Once Ph. D.s have been hired into an academic position, it is natural to ask, what happens next? The milestones of an academic career are hiring, tenure, and promotion. In the context of these decisions, a primary question must be whether male and female faculty are treated similarly while they are employed. Is the day — to-day experience of being a faculty member similar for men and women?
Equitable treatment and opportunity are important for several reasons. First, how a faculty member is treated affects the ability of that faculty member to do the best research and teaching of which he or she is capable. This in turn affects subsequent decisions on the part of the university about salary, tenure, and promotion. It also affects subsequent decisions on the part of the faculty member about whether to entertain outside offers and whether to leave that university for a position elsewhere. Furthermore, the equitability with which a faculty member is treated can contribute powerfully to whether a faculty member feels he or she is a central part of the enterprise, as well as to the faculty member’s sense of wellbeing and satisfaction with his or her professional life.
As noted in Chapter 1, there was anecdotal evidence that women do not fare as well as men professionally, but such differences can be subtle and hard to detect. The survey data presented in this report will provide information that is relevant to this perception and will help clarify the current status for women in the six disciplines surveyed at research-intensive (Research I or RI) institutions. According to one commentator:
The study initiated at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) several years ago by Nancy Hopkins has now been replicated at several other institutions, including Cal Tech. The reports have shown that women in science and
engineering faculty are more likely to report that they feel marginalized and isolated at their institution, have less job satisfaction, have unequal lab space, unequal salary, unequal recognition through awards and prizes, unequal access to university resources, and unequal invitations to take on important administrative responsibilities, especially those that deal with the future of the department or the research unit. The fact that this study has been replicated at other institutions says that this is not an MIT specific problem. This is a generalized problem about the way women faculty at research-intensive universities experience their career environment. (Tilghman, 2004:9)[55]
This chapter examines variables that could contribute to a faculty member’s ability to excel at teaching and research. It asks about factors related to equitable treatment of male and female faculty at research-intensive institutions in the six disciplines surveyed, whether there are gender differences in salary, publications, or the inclination to remain at that university, and whether differential treatment accounts for any gender differences in salary, publications, or the inclination to move on. The variables of primary interest to us fall into three categories: professional life, institutional resources, and climate. Under professional life, we include how much of each of the following a faculty member does: the amount of research; the amount of teaching, advising, supervising, and mentoring; and the amount of service to the university or broader community. Under institutional resources sometimes provided to support a faculty member’s teaching and research, we include start-up funds, summer salary, travel funds, reduced teaching loads, laboratory space and equipment, and staff (postdocs, research assistants, clerical support). Under climate, we include variables that can contribute to a faculty member’s sense of engagement or marginalization within the department and the institution, such as whether the faculty member is mentored by more experienced colleagues, whether the faculty member is asked to contribute to important decisions in the department and the university, and whether a faculty member regularly engages in conversation about research and teaching with his or her colleagues.
Three initial comments are necessary prior to proceeding with the assessment. First, there are dozens of factors that together comprise a faculty member’s job, from the number of students she teaches, to whether she has the newest equipment in her lab, to whether she thinks her peers are collegial. One major benefit that studies of hiring, tenure, and promotion have is that there is a dichotomous end point that helps to focus attention. The study of professional activities, institutional resources, climate, and outcomes lacks this. Therefore, anchoring the analysis is somewhat more challenging. Second, the following analysis is descriptive. Essentially, what is reported here about professional life, institutional resources, and climate is the average response of male and female faculty to a series of questions about their work habits and environment. In the final section of this chapter, we look at how professional life, institutional resources, and climate contribute to important outcomes, such as research productivity and salary. In these analyses, we attempt to control for as many factors as we can that might contribute to the outcome, but it is likely that there are additional relevant variables about which we have no data. Without all relevant controls accounted for in the analysis, the results need to be taken as preliminary and as an impetus for further, more sophisticated research, rather than a definitive statement on the existence of disparities between male and female faculty. Finally, it should be noted that the analyses presented here provide an aggregated, often average, view. That view is not inconsistent with some women having very few resources and some women having quite a lot, nor does it negate the possibility that individual women (or men) are discriminated against in their access to resources. The deviation around average individual accounts of satisfaction or dissatisfaction can reflect a difficult reality, even when the averages among male and female faculty are the same.
The next three sections focus on professional activities, institutional resources, and climate issues. Professional activities include teaching, research, and service. Institutional resources cover a gamut of variables, including lab space, start-up packages, and research assistants. Climate focuses on such issues as mentoring and collegiality. Several of the above factors are further disaggregated into a variety of component elements. To study whether male and female faculty members reported different experiences on these dimensions and variables, we examine four types of information. First and foremost is our survey of faculty in six disciplines in RI institutions.[56] A second valuable resource is the U. S. Department of Education’s National Survey of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF), undertaken in 2004 (“NSOPF:04”).[57] That survey queried respondents regarding the fall 2003 term and thus occurred in a similar timeframe as the faculty survey. The other two information sources used throughout the chapter are individual research studies undertaken by scholars and gender equity reports completed by RI institutions.
After reviewing the three elements of day-to-day careers, we turn our attention to faculty outcomes. In the fourth section, we ask whether there are differences between male and female faculty in publication rates, grant funding, laboratory space (which is both an institutional resource and an outcome), nominations for honors and prizes, salary, outside offers, or the inclination to remain at the current institution, and which professional life qualities, institutional resources, or climate variables contribute to differences in these outcome variables. This section draws on research done by individuals or as part of institutional studies to examine the issues of retention and job satisfaction, as our survey did not gather data on these variables.