Issues after Tenure

This section of the introduction focuses on authors who address issues of particular significance to women associate and full professors—the slow rate of post-tenure academic advancement, the academic glass ceiling, and discrimination. Key questions addressed in these articles include the following: (1) Which institutional, cultural, and life factors keep qualified women associate professors from seeking promotion and contribute to a widespread "stall-out" problem?; (2) Are standards and policies for promotion sufficiently clear and transparent?; (3) Why is parity at the full professor rank important?; (4) How may women faculty's academic advancement be effectively monitored in order for equity to be achieved at the rank of full professor?; (5) How may tenured women faculty guarantee equitable access to positions of leadership and awards?; (6) What strategies help tenured women resist academic discrimination and remedy institutional inequities?

In a study of life narratives of women faculty, "Affective Stories: Understanding the Lack of Progress of Women Faculty," Patricia A. Stout, Janet Staiger, and Nancy A. Jennings analyze associate professors' perceptions of their status as faculty and their advancement to full professorship at the University of Texas at Austin, a flagship school with more than 45,000 students. They explore the participants' beliefs and feelings about their career progress, their practices, the problems they encountered, and the strategies they utilized to deal with them. Using focus group sessions for junior and senior associate professors in the humanities, social sciences, and the "hard" sciences, the authors taped, categorized thematically, and analyzed the participants' narratives. Four recurring themes in the participants' narratives were identified: self as victim, self as heroine, other as victim, and other as heroine. According to the authors, the narratives suggest that the slow advancement of women faculty and the stall-out problem result from institutional barriers as well as personal barriers that include demoralization, lack of agency, and resignation to one's situation.

The University of Texas women associate professors experienced different problems depending on their career stage. Junior associate women faculty felt there was a lack of funding and support for scholarship, insufficient time to perform their work, and inadequate facilities or space and resources (e.g., equipment). Senior associate women professors perceived a heavy administrative load and insufficient time for research as major problems. However, both cohorts experienced a lack of support and respect for their race- and gender-related scholarship, were discriminated against on the basis of their sex in students' teaching evaluations, and were discouraged by their chairs and colleagues from pursuing promotion. The study also reveals that senior associate women faculty delayed promotion to avoid making themselves vulnerable to the critiques of colleagues who might think the quality of their records did not merit promotion. This finding resonates with Williams, Alon, and Bornstein's idea that women faculty face a "catch-22" situation when it comes to competence. Not only is it harder for women faculty "to establish their competence, but they also may be penalized for being 'too' competent if they upset the stereotype of how women 'ought to behave'" (2006, 81). As Donna Shalala remarks, "women must also deal with a lifelong questioning of their ability" (Hoogeveen 2007, 45).

The University of Texas women associate professors provided additional reasons for not applying for promotion and merit awards: (1) unclear and variable standards; (2) lack of, insufficient, or inappropriate mentoring; (3) the lingering psychological impact of inequities and of the antagonistic process women faculty experienced in their earlier promotion. Some of the difficulties tenure-track women faculty have been found to experience were similarly experienced by these women associate professors. Like their counterparts, some of the study participants faced the challenges of a two-career-couple marriage and were at the stage of family formation when academic demands and responsibilities compete with family demands and responsibilities, such as child and parent care. The authors report that "the majority of the study participants had children, with 17 individuals (74 percent) reporting having from one to three children" (128). It should be noted that postponing family formation until the post-tenure stage is not unusual. As Mason and Goulden remark, "the culture has shifted...