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September 12, 2008, 09:51 AM ET
Many Black Women Veer Off Path to Tenure
Black women appear to be substantially less likely than other segments of the population to get on and stay on academe’s tenure track, according to a forthcoming report commissioned by the National Association for Equal Opportunity in Higher Education.
The report says survey data collected from doctoral recipients suggest that “black women have a distaste for or trouble navigating some aspects of the tenure process,” even though they do not appear to have any distaste for academe itself.
“We don’t know what is going on, but the data suggest that black women are not faring as well” as other groups, said Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe, a professor of economics at the University of Vermont and research fellow at the Institute for Higher Education Law and Governance. Ms. Sharpe is a co-author of the report, along with William A. Darity Jr., a professor of African-American studies, economics, and public policy at Duke University, and Omari H. Swinton, an assistant professor of economics at Howard University.
The researchers based their analysis on data from surveys that the National Science Foundation has administered to the same doctoral recipients repeatedly since the the early 1990s, to track their progress over time. The fields covered by the surveys included engineering, mathematics, the sciences, and the social sciences.
In crunching data derived from the surveys, the researchers found that black women were about twice as likely to transfer from a tenure-track faculty position to an adjunct research path as members of other groups, including black men. They were substantially less likely than other segments of the population to be retained in tenure-track faculty positions, and more likely to go from having a postdoctoral fellowship to being unemployed.
The association, which represents historically black colleges and universities, plans to release the report, “The State of Blacks in Higher Education 2008,” in October.
Categories: Faculty-hiring
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