Hitting the Ceiling

Drew Gilpin Faust, Harvard University’s newly appointed president (and its first female president), may have chipped the academic glass ceiling, but many female academics continue to hit their heads against it, writes Robert Drago, a professor of labor studies and women’s studies at Pennsylvania State University at University Park, in a recent Chronicle Careers column.

While record numbers of women are joining the professoriate, female academics are much more likely than their male counterparts to end up in low-paying adjunct jobs, where they have little time for research and the opportunities for advancement are therefore slim. According to a 2006 report from the American Association of University Professors, a whopping 65 percent of American academics held non-tenure-track jobs in 2003, up from 43 percent in 1975, and three-quarters of the contingent academics in 2006 were women.

Drago says that many academic moms settle for part-time jobs so they’ll have time for their families.

He says universities must do more to get women into the tenure-track pipeline, the training ground for successful academics. If more universities adopted a “half-time tenure track,” faculty parents wouldn’t have to choose between making time for their academic work and for their families, he suggests. Unfortunately, Faust may not be in a position to push for change at Harvard because she “might face accusations of favoring, well, … mothers,” Drago concludes.

Also see a related thread
in The Chronicle’s forums.