Almost half of the assistant professors at the University of Idaho this year are female. More than a third of associate professors are women, the next rank among academic faculty. At the top tier — full-fledged professors — women make up less than a quarter of about 270 professors on salary at UI.
Academic faculty hierarchy and the tenure process are among some of the oldest institutions in the already ancient bureaucracy of academia. Tenure-track faculty members arrive as assistant professors and begin a six-year probationary period, before becoming eligible for promotion to associate professor and the tenure benefits that come with it.
Jon Miller, an economics professor in his 25th year at UI, said third-year reviews tend to advise junior faculty members unlikely to make it through the process against continuing, making fifth-year reviews less formal.
“It’s a very thorough process,” Miller said. “It’s not easy to get tenure.”
He figured about 75 to 80 percent of applicants are awarded tenure after multiple committees and administrators, culminating in the university provost and president, approve their portfolio.
Jeanne Stevenson, vice provost of academic affairs, reviews tenure applicants as a non-voting member of UI’s promotion and tenure committee. She said each college and department lays out expectations in its by-laws for tenure-seeking faculty in four areas: teaching and advising, scholarship and creative productivity, outreach and engagement and leadership and service.
Stevenson remembers arriving in Moscow in 1985 with an 11-month-old son to fill a vacancy as an assistant professor. She said her department chairs and deans made it possible for her to balance her responsibility as a parent with the workload of seeking tenure.
“I think I was able, partly because of how I managed my time, but also because of people’s willingness to be flexible — I could organize and manage the time so that I felt like I easily managed the expectations of the workplace, but also met my own expectations for time with my family,” she said.
Victoria Arthur, an UI English lecturer, met similar challenges when her husband died while she was studying for her master’s degree, making her the sole caretaker of their 8-year-old son.
“I made career choices based on what was best for my son,” Arthur said. “I chose the limitations of lecturer, because of the benefits for my son — because that was more important to me.”
As a lecturer, Arthur wouldn’t be eligible for tenure, even if she had time to fulfill the requirements. Instead, she teaches up to twice as many classes as tenure-track faculty without medical insurance or retirement benefits. Instructors and senior instructors occupy a similar position, but enjoy more permanent structures. Her one-year contracts don’t guarantee ongoing employment, but Arthur said she feels well supported by the department’s leadership.
“The job is inherently unstable,” she said.
Arthur hypothesized that women facing decisions like hers often opt out of the race for tenure, because societal norms still place domestic responsibility on women.
Miller, who said he has a more traditional perspective, said those norms might be based in biology.
“Women are hard-wired, on average, toward children,” he said.
Miller explained that women’s lower earnings result from intermittent labor force participation caused by childbearing.
“Women withdraw from the labor force to have and care for young children. It’s not good or bad, it just is,” he said. “Intermittent participants are punished in the labor market, because they lose skills, which is part of why women make less than men.”
He cited research that found women with children, who’ve had intermittent participation, are removed from the sample, salaries are much more comparable.
Miller said he expects to see more women fill the upper levels of university and corporate institutions, but isn’t sure how the shift might impact family life.
“I’m not sure if trading the American family for more women professors is a good trade-off,” he said.
Miller recalls the extra strain on his family life during the tenure process, and said he understands why junior faculty would wait for tenure to have children.
Sean Quinlan, an associate professor and chair of the history department, agreed the process is difficult for junior faculty members with big responsibilities at home — whether they include care for young children, an ailing spouse or aging parents.
“Becoming an associate professor is like wandering in a wilderness,” he said. “The path to tenure is existential — you get it or lose your job.”
Quinlan is in the process of acquiring a full professorship, and said the process could use updating to accommodate limitations of modern life. From fading print publications to disappearing federal funding, old requirements don’t always account for a shifting culture.
Deb Stenkamp, a UI biology professor, said her department updated its expectations just this year. Historically, the department considered external grants the primary evidence of rigorous research. But Stenkamp said dismal federal funding made grants scarce in recent years, so the rules shifted to consider other lines of evidence for maintained research, such as training graduate and undergraduate students, publishing research and teaching.
UI Interim Provost Kathy Aiken said UI administrators are working on the system as a whole. She said some elements of it are past their prime, but it would take a sea change to update the process.
“While both men and women are challenged early, that whole system was created when only one partner worked outside the home,” Aiken said.
Many faculty members wait until they’ve secured tenure to start a family, rather than meeting two huge demands on time and energy that otherwise tend to hit around the same time.
“Now it’s harder for both men and women, because there are more dual-career families,” Aiken said. “And we haven’t really changed how we do the system to keep pace with how society has changed.”
She said few entities are more tradition-bound than academia, and the answer isn’t to throw it out altogether. Tenure ensures that faculty can research, teach and share controversial ideas without fear of financial retribution.
“Academic freedom demands tenure,” Aiken said.
Potential changes to UI’s system include less teaching for junior faculty, increased mentorship and opening the process to consider different paths to tenure, Aiken said. The most recent policy update allows assistant professors to stop the six-year countdown to tenure application while they attend to personal or family needs.
Aiken, the history department’s first tenured female, said she had a difficult time with tenure, but she felt her struggle was worthwhile.
“Studies are showing that people of my age — of the women’s movement — were willing to do whatever it took to get promoted to full professor, because they felt like it was a responsibility,” Aiken said. “Well, a lot of women now are saying, ‘why.'”
She explained that facing subtle, systemic challenges is no longer a noble cause for women who would be professors. Obstacles, such as having more advisees than male colleagues and serving on more committees as boards in need of diversity, greet women who move up in rank. Often, women who excel are rewarded with more and more work — and not necessarily the sort that counts toward tenure.
“Clearly, the climate for women in academia has been a challenging one historically,” Aiken said. “At the University of Idaho in particular, when you look at people wielding power, there are typically a lot more men than women in those positions.”
Aiken said the landscape is gradually changing, and women are hired at more equitable rates and salaries to men.
Stenkamp said the university could do a better job holding onto its female scientists, who are often recruited elsewhere after a brief stint at UI. Other institutions offer juicier positions with opportunities for an equally skilled spouse.
“UI has, at times, challenges in hanging onto valuable people,” she said. “Often in science there will be partnered ambitious scientists … UI has to pump in resources to obtain and retain both.”
In fact, Stenkamp said more men than women in her department juggle parenting and career responsibilities. The demands, she said, can be crushing.
Arthur pointed out the system of academic advancement is oppressive of today’s men and women alike. The difference is that women work in systems unfit for modern life, and against cultural ideas of masculinity and femininity.
“It’s more challenging for women in general than for men in general, because our culture still has different ideas about who should be responsible for personal life,” Arthur said. “The people might be less implicitly sexist, but the systems and culture, in a lot of ways, still are.”
Written by Victoria Hart