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Women and the Tenure Track

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By Sara Davis

Not long ago, a colleague of mine was turned down for a tenure-track job because she was married. How do I know this was the reason? The head of the hiring committee said so.

My colleague, Jenny, applied for a tenure-track position in history at a respected public university. After a brilliant on-campus interview and a few days of lively conversation with colleagues, Jenny thought she had the gig nailed. On the last day, the hiring committee, as a group, sat her down. The chair -- a woman -- told Jenny that she was their top candidate, but added: "We've been trying to figure out what your family situation is. What's the story?"

Jenny hemmed and hawed. Faced with a circle of people who had the power to decide her future, she decided to tell the truth: her husband is a biochemist, and he recently applied for a job on the same campus.

"Let us know if he gets the job," said the hiring committee chair. "It will be a major factor in our decision."

A month later, Jenny got an e-mail message from the university. The committee had decided to offer the job to someone else -- a man, as it happened. "However," the chair wrote, "if your husband does get the position here, we'd be happy to hire you as an adjunct."

Jenny says that she will be an adjunct in that department when Satan puts on figure skates. I thought this story was some kind of horrifying flashback to the 1950's. Yet when I spoke to other women on the job market, I found that there were a lot of similar stories out there. This made me think a little more carefully about the role of women in higher education.

When I started graduate school, I thought academe looked pretty progressive, compared with my very brief experience in the business world. My professors seemed sensitive to the politics of gender and race -- they talked about it in the classroom all the time. The obnoxious sexist joking and racist humor that were widely accepted at business meetings and parties were missing from department gatherings. My boss in advertising hit on me and my female co-workers constantly, but my adviser at the University of Pennsylvania propped his door open whenever we met to avoid even the appearance of impropriety. I almost never felt that my professors in graduate school treated me differently from the guys in my classes. In fact, smart, outspoken female students dominated the classrooms.

Yet after only a couple of years on the job market, the balance is beginning to shift. More of my male than female peers seem to be getting tenure-track jobs. And despite the questionable office climate in my advertising firm, there were actually a lot more women and people of color in top jobs at the company than there are today in the tenured ranks of academe.

To gather some data, I first decided to conduct a very scientific survey of my address book. After leafing through, I added up the names of 30 male and 40 female friends and acquaintances with Ph.D.'s. A quarter of the women have already dropped out of the academic job market and taken jobs with businesses or nonprofit organizations. A few have shifted into what looks like terminal adjunct mode.

On the other hand, only a sixth of the men have left academe, and none are adjuncts. There are twice as many men with tenure in my phone book as there are women. It has only been two years since my dissertation defense, but I foresee my phone book showing greater female attrition over time.

Some of you may say that my phone-book survey has a high margin of error. However, reports from the American Association of University Professors and other professional associations and universities bear me out. An A.A.U.P. fact sheet on the status of women shows that in academic 2000-1, women made up only 31 percent of the faculty at doctoral-level institutions and 40 percent of the faculty at baccalaureate institutions. Women did, of course, make up 50 percent of the faculty at institutions without ranks.

The numbers are even worse in the sciences: A 1999-2000 report from the Association of American Medical Colleges shows that the percentage of tenured women on the faculty at medical schools has stayed exactly the same for several years: 15 percent. At my current employer, Yale University, only 11 percent of the tenured professors are women. And a 1998 report from the Higher Education Research Institute of the University of California at Los Angeles says that female faculty members "continue to serve in the lower academic ranks more often than do men" and are "less likely to be tenured."

Everyone seems to agree that there are plenty of outstanding female graduate students: "The problem is not in the pipeline," they say. But somewhere between the pipeline and the tenure track, tons of women get discouraged and bail out.

And if we are honest, some of us are discouraging each other. For instance, rather than rushing to support Jenny, a lot of my female colleagues blamed her for the whole debacle: "She messed up," said one friend. "She should have underscored her commitment to the job, no matter what." "Jenny should have told them her marital status was irrelevant," said another. "Jenny shouldn't have worn her wedding ring to the job interview in the first place," said a third.

Maybe they're right. No doubt Ms. Mentor can offer some good advice about how Jenny could have better handled the situation.

But here is what Jenny says: Her application was undermined by a chairwoman, not a chairman. Jenny points out that if she hadn't married an academic, she might well have gotten the job. On the other hand, her husband's decision to marry an academic will never affect his job prospects. She also says that academe expects her to live the life of a monk, but that she's pretty displeased with the quality of work she sees produced by famous senior scholars who have chosen to do just that. In sum, she's getting turned off by the whole business.

She hasn't dropped out of the academic job market yet, but she recently had an interview with a private company. And why not? The pay can only get better.

Under the circumstances, it is heartening to read that Princeton University recently appointed an eminent molecular biologist, Shirley Tilghman, as its 19th president. Ms. Tilghman has been an outspoken critic of the situation facing junior female scholars in the academy. (See an article from The Chronicle, May 18.)

Maybe it's time for more senior scholars to bring this problem out into the public and take a stronger stance about the treatment of women on their own campuses and across academe.

As for us young Ph.D.'s on the job market, can we use these experiences to make us stronger, to do work that is twice as good, to set better standards for our profession? That's what I keep arguing to Jenny, but I'm not sure she's convinced.