance, an innovative and inclusive undergraduate curriculum, excellence in student advising and mentoring, and meaningful community outreach and partnerships, ‘fixing the system’ may yield more promising results for the University as a whole. Perhaps we should reimagine the requirements for advancement to Professor and consider excellence in these categories as equally meritorious for promotion to Professor as excellence in research. Other institutions are starting to do so: for example, The Rochester Institute of Technology has given serious consideration to this sort of transformational approach for the promotion of APs ten years post-tenure.

According to Brown’s OIR website, the percentage of male Professors at Brown is similar to the national average of 75%, a statistic that has remained rather stubbornly fixed despite the recent expansion of the faculty. In the same period (2010-2019), the percentage of white Professors has decreased from 83.2% (n=293) to 79.1% (n=326). Given the disproportionate impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the research productivity of women, caretakers and faculty of color, it is more than prudent to remove barriers to advancement. Indeed, it may be the only way to ensure that the progress made in diversifying faculty at the junior ranks will finally have an impact on diversifying faculty at the senior ranks.

But what can I do now?

In May of this year, at the invitation of the Provost, CFED submitted a list of recommendations to address GDA. However, institutional change tends to be slow for a variety of bureaucratic and budgetary reasons. So here are five steps that APs can take immediately to create their own ‘horizon of possibility’ for advancement in rank. I also highly recommend Keisha N. Blain's "From Associate to Full Professor," which appeared on May 22, 2020 in Inside Higher Ed.

Get informed. Review your department’s Standards & Criteria for promotion to Professor. This is the document that the Tenure, Promotions and Appointments Committee (TPAC) will use to judge if you have met or exceeded your department’s criteria for promotion. If the criteria are not clear to you, they probably won’t be clear to TPAC either. Ask for clarification. (This could be done anonymously through the University Ombuds Office.)
Create a plan. You can come up at any point after tenure for promotion to Professor. It may be helpful to find out what the culture is in your department for the timing of this promotion and if an outside offer accelerates a promotion review. After you select the Academic Year (AY) for your promotion review, set specific milestones for each semester and summer between now and then to meet the criteria for advancement. Keep a log of how you spend your time. Learn how to make invisible work count towards your promotion.
Find a mentor. A good mentor is someone you can trust to give you sound and constructive advice on your advancement plan and any issues that arise meeting your milestones. You may find a senior colleague or chair in your own department or a related department or you may go outside the university to find an expert. This article by Robert A. Fox reviews the value of mentoring mid-career faculty and what a mentor might do to help you. Ask your mentor to nominate you or to organize your nomination for awards and other recognition in your discipline.
Get connected. Take advantage of Brown’s institutional membership in the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity (NCFDD). Reach out to APs in other departments to build community. Offer to give talks at other institutions and volunteer to organize symposia at conferences. There’s a Brown Parents’ group (whose AY20-21 contacts are Associate Professor in Ecology and Evolutionary Biology and in Computer Science and Director, Center for Computational Molecular Biology Sohini Ramachandran, Assistant Professor of Archaeology and Classics Candace Rice, and Associate Professor in History Seth Rockman) as well as a Faculty of Color network (whose AY20-21 co-directors are Associate Professor in History and Africana Studies Françoise Hamlin and Associate Professor in Religious Studies Nancy Khalek).
Start (or keep) writing. The NCFDD recommends that you make a commitment to write for 30 mins every day, Monday through Friday. This year, the Sheridan Center for Teaching and Learning began hosting Faculty Writing Groups led by Provost’s Faculty Teaching Fellow and Senior Lecturer in English Jonathan Readey and two representatives of the Sheridan Center, Anne Kerkian, the Senior Associate Director for Writing and English Language Support, and Charles Carroll, the Assistant Director of the Writing Center. These writing groups serve the goals of providing accountability, community, and goal-setting, with the option of constructive feedback on writing.

A wise woman on SCOTUS once cautioned that “Real change, enduring change, happens one step at a time." I hope the ideas and resources summarized in this essay will inspire change and move us a step or two forward to eliminating GDA at Brown. I hope you will fight for your seat at the table or, as a wise POTUS once said “Better yet, fight for a seat at the head of the table.” And when you get there, don’t forget to shake it.

Acknowledgments

I am grateful to my inspiring colleagues Johanna Hanink, Meredith Hastings and Patricia Sobral for their constructive suggestions on a draft of this article and to members of CFED and the DIOB for insightful discussions of faculty advancement and diversity over the past year.

Notes

[1] Modern Languages Association (2009), Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey,1-35.

López, C.M., Margherio, C., Abraham-Hilaire, L.M., Feghali-Bostwick, C. (2018). Gender Disparities in Faculty Rank: Factors that Affect Advancement of Women Scientists at Academic Medical Centers. Social Sciences. 7(4):62. https://doi.org/10.3390/socsci7040062

Valian, V. (1998). Why so slow?: The advancement of women. Cambridge, Mass: MIT Press.

[2] Misra, J., Lundquist, J., Holmes, E., Agiomavritis, S. (2011). The Ivory Ceiling of Service Work. Academe 97, 22-26.

Misra, J., Lundquist, J., Holmes, E., Agiomavritis, S. Associate Professors and Gendered Barriers to Advancement.

[3] Hofstra, B., Kulkarni, V.V., Munoz-Najar Galvez, S., He, B., Jurafsky, D., McFarland, D.A. (2020). The Diversity–Innovation Paradox in Science. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. Apr, 117 (17) 9284-9291; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1915378117.

Kets, W. (2015). "Want More Innovation? Get More Diversity." Chronicle of Higher Education, November 23, 2015.

Stewart, A. J. & Valian, V. (2018). An Inclusive Academy: Achieving Diversity and Excellence. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

[4] Kulp, A., Wolf-Wendel, L., & Smith, D. (2019). The possibility of promotion: How race and gender predict promotion clarity for associate professors. Teachers College Record 121 (5).

Williams June, A. (2016). "The uncertain path to full professor." Chronicle of Higher Education, February 14, 2016.

[5] Moss-Racusin, C.A., Dovidio, J.F., Brescoll, V.L., Graham, M.J., Handelsman, J. (2012). "Faculty's subtle gender biases favor male students." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, September 17, 2012, 201211286; DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1211286109.

Goldin, C., Rouse, C. (2000). "Orchestrating impartiality: The impact of "blind" auditions on female musicians." The American Economic Review 90(4), 715-741.

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