The 13+ Club: An Index for Understanding, Documenting, and Resisting Patterns of Non-Promotion to Full Professor

Despite increasing access to some faculty ranks, women faculty members continue to encounter a glass ceiling when it comes to achieving the rank of full professor. In this article, we introduce the 13+ Club Index as a way to understand, document, and resist patterns of non-promotion for women. Despite the utility of metrics for documenting issues in women's advancement, many are difficult to come by and hard to interpret. As a result, women at an institution may feel that they can make no real progress because they do not have access to the data required to make their case. Using the concept of the 13+ Club—the faculty cohorts at an institution who are thirteen or more years past degree—we have developed an index to document patterns of non-promotion that overcomes these difficulties by relying exclusively on publicly accessible data. In the first part of this article, we introduce and describe the 13+ Club Index and detail some of the logistics of acquiring and constructing an index of non-promotion. Then we describe the way we have used this index at Rensselaer first to initiate and then to monitor change. We conclude with thoughts about how the 13+ Club Index can challenge institutions to examine the full scope of improving women's advancement.