By SARAH C. STEIN LUBRANO
In case you didn’t notice during class selection this fall, female professors are a bit scarce at Harvard. In fact, women continuously hold many fewer higher-level positions and tenure than men at elite universities. Harvard’s most recent Faculty Trends report states, “Over the last four years women have made up between 25 and 26 percent of the ladder faculty. With respect to rank, women currently represent 22 percent of tenured faculty and 36 percent of tenure-track faculty.” In short, women consistently make up about one fifth of tenured faculty, even though they represent about one third of those eligible for it. They aren’t just underrepresented in academia; they are also underrepresented among tenured academics. (The statistics on minorities, which deserve an opinion piece of their own, are equally unrepresentative of the population of the United States.) Of course, the idea that this gender imbalance is a problem rests on two premises: that we should have higher numbers of elite women academics, and that we don’t because of discrimination or bias—something systematically unfair.
The first seems practically self-evident to this particular Harvard student for the very basic, almost simplistic reason that I like having female professors. I see myself in them; their success encourages me. I can ask them to dinner without feeling awkward. On a purely anecdotal level, they show a lot more interest in my wellbeing. But beyond my feelings on the matter, it is obvious that women have half the minds of this world, and their apparent exclusion thus likely means worse scholarship. Such exclusion appears likely knowing that the problem extends to women who are already brilliant and accomplished enough to be tenure-tracked at Harvard.
So why are there so few female professors at Harvard and comparable institutions?
MORE MISERY.
"I can ask them to dinner without feeling awkward."
ReplyDeleteWTF? You damn well should feel awkward asking your professors out to dinner because your professors should be making you feel awkward for asking.
The Harvard houses have dinners students can invite professors/instructors to once a semester or so . . . she's not asking them out on dates.
DeleteAh, well, I stand corrected. Then she shouldn't get hung up on the prof's gender. If she has a problem asking a male faculty member to this type of dinner, that's her problem, not Harvard's.
DeleteThis student, who seems to think she is trumpeting the need for more female academics for reasons of diversity in the most intellectual of environments, is really just trumpeting the need for women because "they show a lot more interest in my wellbeing". And that right there is the problem. Women are somehow seen as more "accessible" and more socially approachable. The "big sis"/"mommy" thing. "Look! I can ask my proffie out for dinner!" And women are punished if they do not fit into that mold. Katie might like that, but it's not good for women in the profession.
ReplyDelete" “Over the last four years women have made up between 25 and 26 percent of the ladder faculty. With respect to rank, women currently represent 22 percent of tenured faculty and 36 percent of tenure-track faculty.” In short, women consistently make up about one fifth of tenured faculty, even though they represent about one third of those eligible for it."
ReplyDeleteThe tenured faculty represents decades of hiring. There will be a significant time lag before it fully reflects any upward shift in the hiring of women, so I don't think the argument made here is particularly valid. (Not claiming all is well by any means, but a better measure for this argument would be to compare the proportion of women in tenure track positions with the proportion in *recent* tenure hires.)
Or how about the number of adjuncts vs tenure-track teachers?
ReplyDeleteBased on my experiences as an undergrad and grad student at Harvard and/or comparable institutions, I think Stella nailed it. Women, by choice, as a result of others' expectations, or both, end up spending more time on various sorts of caretaking and housekeeping (i.e. teaching, mentoring, advising, and administrative/committee work), and less on their own research, which is, of course, what the R1s value most, and what leads to tenure there (either from the ranks, which is more rare than at most institutions, or by hire-to-tenure). The problem is exacerbated by the fact that, as long as the faculty as a whole is gender-unbalanced, any attempt to gender-balance committees and the like will lead to yet more demands on women (this is also, of course, a problem for people of color and any other identifiable underrepresented minorities, and a double problem for people who fall in both/several categories; one of the refrains from black female professors at a conference I attended recently was "I don't want to die an associate professor" -- at least they'd made it to associate, but they'd been too busy with the kind of work described above to publish at the level expected of a full professor). Of course there are exceptions -- women who manage to do both, or to concentrate on research -- but, at an institutional level, the pattern is still there.
ReplyDeleteSo how did I, as a student observing this, react? Grateful for those (mostly but not exclusively female) who had put time, energy, and care into teaching (but mostly hadn't gotten tenure), I determined to do the same. As a grad student, I thought this approach would land me at a SLAC rather than an R1, which seemed like a fine outcome. Instead, thanks to changes in the structure of the academic job market, it landed me in adjunct positions and then the longterm non-TT fulltime gig I now occupy. The really tricky part is that I'm probably temperamentally better suited to a research-intensive (and/or department-level administrative) job than a teaching-intensive one; for me, the most appealing part of a professor's job is playing around with ideas, and thinking about the whole enterprise of educating people and how what we do prepares them for life. I enjoy student contact as a part of all of the above, but for me, unlike for some of my colleagues, it's not the most energizing part of the job. I probably focused more attention than wise on teaching as a grad student in part because I realized it wouldn't come as naturally to me as to some people. But I also did it, as I mentioned above, because I thought it was the right thing to do. Whether I would have made the decisions if I were male I'm not sure, but my instinct is that gender, and gender expectations (and perhaps the fact that my own talents and tendencies run somewhat counter to gender expectations), played a role.