Closing the Gender Gap

The issue of women’s rights doesn’t grab the headlines the way it did in the ‘70s and 80s, when the call for equality between the sexes was loud and clear. But, in certain fields of academia where men have dominated leadership, culture and practices, the environment does not exactly foster women’s full participation.

In late January, after an all-day workshop at MIT, university presidents and leaders from nine Research I institutions made news. They acknowledged that women on their science and engineering faculties still face barriers to equitable treatment. These leaders pledged to review and make potentially significant changes in university-wide procedures regarding diversity, compensation and resource allotment.

"I thought it was remarkable that it happened at all," said Lottye Bailyn, professor of management at MIT’s Sloan School and a participant in the workshop. "A couple of years ago, I wouldn’t have given you one penny that this could happen at all."

Even though business schools were not grouped with science and engineering, Newsline determined to learn how women management academicians are faring in their historically male-dominated field.

The topic is one fraught with subtle messages — although not so subtle to women who believe their careers have been influenced directly by unfairness. Female academics are reluctant to rely solely on the anecdotal evidence to make the case that there are gender-based inequities in their profession. Yet, hard data that might be used as evidence often are not statistically significant.

"If you aggregate too much, you lose it all," said Bailyn. "The experience is very dependent on the field and areas. It is difficult to get reliable statistical evidence because the numbers are too small to start with."

According to Rick Antle, senior associate dean and chair of the appointment committee at Yale’s business school, only one of 17 tenured faculty at his school is female, although more women are represented at lower ranks. "There were almost no women around in management schools when faculty who are now 55 got tenure," he said. "Now, more women are entering the tenure possibility set."

"There is limited progress," said Betsy Boze, business dean at the University of Texas at Brownsville. "We gain a dean here and we lose one there. I was one of two women deans in the UT system nine years ago, and now there still are two women deans.

"Women deans tend to come, for the most part, from the tenured faculty group — especially from economics and finance," said Pat Flynn, dean of Bentley College, and herself an economist. "There aren’t a lot of women tenured in those fields, so the pipeline there is small." The other source of deans, she said, is management, strategy and policy, where there is a higher percentage of female tenured faculty.

Society Moves Institutions
Urged by societal pressure to better accommodate diversity, universities and business schools are adjusting their policies, procedures, hiring practices and appointments.

In some cases, legislation, legislative audits or monitoring strongly motivate schools to expand the hiring pool to include more women, as well as minorities.

The University of California’s nine-campus system recently has been under scrutiny for gender equity, at the request of a state senator, said Ben Hermalin, associate dean for faculty at UC-Berkeley. This year, the school got better gender balance in the pool of faculty recruits by centralizing hiring with a single, standing search committee, made up of equal numbers of men and women, rather than a committee for each discipline group.

Denise Smart, b-dean at Southwest Texas State, thinks it helps to be at an institution where the university has a strategic goal of diversity. "The campus has placed value on promoting ethnic, gender and cultural diversity. When I came here, the university had just completed a task force on diversity, and they had done at least two salary adjustments, with gender being one of the factors." In addition, the business school had completed a gender equity study, in which women reported their perceptions and their desire for more communication about criteria for tenure and promotion. Smart herself set up a task force on diversity. As a result, the school created a new policy for tenure and promotion that takes into account gender and minority perspectives.

Many agreed that much progress occurs through changes in institutional policies, procedures and actions.

Susan Ashford, senior associate dean for academic affairs at the Michigan Business School, said that Dean Joseph White’s stated intention that his school be the school of choice for women is the kind of institutional action that makes a difference in women’s participation. Currently, 16% of the tenured faculty are women, and the entire faculty at Michigan’s b-school is 24% women.

White’s statement allows the school to do many things that support women, Ashford said. "This statement creates a lot of room to move for the folks interested in this issue within the school."

Judy Olian, in her first year as b-dean at the Smeal College of Business, said the central administration of Penn State gives assistance with incentives for hiring women and minorities. Salary subsidies, spousal employment and family friendly policies help them recruit women. The school itself has a formal mentoring program, a performance development program and an annual feedback session.

"Frankly, I think the main thing is to provide support for junior faculty, to assure that women and minorities are not tokens," Olian said. "We really strive to have a critical mass of women in all of our departments."

"We’re conscious of the way we bring young faculty into the system, because a lot of women and minority candidates start at the entry level," said Carolyn Woo, business dean at Notre Dame. Yearly reports monitor whether or not new faculty have time for research and fair teaching loads, and if they are being mentored and getting feedback and support.

Notre Dame now has about 16 tenure-track women on a 95-person tenure-track faculty. Of the new recruits brought in for tenure-track positions in the last four years, about 50% have been women.

Institutional demands for greater gender equity exist in Canada, as well. Margot Northey, dean of the business school at Queen’s University in Ontario, said that while not every person or group at her school is necessarily interested in increasing women’s representation, the university systems definitely are. Queen’s has an "anomaly fund" to correct past inequities in salaries that might affect women, minorities, or anyone else.

"The position of women on the faculty as a whole is not 50/50, but we now have policies that make us look very hard for women and other diverse groups in our hiring. No one would say we are discriminating if you look at the numbers after the past l0 years."

Bailyn had a cautionary word for those who think they are doing everything they can to recruit and hire women. "Every university at this moment is active in its intent. The question is, how does that translate? Women don’t always come through the same channels. Where is your activity? Are you looking at different channels? Some women don’t come from expected colleges or universities. As long as you look though traditional eyes, no matter how active you are, you won’t make much progress. You have to look through a different lens."

That’s not easy for senior appointments, she added. "A man would start with women he knows. In some fields, lists of women are available. You must ferret people out."

Some schools hire professional recruiters to focus on searches, rather than expecting faculty to handle it. "This is a tough job," Bailyn said. "It’s hard for a faculty member to do it, even with good intent."

AACSB accreditation standards also are an incentive for increasing women’s visibility, both in front of the classroom and in leadership roles. The standards state that, "The institution should demonstrate continuous efforts to achieve demographic diversity among students, faculty and staff." And an accreditation guideline confirms that "recruitment and selection practices should include efforts to achieve demographic diversity in the faculty consistent with the school’s mission and student population."

Having institutional sensitivity to the issue of gender equity and the other issues that come along with it isn’t a progressive concept, says Jack Keane, Gillen Dean Emeritus at Notre Dame and professor of strategic management. "It is the fair thing to do; it has to do with honesty and integrity." He left the deanship in 1997, after almost nine years and a 50% increase in women faculty. Keane’s successor is Carolyn Woo.

Hurdles of Academia
Even when an institution strives for equity, traditions die hard. Entrenched habits, practices and expectations developed many years ago by and for men don’t often work as easily for women — or even for younger men, whose role in family life may be different.

"All the procedures, images, routines, practices are based on male characteristics," Bailyn said. "It is an unintentional bias against seeing women as fitting into these positions. It’s unconscious and women share it, as well as men. But it makes it tough. It is the notion that women have to be better to be there."

Success in academia requires jumping hurdles, both spoken and unspoken. In schools where tradition runs deep, women sometimes can’t easily learn what the hurdles are.

"Some of the rules are not known to women," Smart said. "They may not be known to men either, but they affect women disproportionately because more men have been here longer, and are already tenured and promoted."

The timing of the tenure process today also has an inconvenient parallel to another significant event in life, said Bentley’s Flynn. "When you get out of graduate school, get a full-time job, then you have five or six years while you are writing away. Then you think, ‘Wait a minute, how old am I? When am I going to have those kids?’" Making decisions about marriage, children and child rearing is one of the most difficult balancing acts. "There are particular stretches when it is easier to have a child," Woo said. "During the dissertation years, you can research and write and you aren’t teaching; so you have flexibility in your schedule."

The tenure clock rule is one that males could manage, even if it is difficult. Some institutions allow that clock to be stopped for a few years for childbirth, childcare or family leave. But if the clock cannot be stopped, women are most often the ones who have to punch out early.

"There’s no question that academia is addressing this, to some degree, with more family friendly policies around tenure," Olian said. "Major universities now will add to your tenure clock, if you have had some significant family burden. That is a big deal."

The demand for a certain type of research project is a stumbling block at least for some women, says Cathy Curran, an assistant professor of marketing at Creighton University. Curran recently conducted a small survey of marketing academics to discover gender issues, similar to one done by the Chronicle of Higher Education in 1997.

"Women seem more drawn to programmatic research and big holistic projects that take more time to complete and are more complicated," Curran said. "This is not the best course of research for tenure because you are not putting enough things out. For many women, the demand for quantity over quality is a real issue. The tenure requirement to be publishing doesn’t fit the type of research they wanted to do.

"I’ve talked to women at pressure cooker universities," Curran said, "where you have to have top level journal hits every year. They aren’t taken seriously if they have to go home, make dinner and take care of their kids."

Another barrier is an inability to gain entry to research projects. "A lot of faculties now have a woman or two on them, but they tend to be newer," Curran said. "Senior faculty tend to be men. They have the access to resources for research and consulting. New male faculty can be rolled in more easily." Invitations to basketball games, golf games, overnight consulting trips tend to include new male faculty while excluding female faculty.

Women also may be assigned more often to service-type committees that take time but provide nothing of research value. "When we do our contract renewal, our promotion and tenure package, we also are explicit on the service activities of individuals. We cannot overload our junior people, particularly women and minorities with too many service activities," Woo said. "We do a special report just to make sure we didn’t misuse people."

The question of taking service assignments keeps coming up at the Affinity Group sessions to develop women’s career skills, Flynn agreed. Women take on service responsibilities that don’t provide the skills or build visibility in the business community, so they didn’t feel prepared for higher positions. "People need to think about which committees to volunteer for," Flynn said. "It is important to do service and volunteer, but volunteer for the tenure committee, or do volunteer work with the chamber of commerce to connect with the business community."

Linda Garceau, b-dean at East Tennessee State University, said ETSU is studying its promotion and tenure guidelines and trying to define what it takes to be promoted. "We don’t put a cap on the numbers tenured," she said, "so we don’t have quite the level of cut-throat competition."

Cultural Climate
A school’s culture also has a profound impact on how welcome or unwelcome women educators feel and how they can perform. And, the topic of culture may be the most sensitive because it is so subtle and intangible.

A high professional profile discourages both men and women from bringing up personal issues. But if those issues must be addressed and dealt with to further the professional career, a woman can be stuck in a Catch-22. "Isolation" as an academic is an emotional topic that a predominantly male organization isn’t likely to discuss. Yet, feeling isolated in one’s chosen career, women said, is difficult to overcome. "There is a feeling of marginalization," Bailyn said. "You are just not one of the gang. But that certainly is improving."

"You have to get beyond a token to have a comfort level in the culture," Olian said. "If it is only a token, the existing culture won’t make it easy for either the token or for the rest of the people in the culture to accept. There is a comfort threshold — you have to go beyond one or two."

The availability of role models is critical. If senior faculty are men, a female tenure-track faculty member may have difficulty envisioning how her life will work. "This is a workplace, like any other," Olian said. "If women incur more of a burden — either by choice or necessity — they drop out."

Perhaps indicating how invisible the issue can be for men, UC-Berkeley’s Hermalin did not think the presence of a woman dean affected the recruitment of women. But, he added, a female colleague told him that a woman candidate remarked on how great it was to see women in positions of authority in the school. The b-dean at UC-Berkeley is Laura D’Andrea Tyson.

Having strong mentors also is critical. Many were fortunate to have generous mentors, both male and female, but they recognize that is not always the case.

Smart believes that senior male faculty got used to working with male junior faculty and simply aren’t as comfortable with women.

Keane observed that as dean at Notre Dame, he noted an early reluctance for men to mentor women, but he could not afford to be too heavy-handed with senior, established people because that would foster resistance. "Men on the faculty would say, ‘My door is open to men or women any time,’" he said. "But they forgot what a gap it is for a woman going to see senior faculty members with lots of years difference, rank difference, sex difference. I would encourage both parties to overcome this gap, and as women became more prevalent it got easier to do that."

Networking opportunities can be missing for females, not because the social dynamic is discriminatory, said Woo, but because they are different. As a young mother and faculty member, Woo ran errands at lunch, while her colleagues went to the gym together. "Female and male rhythms and schedules in academic life are different." One faculty member noted that she had no trouble networking when she was a junior faculty member, nor did two other women on the faculty. She suspects the reason was that all three of them were married to fellow faculty members, who kept them informed about what was going on.

Curran agreed. The issue of women being left out of mentoring or networking opportunities is a blind spot for male faculty. "It is unspoken and unconscious. If you raise the issue, men often say, ‘We have never excluded you,’ They just don’t see it."

Another unconscious aspect of the business school culture has been the practice of conducting interviews in hotel rooms. This issue came up during a panel discussion on gender issues in academia at the 1999 AMA Winter Educators Conference.

"For many women, an interview in a hotel room is a threatening and bizarre environment," Curran said. Having to do an interview with three men in a room with a bed, and sometimes having to sit on the bed, is inappropriate and unprofessional.

As a result of that panel discussion, Curran said, the AMA changed its practice, so that interviews were done in suites or public places.

Individual Issues and Choices 
The perception exists that women often have weaknesses in certain areas that are critical to success in academia. Career planning/choices, networking and self-promotion are three skills that women must develop themselves in order to move upward on a career ladder.

One of Woo’s concerns is that women sometimes make poor decisions on the administrative track. They might take a job as a center director or assistant dean for undergraduate counseling, or associate director for an executive education program, and get off the scholarship track. "The danger is that you may do well in administrative roles," Woo said, "but as you rise, particularly in strong, academic schools, they will want someone who has gone through the whole experience of academia, so there is a possibility of hitting a glass ceiling later." Going into administration early, without tenure, and then trying to go back to frontline positions is hard, she said.

The ability to network and promote oneself often is missing among women. Keane was astonished when he would go to the women’s discussions at AACSB conferences and offer himself as a support person. "Only one person sought me out! Where is the assertiveness?," he asked. "Here is a dean of a reasonably respectable school, Notre Dame, good size, pretty well known, and only one person comes to me."

"We haven’t had a good enough base group to work from," said Barbara Nemecek, dean at the College of Business, Montana State University-Billings. "I don’t think we learned the networking skills the way men have. We are just beginning to learn."

Balancing also is a skill that is difficult to maintain going through the Ph.D. and tenure hurdles. How does a woman handle the opportunity to move to another faculty position, if she has a husband who needs employment? Or what does she do if her husband is transferred? Stay where she is, or settle for moving to another school that might not be as favorable to her career? In urban areas the decision might not be so difficult, but many universities are located outside of major population areas. And that can be a major detour on a career path.

Garceau took the East Tennessee State deanship, leaving Cleveland State University and establishing a commuter marriage with her husband, who is a CFO. "It will probably stay a commuter marriage." They alternate two weekends in Cleveland and Tennessee, flip a coin for the third one and use the fourth to work. "It works very well for us," she said. But she has lost women faculty, for whom it didn’t work so well.

"Women who have Ph.D.s and are on the tenure track make choices to a greater extent than their male peers due to work/balance issues, and they assume a disproportionate share of that division," Olian said. "You see women stepping off the tenure track, either before or after they make tenure, to a greater extent than do men, just as you see more women executives and managers stepping off the upward mobility track, in the aggregate."

Montana’s Nemecek first switched her career from retailing to education to accommodate her husband’s international travel. She later moved from the University of Minnesota, after 20 years on the faculty, to be a department chair at the University of Nebraska at Kearney. She then learned her husband wasn’t being transferred after all. She spent more than three years operating two households and managing a commuter marriage.

"I think a lot of female career paths sort of evolve more than are fully planned," Nemecek said. "I was into my career 25 years when I made the most conscientious decision of my career to become a dean."

Women’s ability to promote one’s self is being practiced in some Cal State schools, Curran said. They have begun a woman’s support group that encourages members to apply for associate deanships and chaired positions as they open up. "The group assures women that they are just as qualified; they simply need to get proper sponsorship."

Flynn surveyed women deans to find out how they got where they are. "The women deans exhibited a wide variety of career paths to becoming dean. Also, it was amazing how many were not even applying for the job when they were approached by either a search committee or an administrator in their school and asked to enter the pool."

What Next to Advance Equity? 
For some of the women who have been on management faculty or in administration for many years, the progress of gender equity has been slow.

"For a long time we thought that time would take care of things," Bailyn said. "And now it is perfectly clear that time alone will not take care of it. Now one has to move on a different tack, and that is tough because it has to do with assumptions and attitudes."

On the male side, there is some impatience, too. "I just wish that women who aspire to administrative or faculty positions would turn up the heat a little more," Keane said. "Just kick it up a notch and get there. And they will get there. There is nothing like persistence."

Woo noted several things that will help women advance. One is the increasing practice of stopping the tenure clock so that women don’t have to choose the family or career ladder. They can do both. She also believes women should not rush the research process after they finish their Ph.D. program. Building up a headwind and some momentum in their research will pay off. "The toughest time is really pre-tenure, and how you manage that stretch is very important."

A positive influence for business education that other male-dominated fields may not experience, said Ashford, is the breadth of disciplines and that academicians are exposed to management thought.

"You can’t avoid the fact that diversity is a big issue in management right now. Faculty come to think, ‘How diverse are we?’"

Flynn cites companies like Deloitte & Touche, which says businesses should hire women, not because it is "good," but because it is "good for" business. The company has had top-down training sessions and has helped identify women prospects.

The AACSB Women Administrators in Management Education affinity group is helping to formalize some of the informal training work that some women educators have been doing for years, Flynn volunteered. Instead of women just getting together for a once-a-year thing, the groups reach out to deans, associate deans, and others. They are meeting and having sessions throughout the year.

"We have to admit that the ‘good old boys network’ really works," Nemecek said. "As females, we have not been able to develop that. But I think now we are beginning to learn the system, how it works, why it works and how to make it work better."