Exploring the climate for women as community college faculty

Abstract

Despite the literature pointing to a "chilly climate" for female students and faculty, there has been little attention to the perceived conditions for women as community college faculty members. This chapter provides a literature review as well as analyses of a national dataset of responses of community college faculty to examine the climate at the nation's two-year colleges.Two decades ago Hall and Sandler coined the phrase "chilly climate" to symbolically represent a pervasive and negative classroom climate reported by girls and women. Subsequently, the term has been applied to women's experiences in postsecondary classrooms and career advancement. Hall and Sandler's (1982) groundbreaking study notes that the traditional practices of college professors provide a differential treatment of students by gender that favors men and marginalizes women.Other studies followed, focusing on women's perceptions of their career development, barriers, and opportunities in the academy. Discriminatory practices and attitudes toward women were documented, and evidence of restrictions on women's academic freedom and lower levels of advancement were shown to be more widespread than generally assumed. One of these studies also gave rise to the image of the "glass ceiling" as a composition of transparent barriers that prevented women from rising above a certain level in the institutional hierarchy (Morrison, White, Van Velsor, and The Center for Creative Leadership, 1987). A decade later the "academic funnel" provided a picture of decreasing opportunities for women as they struggled to progress to higher levels of administration.Despite the prevalence of research literature with clear evidence of a chilly climate for many women college students, faculty, and administrators, little attention has been given to the status of women faculty at community colleges. Here we provide a literature review to highlight the conditions of women faculty working in colleges and universities and empirical analyses of a national dataset of community college faculty collected by the Center for

Table of Contents

“…Responses were categorized by type of institution, with faculty at associate of arts colleges having the highest percentage of female faculty (85 percent) and minority faculty (82 percent) agreeing "strongly" or "somewhat" that female and minority faculty are treated fairly at their institution (Table 126). A few years later Hagedorn and Laden (2002) examined responses to selected questions from a different national survey of community college faculty to answer the general question "Is there a chilly climate at community colleges for women faculty?" (p. 70).…”

Hiring and recruiting female faculty

“…Huber (1998) found that 85 percent of women report being treated fairly at the community colleges. A more recent study by Hagedorn and Laden (2002) also report an overwhelmingly positive perception of community colleges by female faculty. Women generally do not view community colleges as discriminatory and feel as if they are treated equally.…”

“…Yet in-depth qualitative studies suggest more complicated experiences and perceptions of women community college faculty and point to some areas that require improvement. For example, female faculty are more likely than their male counterparts to perceive gender discrimination (Hagedorn and Laden, 2002;Townsend and LaPaglia, 2000). Also, one study found that female faculty at a rural campus experienced a negative climate (Wolfe and Strange, 2003).…”

Noninstructional staff perceptions of the college climate

“…They found statistically significant gender-based differences, with women faculty more likely to perceive inequities in salary and rank and less likely to agree that their administrators hold female and male faculty in the same regard. Hagedorn and Laden (2002) found that community college female faculty view college climate in much the same way that their male counterparts do, yet they differ from males in their perceptions of discrimination. Rosser (2004) discovered that gender has an impact on faculty intention to leave when combining faculty work-life perceptions with professional and institutional perceptions.…”