Workplace Demands Are Tougher on Women Faculty
Like other professionals, men and women faculty are increasingly expected to function as "ideal workers" who are extremely committed to their jobs and require little time off. Doing so is more difficult for women academics than it is for men, however, according to a report issued in December by the Mapping Project at Pennsylvania State University. The Alfred P. Sloan Foundation funded the project. (It is also supporting "Access to the Profession," an AAUP project on balancing work and family responsibilities.)
The Mapping Project, undertaken by Penn State professors Robert Drago and Carol Colbeck, analyzed the interplay of family and employment commitments for faculty in U.S. colleges and universities. A previous project report found that women are more likely than men to engage in "bias-avoidance" behaviors, which are designed to minimize intrusions of family, or the appearance of such intrusions, on work commitments. (See page 5 of the July-August 2002 issue for an account of that report.)
In the current phase of the project, researchers used three tools—a survey of faculty at more than five hundred institutions of all types, case studies at eleven institutions, and the "shadowing" of thirteen faculty members at two research institutions—to study tenure-track faculty in chemistry and English departments.
Researchers divided bias-avoidance behaviors into two types. "Productive" bias-avoidance behaviors, such as avoiding marriage and child rearing, improve work performance at the expense of family commitments. "Unproductive" bias-avoidance behaviors, such as claiming to be sick oneself in order to stay home with a sick child, hide family commitments to enhance the appearance of being an ideal worker, but have minimal or adverse impacts on actual work performance. The researchers found that women are more likely than men to engage in both kinds of bias avoidance, partly because women are expected to do the bulk of child-rearing work and partly because of "daddy privilege," or the tendency of colleagues to laud men for honoring and publicizing their family commitments while penalizing women for the same behaviors.
More than 25 percent of women faculty reported having fewer children than they wanted compared with 10 percent of men, and more than 30 percent of women avoided asking for a reduced teaching load when needed, compared with 20 percent of men. The report posits that women are also more likely than men to accept bias as normal, and to make and meet family commitments knowing that such commitments may hurt their careers.
Faculty at institutions with work-and-family policies, such as those permitting reduced workloads or the stopping of the tenure clock, tended to practice less bias avoidance, according to the report. "They don't feel like they have to hide their family lives," says Drago.
The report urges both men and women faculty to resist the bias against caregiving by discussing family commitments in the workplace and pressing for more family-friendly policies. It also offers recommendations to institutions, including allowing and promoting the stopping of the tenure clock, implementing clear and fair paid-leave and reduced-load policies for new parents, implementing a part-time tenure track, and making the requirements for achieving tenure more explicit.
In 2001, the AAUP adopted as policy the Statement of Principles on Family Responsibilities and Academic Work, which addresses many of the same issues.
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