BY CHELSEA FOWLER

Today is Equal Pay Day.* Tomorrow, April 11, 2018, the AAUP will release the 2017–18 Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, which discusses salary and compensation across higher education institutions.

There has been a growing trend in the United States in the past two decades of women’s postsecondary educational attainment surpassing men’s. While women have outpaced men in higher education degree attainment, they still fall behind men in the highest faculty ranks. Men continue to dominate university faculty ranks, including full professor, associate professor, and assistant professor ranks, as seen in the figure below, contributing to higher percentages of men than women teaching at higher education institutions overall. As demonstrated in the table below, women are more likely to be concentrated at the assistant and associate professor ranks.

Gender Disparities in Faculty Ranks at Public Doctoral Universities 

 Analysis of 2005–2018 data from the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey

The table shows the percentage of male and female full-time faculty at the full professor, associate professor, and assistant professor ranks from 2005 through 2018 at public doctoral universities. It should be noted that academic years 2015–16 and 2016–17 were excluded from this analysis as this tabulation was not calculated during these years. Despite the omitted data, the 2017–18 data show consistent trends. In this analysis, instructors and lecturers are not included because there are not comparable data from year to year due to evolving definitions. For a given academic year, the faculty percentages do not add up to 100 percent as only three ranks are included.

From 2005 to 2018, women slowly gained ground in faculty ranks, closing gaps with their male counterparts. Since 2004–05, men and women have been closest to parity in the assistant professor ranks, closing the gap to 0.9 percent in 2017–18. In particular, women have come close to parity with men in assistant professor positions. Women have made strong gains at the associate professor rank, shrinking the gap between women and men from 7.6 percent in 2005 to 3.5 percent in 2018. Starker differences remain persistent at the full professor rank, however, where men hold a 15.5 percent advantage over women, down from 23.5 percent in 2005. The data suggest that women have made strides in achieving parity with men in ranked positions, but face barriers breaking into the highest rank. Throughout their careers, female faculty largely remain concentrated in lower and middle-rung positions and some ultimately leave the field of higher education. In other words, higher education ranks seem to have a leaky pipe. Women are entering faculty ranks and advancing to middle-rank positions, but face barriers making it to the top. So what accounts for this leaky pipe?

Institutional Support
The data show that women have largely been successful at being hired into low and mid-level faculty positions, such as assistant and associate ranks.  However, the leaky pipe indicates that women face challenges advancing to the top. Institutional promotion policies and support for faculty careers may play a role in the dearth of female faculty at the highest rank. Female faculty with significant teaching loads and service work may not have the time needed to dedicate to research and publication, both of which are often key factors in promotion criteria. And when women perform service work, research shows that they outperform men in the amount of time and number of service work activities and that the work is for the betterment of the institution, not the individual. When female faculty do not have institutional support structures, such as remuneration for service work or research support, they may have difficulties bolstering their resumes to advance within the institution. 

Sexual Harassment
The #MeToo movement has sparked conversation and societal awareness about sexual misconduct across multiple industries and communities, including higher education. A recent survey created by Karen Kelsky collected roughly 1,600 accounts of sexual misconduct in higher education, highlighting the widespread nature of sexual harassment in academia. However, research shows that sexual harassment in the workplace often goes unreported. Female faculty members who face harassment in the workplace may feel uncomfortable reporting their harassers out of fear of facing a number of repercussions, including retaliation, tension in their professional community, financial consequences, or being labeled as a “trouble-maker.” When female professors face repeated or escalated harassment, they may change projects or institutions, causing disrupted work, potential funding losses, and an interrupted work history, making it more difficult to get promoted. Harassment remains a constant barrier female faculty face in persisting in institutional ranks and making it to the top.

Institutional Reliance on Part-Time Positions
Another cause of the leaky pipe is higher education’s increased reliance on part-time and non-tenure-track positions. As shown in Figure 2 of the AAUP’s 2015–16 edition of the Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, the majority of academic positions today are not only off the tenure track they are also part-time. As institutions rely more and more on part-time faculty it becomes increasingly difficult for faculty to move up the ladder to tenure-track and tenured positions, which can lead to faculty remaining in low-level positions or leaving the institution entirely. Part-time faculty shares have increased in the past several decades and “today comprise approximately 40 percent of the academic labor force, a slightly larger share than tenured and tenure-track faculty combined,” according to AAUP data. This reliance on part-time positions dramatically impacts female faculty who are already concentrated in those ranks as they may not find full-time positions to move up the faculty ranks.

Unconscious Bias and Gender Stereotypes
Unconscious bias and gender stereotypes present issues in all work environments, including higher education. Unconscious or implicit biases are beliefs and attitudes that individuals hold about populations of people; while they do not often result in obvious, biased actions against an individual, they play a role in how individuals perceive and act toward others. Gender stereotypes lead people to expect men to possess dominant, outgoing, and assertive personalities and to assume leadership positions and women to possess more passive, introverted, and timid personalities and to assume lower-level, supportive positions. Gender stereotypes and unconscious biases can be harmful in the workplace as they often depict women in a negative light. These stereotypes and biases can be seen in teaching evaluations, for example, as many studies show that student evaluations of female professors tend to be lower than those of male professors. Gendered language and stereotypes may also be seen in recommendation letters, which impact faculty hiring and advancement. When considering faculty for promotion and tenure, evaluation committees often take many components into account, including student evaluations and recommendation letters. 

Lack of Mentorship or Role Models
The dearth of women at the highest ranks means there are fewer female role models and mentors for junior faculty to emulate. Mentors are essential to help junior faculty identify career goals, assess their progress, and provide overall guidance and support for professional advancement. A 2015 study by the University of California, Berkeley found that women stand to gain more than men when being mentored, as they can expand their professional networks and increase visibility in their field. With few examples of women who have been successful in climbing the academic ranks, lower level faculty may be less encouraged to persist in these positions.

Work/Life Balance
Like workers in many industries, higher education faculty feel work/life pressures. For faculty, there are pressures to teach and advise students, conduct and publish independent research, and fulfill service to the university. Women, in particular, often feel additional pressures in their personal lives to care for their families and homes and spend more time than men providing this care. According to the American Time Use Survey, in combined years 2011-2015, full-time employed married mothers with children under age 18 spent 1.86 hours a day on household activities in comparison to 1.18 hours for full-time employed married fathers with children. These mothers also spent an average of 1.32 hours caring for and helping household members, in comparison to 0.87 hours for fathers. For female faculty in particular, the academic career track time table is very rigid and can run parallel with a woman’s desire to start a family, creating conflicting priorities. The need to satisfy both academic and personal demands can leave faculty feeling dissatisfied and lead to women remaining in low-level teaching positions or leaving academia altogether to alleviate some of the dueling pressures.

There are many factors that contribute to the leaky pipe that make it challenging for female faculty to reach the highest rank. With institutional and individual support, female faculty can work past these obstacles and make it to the top.

* Equal Pay Day is the symbolic day when working women’s earnings catch up with their male counterparts from the prior year. It takes more than a quarter of a year longer for women, on average, to earn what men earned in the previous year. Unfortunately, it takes even longer for African American, Latina, and other minority women to achieve parity with their male peers. There are many contributing factors to pay inequality, including not hiring or promoting women to high-paying positions and not advancing women at the same rate as men, among other structural factors. While these factors greatly impact women’s earnings, they are also some of the reasons why women fall victim to the leaky pipe.

Chelsea Fowler is the AAUP’s research assistant.