At my institution, we're in the midst of a conversation about how to re-jigger the committee-assignment process, in part to make sure that more people do more of the work of get to be involved in faculty governance.
Coincidentally, there was a CHE piece on Monday, reporting on an MLA report that women typically take longer than men to be promoted from Associate Professor to Full. There's something a bit weird in the summary, where they state that:
The report shows that women at doctoral institutions take two and a half years longer than men to reach full professor. The gap shrinks to one and a half years at master's institutions, and the smallest gap—a year is at baccalaureate colleges. A closer look at private independent colleges by the association revealed that women there take three and a half years longer than their male counterparts to advance to associate professor.
I don't quite know what to make of that final sentence: at SLACs, women take only a wee bit of time longer than men to go from Associate to Full, but they take a good bit of time longer to get from Assistant to Associate. SLACs are doing *well* at mentoring female mid-level faculty, then? Or are better about rewarding service (which, let's be honest, women do more of than men, much of the time)? But I do think that it's quite likely -- and a bit strange that the article didn't mention -- that the longer time pre-tenure for women is linked to maternity leave policies, which often include a period of time when the tenure clock is stopped.
Folding that time into a simply calculus of "how long it takes women to reach a certain rank" is misleading, because "time" isn't always the same thing in all cases. If you've gotten a tenure-clock pause because you've had a child, then presumably it's because you *aren't* doing the kinds of work that would get you tenure.
But what I found most disturbing the piece is the concluding point, the final couple of paragraphs that describe the choices some female academics have made to opt out of the promotion process and stay at Associate because the kinds of work they want to do -- " working with students, preparing course materials, and doing research that involves the community" -- aren't considered "important" enough for promotion.
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