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‘My research agenda may never recover’: pandemic work-life demands and obstacles to career advancement for faculty mothers
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Extensive research suggests that ideal worker and mothering expectations have long constrained academic mothers’ personal and professional choices. This article explores how academic mothers experienced their dual roles amid the unprecedented shift in the work-life landscape due to COVID-19. Content analysis of questionnaire data (n = 141) suggests that academic mothers experienced significant bidirectional work-life conflict well into the fall of 2020. Increased home demands, such as caring for young children and remote schooling, interfered with their perceived capacity to meet ideal academic norms, including a singular focus on work, productivity standards, and their ability to signal job competency and commitment. Likewise, work demands reduced their perceived ability to meet ideal mothering norms, such as providing a nurturing presence and focusing on their children’s achievement. Academic fathers experienced increased demands on their time but primarily described intra-role conflict within the work domain. Despite a pandemic landscape, ideal academic and mothering norms remained persistent and unchanged. The article concludes with implications for policy and practice in higher education.
During a period of massive upheaval to the higher education sector, the traditional academic role has undergone considerable change. One element of these changes has been the broad introduction of Education-Focused (EF) or equivalent academic positions, which focus on educational excellence, with a requirement for high quality teaching and associated scholarly research. This paper reports on the reflections of a group of bioscience academics as they transitioned from a traditional teaching and research position to an EF academic position at a research-intensive Australian university. Through analysis of written narratives, the insights of these academics, including their concerns and potential opportunities, were explored. Given the global trend toward EF and similar positions, this study provides valuable insights into the evolving nature of academic identity, and in particular the role of EF academics in enhancing curricula and in providing educational leadership. Additionally, this study provides perspective for universities to plan optimally for future introduction of EF positions. Facilitating opportunities for support, mentorship and career progression of EF staff will promote best practice in teaching and learning.
Parents in academic careers face notable challenges that may go unrecognized by university management and/or policy makers. The COVID-19 pandemic has shed light on some of these challenges, as academic parents shifted to working from home while simultaneously caring for children. On the other hand, many parents found that the shift to working from home offered new opportunities such as working more flexible hours, development of digital skillsets, and increased involvement in the education of their children. In this article we explore the work-related challenges and opportunities experienced by academic parents as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and offer potential long-term solutions for academic parents and their universities. We use the following methods: (1) a literature review focused on identifying the work-related challenges academic parents faced prior to the pandemic, as well as the impact of the pandemic on scientists and working parents and (2) administer a world-wide survey with the goal of identifying the challenges and opportunities associated with parenting and academic work through the COVID-19 lockdown (304 total responses; 113 complete). Moving forward these findings have enabled conclusions to be drawn in order to shape a new normal. Our aim is to offer university administrators, policy makers, and community service providers with ways to provide additional support for academic parents as well as provide tools for academic parents to learn successful strategies directly from their peers.
The aim of the study is to document how academics who mother have reorganized work and childcare since the beginning of the coronavirus (COVID‐19) pandemic in the United States, how those shifts have affected their academic productivity, and solutions proposed by academics living these experiences. We collected data via an online survey and, subsequently, by conducting qualitative interviews with a sub‐sample of participants. From June to August 2020,131 female‐identified academics who mother were recruited via a Facebook group, Academic Mamas, and participated in our online survey. Twenty participants were then interviewed via phone or Zoom to explore more deeply the experiences of academics who mother. Results of our research suggest that since the start of the COVID‐19 pandemic the pressure on academics who mother is immense. Analysis of the qualitative data revealed three major themes: (1) inability to meet institutional expectations; (2) juggling work and family life; and (3) proposed solutions. Our results suggest that significant efforts must be made by academic institutions to acknowledge and value the childcare responsibilities of academics who mother and to create solutions that fully address the challenges they face in meeting the academic expectations and requirements that largely remain unmodified despite the pandemic.
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In this article, I deal with the notion of ‘academic identity’ holistically, seeking to bring together the teacher and researcher roles of academics in the neoliberal university. The article begins from the perspective of early-career academics who occupy the majority of fixed-term, teaching-only contracts in Higher Education, arguing that such casualisation of academic labour entrenches the role of the academic as Homo economicus . Drawing on the work of Foucault, I demonstrate how a neoliberal governmentality is now not only exerted upon academics from without, but increasingly they are subjecting themselves to the logic of efficiency and effectiveness too. The neoliberal governmentality of the university thus influences and shapes academic subjectivities, such that what it means to be an academic is confined to this marketised logic. Despite the pressures placed on academics to ‘produce’ measurable outputs and demonstrate their impact, I argue that moving beyond Homo economicus is possible, arguing instead for a re-claiming of ‘the academic’ as Homo academicus . The idea of Homo academicus can only be supported when three conditions are present: collegiality is afforded greater importance than competition; the discourses of ‘productivity’ and performativity are balanced against simply ‘doing good work well’ (Pirrie in Virtue and the quiet art of scholarship, Routledge, London, 2019), and; academics are mindful to practice the ‘quieter’ intellectual virtues, including the virtue of ‘unknowing’ (Smith in J Philos Educ 50:272–284, 2016).
During the early months of the COVID-19 pandemic, the submission rate to scholarly journals increased abnormally. Given that most academics were forced to work from home, the competing demands for familial duties might have penalised the scientific productivity of women. To test this hypothesis, we looked at submitted manuscripts and peer review activities for all Elsevier journals between February and May 2018-2020, including data on over 5 million authors and referees. Results showed that during the first wave of the pandemic, women submitted proportionally fewer manuscripts than men. This deficit was especially pronounced among younger cohorts of women academics. The rate of the peer-review invitation acceptance showed a less pronounced gender pattern. Our findings suggest that the first wave of the pandemic has created potentially cumulative advantages for men.
Gender differences in academia are well-known. Women publish less, achieve higher positions less frequently, and have more interrupted careers. Mothers, more than fathers or childless men and women, suffer these disadvantages. Women academics have to deal with the work-family conflict, the participation in both work and family roles are incompatibly demanding. The closure of childcare services and the impossibility to benefit from informal care (mainly via grandparents) made the pandemic a potential accelerator of these drawbacks for academic mothers. Academic work is basically incompatible with the everyday care of children. Analyzing in-depth interviews, in this article we show how mothers of young children had to reorganize their job priorities during the Covid-19 global pandemic. Moreover, we describe the perceived effects of the pandemic on their future career. We showed that the pandemic changed the priorities of academic mothers in a direction that is unfavorable to their careers: mothers devoted most of their time to teaching duties and stopped research. Moreover, they felt an increased gap in their relative competitiveness with male and childless colleagues.
That the COVID‐19 pandemic has affected the work conditions of large segments of the society is in no doubt. A growing body of journalistic accounts raised the possibility that the lockdown caused by the pandemic affects women and men in different ways, due mostly to the traditionally gendered division of labor in the society. We attempt to test this oft‐cited argument by conducting an original survey with nearly 200 academics. Specifically, we explore the extent to which the effect of the lockdown on child‐care, housework and home‐office environment varies across women and men. Our results show that a number of factors are associated with the effect of the lockdown on the work conditions of academics at home, including gender, having children, perceived threat from COVID‐19, and satisfaction with work environment. We also show that having children disproportionately affects women in terms of the amount of housework during the lockdown.
In this exploratory, descriptive study, we used time diaries to understand the content and quality of faculty work experiences and interactions (specifically looking at work activities, feelings of stress and being rushed, micro-aggressions and micro-affirmations) and differences in work experiences by gender and race. We found that while all faculty work long hours, women and underrepresented minority (URM) faculty face unique challenges in their work day Journal of the Professoriate (11)1 106 including spending less time on research (women) and more time on mentoring and advising (URM faculty), experiencing higher levels of time pressure (women), and encountering more micro-aggressions and less micro-affirmations (women and URM faculty).
In late 2017, a critical investigation of the impact of motherhood on perceptions of success in academia, specific to leisure scholars in the United States, was undertaken by the authors of this critical review. Results from this study indicated that leisure scholars who are also mothers experience a great deal of pressure to be productive educators and researchers. This stems from unrealistic work expectations, unsupportive colleagues, and workplace policies that are difficult to navigate. The impacts of these are exacerbated by the pandemic conditions caused by COVID-19 due to existing patriarchal structures in academia. Community mitigation efforts result in working mothers balancing multiple full-time responsibilities, including providing childcare and education for their children while struggling to complete their paid work. We asked our previous research participants to share how their work and family experiences have been affected by the COVID-19 pandemic conditions, specifically as it relates to performing simultaneously as both primary childcare providers and faculty members at their institutions. While necessary to address a global health emergency, transitioning to remote work has increased employment expectations for mothers employed in higher education. Leisure scientists reported that telecommuting has led to an unideal merger of their personal and professional spaces, disrupting any harmony that these mothers were working so tirelessly to achieve. Leaders in higher education must address this misguided “hurry up model” and lack of concern for their employees as both scholars and human beings that need leisure to ensure quality of life and wellbeing.
Using an online survey of academics at 55 randomly selected institutions across the US and Canada, we explore priorities for publishing decisions and their perceived importance within review, promotion, and tenure (RPT). We find that respondents most value journal readership, while they believe their peers most value prestige and related metrics such as impact factor when submitting their work for publication. Respondents indicated that total number of publications, number of publications per year, and journal name recognition were the most valued factors in RPT. Older and tenured respondents (most likely to serve on RPT committees) were less likely to value journal prestige and metrics for publishing, while untenured respondents were more likely to value these factors. These results suggest disconnects between what academics value versus what they think their peers value, and between the importance of journal prestige and metrics for tenured versus untenured faculty in publishing and RPT perceptions.
The Royal Society of Chemistry is committed to investigating and addressing the barriers and biases which face women in the chemical sciences. The cornerstone of this is a thorough analysis of data regarding submissions, review and citations for Royal Society of Chemistry journals from January 2014 until July 2018, since the number and impact of publications and citations are an important factor when seeking research funding and for the progression of academic career. We have applied standard statistical techniques to multiple data sources to perform this analysis, and have investigated whether interactions between variables are significant in affecting various outcomes (author gender; reviewer gender; reviewer recommendations and submission outcome) in addition to considering variables individually. By considering several different data sources, we found that a baseline of approximately a third of chemistry researchers are female overall, although this differs considerably with Chemistry sub-discipline. Rather than one dominant bias effect, we observe complex interactions and a gradual trickle-down decrease in this female percentage through the publishing process and each of these female percentages is less than the last: authors of submissions; authors of RSC submissions which are not rejected without peer review; authors of accepted RSC publications; authors of cited articles. The success rate for female authors to progress through each of these publishing stages is lower than that for male authors. There is a decreasing female percentage when progressing through from first authors to corresponding authors to reviewers, reflecting the decreasing female percentage with seniority in Chemistry research observed in the “Diversity landscape of the chemical sciences” report. Highlights and actions from this analysis form the basis of an accompanying report to be released from the Royal Society of Chemistry.
This qualitative study examines the ways in which 15 full-time non-tenure-track Women of Color faculty members (NTWCFs) at historically White colleges and universities experienced identity taxation in their work. Critical race theory and critical race feminism were used as theoretical frameworks. Participants experienced identity taxation in 3 ways: care for marginalized students, overburdened with institutional service, and obligations to teach colleagues about race and racism. Although these findings are consistent with the research on tenure-track and tenured Women of Color faculty members, non-tenure-track faculty members faced distinct implications from identity taxation. This included feeling pressured to do this work in hopes of maintaining their position or securing a more permanent one as a result of the tenuous nature of their contracts. Given the overrepresentation of Women of Color in non-tenure-track positions, these findings illustrate a systemic problem that keeps Women of Color in unstable and financially unsustainable academic positions.
Inclusion and diversity are highly visible priorities at many colleges and universities. Efforts to diversify the professoriate have necessitated a better understanding of career outcomes for current female faculty and faculty of color. We measure risk of leaving without tenure and years to promotion from associate to full professor at four large land grant universities. We model career outcomes as competing risks, and compute cumulative incidence functions to discern differences in tenure and promotion outcomes by gender and race. We find incidence rates vary significantly by academic discipline, and in many instances, show larger effects than gender and racial or ethnic differences. Our examination also indicates that in particular academic fields, females are more prone to leave without tenure, and less likely to be promoted to full professor. We also find that racial or ethnic minorities are less likely to be promoted to full professor in certain areas. The analysis suggests that for universities to address systemic issues of underrepresentation in academe, they must account for department level contexts, and align institutional practices to support the goal of inclusion and diversity.
The percentage of women employed in professional scientific positions has been low but is increasing over time. The U.S. National Institutes of Health and the National Science Foundation have both implemented programs to improve women’s participation in science, and many universities and companies have diversity and equity programs. While most faculty and scientists believe that they are fair and unbiased, numerous well-designed studies published in leading peer-reviewed journals show that gender bias in sciences and medicine is widespread and persistent today in both faculty and students. Recent studies show that gender bias affects student grading, professional hiring, mentoring, tenure, promotion, respect, grant proposal success, and pay. In addition, sexual harassment remains a significant barrier. Fortunately, several studies provide evidence that programs that raise conscious awareness of gender bias can improve equity in science, and there are a number of recommendations and strategies for improving the participation of women.
A diverse and inclusive scientific community is more productive, innovative and impactful, yet ecology and evolutionary biology continues to be dominated by white male faculty. We quantify faculty engagement in activities related to diversity and inclusion and identify factors that either facilitate or hinder participation. Through a nationwide survey, we show that faculty with underrepresented identities disproportionally engage in diversity and inclusion activities, yet such engagement was not considered important for tenure. Faculty perceived time and funding as major limitations, which suggests that institutions should reallocate resources and reconsider how faculty are evaluated to promote shared responsibility in advancing diversity and inclusion.
Review, promotion, and tenure (RPT) processes significantly affect how faculty direct their own career and scholarly progression. Although RPT practices vary between and within institutions, and affect various disciplines, ranks, institution types, genders, and ethnicity in different ways, some consistent themes emerge when investigating what faculty would like to change about RPT. For instance, over the last few decades, RPT processes have generally increased the value placed on research, at the expense of teaching and service, which often results in an incongruity between how faculty actually spend their time vs. what is considered in their evaluation. Another issue relates to publication practices: most agree RPT requirements should encourage peer-reviewed works of high quality, but in practice, the value of publications is often assessed using shortcuts such as the prestige of the publication venue, rather than on the quality and rigor of peer review of each individual item. Open access and online publishing have made these issues even murkier due to misconceptions about peer review practices and concerns about predatory online publishers, which leaves traditional publishing formats the most desired despite their restricted circulation. And, efforts to replace journal-level measures such as the impact factor with more precise article-level metrics (e.g., citation counts and altmetrics) have been slow to integrate with the RPT process. Questions remain as to whether, or how, RPT practices should be changed to better reflect faculty work patterns and reduce pressure to publish in only the most prestigious traditional formats. To determine the most useful way to change RPT, we need to assess further the needs and perceptions of faculty and administrators, and gain a better understanding of the level of influence of written RPT guidelines and policy in an often vague process that is meant to allow for flexibility in assessing individuals.
Although the demand for faculty service has increased substantially in recent years, the workload is not shared equitably among tenure-track faculty (Guarino & Borden, 2017; Pyke, 2011). Women faculty tend to spend more time on service activities than men, and they tend to perform important yet less institutionally recognized forms of service like mentoring, committee work, emotional labor, and organizational climate control (Babcock, Recalde, Vesterlund, & Weingart, 2017; Misra, Lundquist, Holmes, & Agiomavritis, 2011). Drawing from the theory of gendered organizations (Acker, 1990), this interview study examined how institutional gender biases impact the visibility and evaluation of faculty service across the tenure-track career trajectory. Our findings reveal how task-oriented forms of service tend to be more visible and valued than relationally oriented service. In addition to addressing a gap in the literature, our study presents practical recommendations to make service more visible, valuable, and equitable across faculty ranks and gender identities.
As academics who have recently entered the “tunnel” of management academia, we witness a troubling phenomenon. Among junior scholars – ourselves included – there is a growing sense of anxiety and self-doubt about the legitimacy of our profession and our position within it. We see much evidence of an “imposter syndrome” (Clance & Imes, 1978) in newly minted academics, a condition where high-achieving individuals either ascribe their accomplishments to luck and contingency rather than individual skill and merit, or find their profession to be a “bullshit job” that provides little social value. This condition leads to a sense of anomie; in more severe cases, individuals live with the constant fear that they will someday lose all credibility, either when they are exposed as charlatans or when their occupation is revealed to be a sham.
This article explores faculty perspectives at three colleges of education regarding strategies of knowledge mobilization for scholarship in education (KMSE), with consideration for the opportunities and challenges that accompany individual and organizational capacities for change. Faculty surveys (n = 66) and follow-up interviews (n = 22) suggest two important trends: First, KMSE presents both a complementary agenda and a competing demand; second, barriers and uncertainties characterize the relevance of knowledge mobilization for faculty careers in colleges of education. This study empirically illuminates the persistence of long-standing challenges regarding the relevance, accessibility, and usability of research in colleges of education housed in research-intensive universities. While KMSE holds promise for expanding the reach and impact of educational research, scholarly tensions underlying these trends suggest that individual and organizational efforts will suffice only with modifications to university procedures for identifying what counts as recognizable, assessable, and rewardable scholarly products and activities for faculty careers.
Guided by research on gendered organizations and faculty careers, we examined gender differences in how research university faculty spend their work time. We used time-diary methods to understand faculty work activities at a microlevel of detail, as recorded by faculty themselves over 4 weeks. We also explored workplace interactions that shape faculty workload. Similar to past studies, we found women faculty spending more time on campus service , student advising, and teaching-related activities and men spending more time on research. We also found that women received more new work requests than men and that men and women received different kinds of work requests. We consider implications for future research and the career advancement of women faculty in research universities.
This paper investigates the amount of academic service performed by female versus male faculty. We use 2014 data from a large national survey of faculty at more than 140 institutions as well as 2012 data from an online annual performance reporting system for tenured and tenure–track faculty at two campuses of a large public, Midwestern University. We find evidence in both data sources that, on average, women faculty perform significantly more service than men, controlling for rank, race/ethnicity, and field or department. Our analyses suggest that the male–female differential is driven more by internal service—i.e., service to the university, campus, or department—than external service—i.e., service to the local, national, and international communities—although significant heterogeneity exists across field and discipline in the way gender differentials play out.
Ribosome stalling during translation can be harmful, and is surveyed by a conserved quality control pathway that targets the associated mRNA and nascent polypeptide chain (NC). In this pathway, the ribosome-associated quality control (RQC) complex promotes the ubiquitylation and degradation of NCs remaining stalled in the 60S subunit. NC stalling is recognized by the Rqc2/Tae2 RQC subunit, which also stabilizes binding of the E3 ligase, Listerin/Ltn1. Additionally, Rqc2 modifies stalled NCs with a carboxy-terminal, Ala- and Thr-containing extension-the 'CAT tail.' However, the function of CAT tails and fate of CAT tail-modified ('CATylated') NCs has remained unknown. Here we show that CATylation mediates NC aggregation. NC CATylation and aggregation could be observed by inactivating Ltn1 or by analyzing NCs with limited ubiquitylation potential, suggesting that inefficient targeting by Ltn1 favors the Rqc2-mediated reaction. These findings uncover a translational stalling-dependent protein aggregation mechanism, and provide evidence that proteins can become marked for aggregation.
Expanding from the customer-service perspective, the present research investigated emotional labor, defined as “service with authority,” in an academic context. Drawing from previous research on display rules and power, tenure and gender were hypothesized to influence the extent to which college faculty labored to provide “service with authority” when interacting with entitled students. Survey results revealed that faculty low in power (untenured faculty) exhibited higher levels of emotional labor when interacting with students, as compared with colleagues high in power (tenured faculty). Additionally, tenure had a mitigating effect on emotional labor amongst male faculty, but heightened stress amongst female faculty. Together, the data suggest that, compared to customer-service settings, emotional performance requirements in academia are both different and dynamic.
In this article we explore the role of academic discipline on the careers of tenure-line faculty women with children. Longitudinal, qualitative findings show that disciplinary contexts and ideal worker norms shape what it means to be an academic and a mother. Even after achieving tenure, ideal worker norms affect these roles; professional advancement is not a given in the academic pipeline. Institutions of higher education must create environments that facilitate the promotion of women to the rank of full professor and into administrative positions.
In this multimethod, qualitative study we examined associate women professors’ sense of agency in career advancement from the rank of associate to full. Defining agency as strategic perspectives or actions toward goals that matter to the professor, we explore the perceptions of what helps and/or hinders a sense of agency in career advancement. Our participants consisted of 16 women associate professors at a major research university who participated in an institutional intervention program designed to enhance sense of agency in career advancement, and a subset of 12 attendees who also participated in a follow-up focus group 6 months later. Participants commonly noted that the influences of workload alignment, interactions with on-campus colleagues, and sense of fit between personal values and institutional promotion criteria constrained their sense of agency in career advancement, while the institutional intervention, self-selected professional networks, and perceived abilities fostered their sense of agency in career advancement. We conclude with individual and institutional level recommendations for policies and practices aimed at enhancing sense of agency perspectives and actions in career development in hopes of better retaining, promoting, and supporting women faculty. (PsycINFO Database Record (c) 2014 APA, all rights reserved)
Objective
We explored the experiences of academic mothers traversing the simultaneous demands of parenting and their professional roles throughout the pandemic to better understand the impact of COVID-19 on engagement in scholarship.
Background
In response to reports of reduced scholarship by women across academic disciplines, the goal of this study was to understand the lived experiences of women scholars who identify as mothers.
Method
Academic women, including faculty and students, completed an online survey with demographic items and open-ended questions. From the collected data, responses from participants who identified as mothers (n = 51) were analyzed using thematic analysis.
Results
Analysis of the data revealed that participants' roles as parents and scholarly women were inextricably intertwined, each serving as foundational components of their identities, a reality highlighted by the exacerbating stressors associated with COVID-19. Altered childcare demands, conflicting roles, and relational changes emerged as consequences of the ongoing pandemic, which compromised participants' ability to effectively attend to different aspects of their identity and sometimes resulted in the development of negative emotions.
Conclusion
Participants identified additional responsibilities due to the ongoing pandemic. Feeling pulled between their often-conflicting personal and professional identities, academic mothers cited a lack of supportive professional structures, which became more evident during COVID-19, as a barrier to their pursuit of scholarship.
Implications
This study aligned with previous scholarly documentation of historical gendered bias common within academia. The potential long-term professional impact of these conflated circumstances on academic mothers during the pandemic is discussed, and implications and recommendations for addressing the same via future research are provided.
This article captures mothers’ experiences of the work–family balance and division of household labor during the initial COVID-19 lockdown. Interviews were conducted with twenty-five academics and twenty professionals in other fields. Mothers who split childcare with their partners had a more positive experience of the work–family balance during lockdown, compared with mothers who did the majority of the childcare. The present study adds a new wrinkle into the literature on flexibility and work–family balance: the perception of flexibility and its impact on the division of labor. Academic mothers, who had always had highly “flexible” jobs, were less likely to split childcare with their partners pre-pandemic and thus less likely to have positive experiences of work–family balance during the Spring 2020 lockdown. I argue that perceived flexibility of a partner’s job affected allocation of childcare during the initial stages of the pandemic, a moment that wreaked significant harm on women’s careers.
Based on a collection of auto‐ethnographic narratives that reflect our experiences as academic mothers at an Australian university, this paper seeks to illustrate the impact of COVID‐19 on our career cycles in order to explore alternative feminist models of progression and practice in Higher Education. Collectively, we span multiple disciplines, parenting profiles, and racial/ethnic backgrounds. Our narratives (initiated in 2019) explicate four focal points in our careers as a foundation for analyzing self‐definitions of professional identity: pre‐ and post‐maternity career break; and pre‐ and post‐COVID‐19 career. We have modeled this research on a collective feminist research practice that is generative and empowering in terms of self‐reflective models of collaborative research. Considering this practice and these narratives, we argue for a de‐centering of masculinized career cycle patterns and progression pathways both now and beyond COVID‐19. This represents both a challenge to neo‐liberal norms of academic productivity, as well as a call to radically enhance institutional gender equality policies and practice.
Remote working, research delays and childcare obligations are taking their toll on scientists, causing stress and anxiety. Remote working, research delays and childcare obligations are taking their toll on scientists, causing stress and anxiety.
Male scientists in the United Kingdom report teaching less than their female counterparts, while women and minorities tend to feel disadvantaged in their careers.
Fully qualitative surveys, which prioritise qualitative research values, and harness the rich potential of qualitative data, have much to offer qualitative researchers, especially given online delivery options. Yet the method remains underutilised, and there is little in the way of methodological discussion of qualitative surveys. Underutilisation and limited methodological discussion perhaps reflect the dominance of interviewing in qualitative research, and (misplaced) assumptions about qualitative survey data lacking depth. By discussing our experiences of developing online surveys as a tool for qualitative research, we seek to challenge preconceptions about qualitative surveys, and to demonstrate that qualitative surveys are an exciting, flexible method with numerous applications, and advantages for researchers and participants alike. We offer an overview and practical design information, illustrated with examples from some of our studies.
Higher education institutions are heavily reliant on part-time adjuncts to teach their students. These part-time adjuncts now account for the majority of faculty in the United States. This qualitative study utilizes a phenomenological approach to explore the essence of the lived experiences of part-time adjuncts who travel to more than one university in their work roles. This study utilized semi-structured interviews with eight traveling adjuncts. The interview questions were based on: the theory of underemployment, employee engagement theory, and the learned helplessness model. While higher education institutions are reliant on adjunct faculty for their survival, the findings uncovered negative factors within the work environment which included job dissatisfaction, low pay, and little or no benefits. The implications and recommendations of these findings and recommendations for future research are also discussed.
School and daycare closures due to the COVID‐19 pandemic have increased caregiving responsibilities for working parents. As a result, many have changed their work hours to meet these growing demands. In this study, we use panel data from the U.S. Current Population Survey to examine changes in mothers’ and fathers’ work hours from February through April, 2020, the period of time prior to the widespread COVID‐19 outbreak in the U.S. and through its first peak. Using person‐level fixed effects models, we find that mothers with young children have reduced their work hours four to five times more than fathers. Consequently, the gender gap in work hours has grown by 20 to 50 percent. These findings indicate yet another negative consequence of the COVID‐19 pandemic, highlighting the challenges it poses to women's work hours and employment.
Faculty are often evaluated on perceptions of their teaching effectiveness, their service activities, and their research productivity. To meet their institutional standards in each area, the faculty must properly allocate and manage their time. Administrators and department chairs have the means to facilitate or hinder faculty research productivity through teaching and service assignments. This paper provides administrators and faculty with a framework to evaluate each faculty member’s annual workload to ensure that adequate time should be available to meet institutional expectations. This framework illustrates the negative effects that multiple course preparations and heavy teaching loads have on research productivity. Institutional policies should be adjusted to consider these effects on their faculty’s research productivity.
Early analyses suggest that female academics are posting fewer preprints and starting fewer research projects than their male peers. Early analyses suggest that female academics are posting fewer preprints and starting fewer research projects than their male peers.
Perceptions of work–family balance and of the reasonableness of tenure expectations are key faculty retention factors. Using a national job satisfaction survey with 2438 tenure-track assistant professors, we explore whether faculty assessment of departmental and institutional support for family–work balance and their satisfaction with family-friendly policies influence their perceptions of the reasonableness of tenure expectations. We pay attention to the importance of gender in our models. Results reveal that women are less likely than men to report tenure expectations as scholars are reasonable and that departments and institutions are supportive of family–work balance. Departmental support for family–work balance, caring for an ill family member, satisfaction with family-friendly policies, and workload have the strongest association with reasonableness. Satisfaction with family-friendly policies has a significant relationship with reasonableness of tenure expectations only for faculty with family care responsibilities. Implications for family-friendly policies and practices in academia are discussed.
Many skilled professional occupations are characterized by an early period of intensive skill accumulation and career establishment. Examples include law firm associates, surgical residents, and untenured faculty at research-intensive universities. High female exit rates are sometimes blamed on the inability of new mothers to survive the sustained negative productivity shock associated with childbearing and early childrearing in these environments. Gender-neutral family policies have been adopted in some professions in an attempt to "level the playing field." The gender-neutral tenure clock stopping policies adopted by the majority of research-intensive universities in the United States in recent decades are an excellent example. But to date, there is no empirical evidence showing that these policies help women. Using a unique dataset on the universe of assistant professor hires at top-50 economics departments from 1980-2005, we show that the adoption of gender-neutral tenure clock stopping policies substantially reduced female tenure rates while substantially increasing male tenure rates. However, these policies do not reduce the probability that either men or women eventually earn tenure in the profession.
Despite having made a number of positive steps to advance diversity and provide support for women scientist in the past ten years, STEM research institutions continue to be an environment where women faculty face a kind of “patriarchal DNA” that treats women scientists as subordinate to men. An environment continues to exist where women faculty often feel unwelcome, and unsatisfied with the rate of their accomplishments. At the time of promotion and tenure women can feel a sense of betrayal as their work is evaluated as being “less than” the work of men. To be successful in a derisive environment, many STEM women faculty report that they have developed coping strategies to adapt to a culture that often excludes them from occupying senior leadership roles, diminishes their accomplishments, and makes them feel remorseful for trying to find a work–life balance.
In academia, there remains a gender gap in promotion to tenure, such that men are more likely to receive tenure than women. This paper tests three explanations of this gender gap in promotion: (1) contextual and organizational differences across departments; (2) performance/productivity differences by gender; and (3) gendered inequality in evaluation. To test these explanations, this project uses a novel dataset drawing from a sample of assistant professors in Sociology, Computer Science, and English, across research universities. This dataset combines data from sources including curriculum vitae, Google Scholar, and web archive employment data, resulting in a dataset of assistant professors' publication records, department affiliations, and job positions. Analyses examine the gender gap in the likelihood of promotion to tenure and in early career trajectories, while accounting for publication productivity and department/university context. The results demonstrate that productivity measures account for a portion of the gender gap in tenure, but in each discipline a substantial share of the gender gap remains unexplained by these factors. Department characteristics do not explain the tenure gender gap. Further, when women do receive tenure, they do so in lower-prestige departments than men, on average. These findings suggest that gendered inequality in the tenure evaluation process contributes to the gender gap in tenure rates.
Gender differences in task allocations may sustain vertical gender segregation in labor markets. We examine the allocation of a task that everyone prefers be completed by someone else (writing a report, serving on a committee, etc.) and find evidence that women, more than men, volunteer, are asked to volunteer, and accept requests to volunteer for such tasks. Beliefs that women, more than men, say yes to tasks with low promotability appear as an important driver of these differences. If women hold tasks that are less promotable than those held by men, then women will progress more slowly in organizations. (JEL I23, J16, J44, J71, M12, M51).
Purpose:
Prior research has established that women and men faculty have different experiences in their professional and personal lives and that academic turnover can be costly and disruptive to home institutions. However, relatively little research has examined gender differences in the antecedent events that contributed to faculty members' voluntary turnover decisions. This study aims to fill this gap.
Materials and methods:
Qualitative and quantitative data were obtained in two ways: by directly contacting faculty members who had voluntarily left their positions through the human resource departments at six institutions and through more wide-scale snowball sampling. The surveys, administered via paper or web based, measured the extent to which participants' experiences with harassment/discrimination, family-related issues, and recruitment/retention offers impacted their decisions to leave. Qualitative data were coded by raters into numerical values, and mean differences based on gender were assessed for these and the quantitative data.
Results:
Both the qualitative and quantitative data suggest that female academicians reported experiencing significantly more gender-based harassment/discrimination, were much more likely to cite family-related reasons for leaving, and reported receiving significantly fewer external job offers and internal retention offers than their male counterparts.
Conclusions:
Academic science departments should be keenly aware of and strive to reduce instances of harassment/discrimination against female academicians, offer more support for family-related issues and encourage faculty to take advantage of these programs, and conduct search and retention efforts fairly regardless of faculty gender.
Synopsis
In many regions, the past decade has been characterised by significant transformations of models of organisation and evaluation of academic work. These include processes of extensification, elasticisation and casualisation of academic labour, and the institutionalisation of regimes of “performativity” (Ball, 2003), enacted by apparatuses of measurement and auditing (Burrows, 2012). These interacting trends are having significant impacts not only on academic working conditions, but also on opportunities for sociopolitical intervention outside the academy. This article draws on an ethnography of Portuguese academia, and on debates about the “toxic” (Gill, 2010) and “careless” (Lynch, 2010) nature of contemporary academic cultures, to analyse the current (im)possibilities of articulating activism and academic work. I argue that in the present day “academia without walls” (Gill, 2010) this articulation is extremely difficult, but we must reject conceptualising that difficulty as an individual challenge, and reframe it as a structural problem requiring – urgently – collective responses.
Traditionally, gender equity in the academy is evaluated in terms of women's professional success as compared to men's. This study examines gender equity not only in terms of professional outcomes but also in terms of familial outcomes, such as childbirth, marriage, and divorce. Using data from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients as well as data from a 2002 to 2003 survey of the work and family issues facing ladder-rank faculty in the nine campuses of the University of California system, the authors followed more than thirty thousand Ph.D.s in all disciplines across their life course and surveyed more than eighty-five hundred active University of California faculty. Results indicate that gender equity in terms of familial gains is as elusive as gender equity in terms of professional employment, raising the fundamental issue of what gender equity means in a university setting or in any fast-track employment setting.
A growing body of research demonstrates that many college environments present challenges for black professors, particularly as they face institutional and personal racism. While scholars have linked these experiences to their attrition, this qualitative study explores black professors’ larger range of responses to difficult professional environments. Twenty-eight black professors employed at two large public research universities participated in this study. Findings indicate that in addition to institutional departure, black faculty respond to personal and institutional racism though a form of psychological departure and acts of critical agency, specifically forming external networks, aiming to disprove stereotypes and engaging in service activities. Thus, institutions must be mindful of the full range of responses to the racism that black professors face, not assuming the climate is hospitable simply because faculty are not leaving the institution. Rather, campuses must improve their campus environments through ongoing strategic initiatives focused on cultural change.