Sensible or Outdated? Gender and Opinions of Tenure Criteria in Canada

Abstract

The university reward structure has traditionally placed greater value on individual research excellence for tenure and promotion, influencing faculty’s allocation of time and definition of worthwhile labour. We find gender differences in Canadian natural sciences and engineering faculty’s opinions of the traditional criteria for measuring academic success that are consistent with an implicit gender bias devaluing service and teamwork. Most women recommend significant changes to the traditional model and its foundation, while a substantial minority of men support the status quo. However, this comparative qualitative analysis finds more cross-gender similarities than differences, as most men also want a more modern definition of success, perceiving the traditional model to be disproportionately supportive of one type of narrow research scholarship that does not align with the realities of most faculty’s efforts. Thus, this study suggests a discrepancy between traditional success criteria and faculty’s understanding of worthwhile labour.

Faculty promotion evaluation and gender equity in business schools

“…Doing so is important because current and past studies on gender equity in academe suffer from the same sample size limitation. For example, findings for Stewart et al (2009), Acker et al (2012), and Dengate et al (2019) are all informed by data with sample sizes that are smaller than ours. Our study is one of the few empirical studies on faculty promotion in Canada that is based on a mid-sample size.…”

“…Canadian business schools are the subject of interest to us for the following two reasons: first, many of the present studies on faculty evaluations in Canada (Acker et al, 2012; Dengate et al, 2019; Stewart et al, 2009) are too general and have not specifically addressed the fairness of business faculty promotion evaluation systems. Canadian business schools are under-researched and the few scholarly works that exist on these organizations mostly address issues of teaching, student learning (Brutus and Donia, 2010; Julien et al, 2011; Robbie and Keeping, 2005), research output and quality (Erkut, 2002; Finch et al, 2017) rather than faculty experience with promotion evaluations.…”

“…Although there has been an exponential growth in female enrollment in post-secondary business programs in the past decades, the glass ceiling persists in the professoriate with less than 20% of full professors being female. The glass ceiling refers to a situation whereby female faculty are stuck at the associate professor rank despite having the qualifications to move to the rank of full professor (Acker et al, 2012; Bagues et al, 2017; Dengate et al, 2019; Kanter, 1993; Mason et al, 2013; Minefee et al, 2018; Stewart et al, 2009). In the period 1970–71, women represented only 9.5% of undergraduate enrollment in business.…”

“…Men dominate the ranks of full and associate professors and earn more than women (e.g., male faculty: US$136,975, female faculty: US$123,225), a fact that has not changed (CAUT, 2018) in more than four decades. Across most academic disciplines, male faculty are more likely to be promoted and advance more quickly than women in the tenure ranks (Acker et al, 2012; Dengate et al, 2019). For instance, male faculty are promoted from assistant to associate professor about five months earlier; and from associate to full professor about one year sooner than their female colleagues (Stewart et al, 2009).…”

“…With that in mind, we opted to use subjective procedural justice for our research design. Doing so was appropriate considering that some of the main issues raised in the current literature (Acker et al, 2012; Dengate et al, 2019; Stewart et al, 2009) on gender inequity in the Canadian academe pertain to the paucity of procedural justice and participants’ perceptions are generally subjective in nature.…”