The outcome of a tenure or promotion decision is the product of individual and departmental characteristics. Individual characteristics focus on evaluations of the faculty member’s knowledge, skills, and abilities. In the area of research, evaluation may focus on a professor’s productivity, measured in terms of publications (i. e., journal articles, books, and chapters), presentations to conferences, or
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ability to obtain grants. Teaching evaluations are used as a metric of instructional performance, as is the amount and quality of graduate student supervision. Counts of how many and what kind of university committees and outside professional activities in which a faculty member is involved, and in what capacity, are used to measure service.
Factors affecting these research, teaching, and service performance measures can also have an indirect effect on tenure decisions. Faculty with children, for example, may have less time to pursue research or service activities, and this may reduce a faculty member’s chances of being granted tenure. Departments with policies that aid faculty who would otherwise be more negatively affected by family issues—for example, institutions that provide child care or family leave—might mitigate the negative effects of these indirect factors and thereby aid the tenure chances of those faculty members particularly affected by family issues.
Departmental and institutional characteristics also directly affect tenure outcomes. In the most obvious case, both male and female faculty will have lower probabilities of gaining tenure in departments that rarely grant tenure to assistant professors, preferring instead to hire tenured associate or full professors. Different institutions—measured in terms of prestige or type (public versus private)—may grant tenure or promotion at different thresholds. For example, “nationally, about 60 percent of scholars competing for university and college tenure slots gain permanent appointments. At MIT, it is estimated almost 50 percent of the men and women on the tenure track will be invited to make their permanent intellectual home at the Institute.”[93]
The committee’s survey asked for departments to report institutional characteristics related to individual tenure decisions, but did not ask department respondents to provide information on the individual faculty member beyond their gender and the outcome of the case. Therefore, the model developed here is intentionally underspecified. It does not include likely salient individual factors that influence tenure outcomes. It focuses instead on examining departmental characteristics and policies that might help or hinder female as opposed to male faculty. Factors of particular interest include:
Department size. Larger departments may have more slots available and may therefore provide more opportunities for an assistant professor to advance.
Stopping the tenure clock. Many universities allow faculty to stop or extend the tenure clock if they have a qualifying event, such as the need to care for a family member. Generally, universities limit the number of years that can be added to the period before an assistant professor must be considered for promotion. Either male or female faculty can qualify for delaying the tenure clock. However, use of stop-the-tenure-clock policies does extend the period of uncertainty for faculty. In our faculty survey, 78 percent of assistant professors reported that their department or university had a formal family or personal leave policy that allows stopping or extending the tenure clock.
Transparency of tenure and promotion policies. It has been argued that unclear tenure or promotion policies would be particularly detrimental to women if women faculty are less likely to have mentors and obtain information through informal channels. However, evidence collected in the faculty survey indicated that women were at least as well connected to information sources as men. As shown previously, female faculty were more likely than male faculty to have a mentor, and women appear to be as well informed as men about the tenure process (see Appendix 5-1). When asked, 88 percent of both men and women responded that they knew their institution’s policy on tenure. However, 81 percent of male faculty but only 75 percent of female faculty responded that they knew their institution’s policy on promotion (or knew there was no institutional policy)—which was a significant difference (p = 0.02). Most departments use multiple means of informing faculty about tenure policies and procedures: 78 percent of departments reported that the university has written tenure and promotion policies, and 49 percent reported that the department has written procedures.
Departmental culture. Inclusive departments are more likely to pay greater attention to equity. We examined whether departments with more representation of women among the faculty were more or less likely to tenure assistant professors, and whether this varied by gender of the candidate. We also examined whether the percentage of women among untenured assistant professors affected the probability of success of male or female tenure candidates.
Public institutions. Private universities tend to have longer probationary periods than public institutions (NRC, 2001a). Some private institutions prefer to hire junior faculty without tenure and senior faculty with tenure, making it difficult to cross from one status to the other within the institution. Ginther (2001) found that being at a private institution decreased the probability of promotion to tenure. It is less clear whether women’s chances of promotion differ relative to those of men at public versus private institutions.
Prestige. Ginther (2001) found evidence that being at a top-ranked university, as defined by rankings provided by the Carnegie Foundation, increased the probability of a promotion to tenure. Note, however, that Ginther’s study involved a broader set of institutions than is employed in this study. If top-ranked universities strive to hire only people they expect to tenure, it may be harder to get hired, but easier to gain tenure at such institutions. Conversely, though, some top institutions are less inclined to tenure their own assistant professors.