Abstract
Gender Transformation in the Academy features diverse feminist perspectives on enduring aspects of gender inequality/inequity in academia with strategies for transforming policies, procedures, and practices. All 19 engaging and informative chapters focus on women faculty or administrators and managers, the enduring gendered issues in academic careers, and the ways progressive change can manifest. While the United States is the context for most of the volume, the editors include chapters reflecting academic life for women faculty or administrators in Australia, Austria, Portugal, South Africa, and Sweden as well as differing academic settings: predominantly undergraduate institutions (PUIs), research-intensive universities, and community colleges. Contributing authors employ varied methods including online surveys, focus groups, institutional data, interviews, and case studies, allowing readers to explore the realities of gender inequality from different methodological vantage points. Many chapters focus on STEM fields as particularly obstinate spaces where women’s satisfaction and success is often slower or impeded. In fact, the research in the majority of chapters is supported by NSF ADVANCE grants, which in large part aim to increase the recruitment, retention, and advancement of women in STEM fields.
The book is divided into three sections covering a considerable scope of academic career pathways: (1) family–work; (2) recognition, generational differences, and advancement; and (3) bias and leadership. Each section weaves together additional themes prevalent in social science research on academia such as gendered organizations and the “ideal worker/professor,” unconscious bias, and critical mass. Each chapter—clearly written and accessible to a wide audience—can stand alone; chapters do not build on each other or connect intentionally. However, a key strength is in the totality of what the breadth of chapters evidences about gender in the academy. For example, across sections select chapters concentrate on departments as instrumental for faculty satisfaction, advancement, and equitable gender representation. This recurring focus provides important information to department leaders about their role in shaping immediate climates that reproduce or resist gender inequality in work–family, advancement and promotion, the ways in which academic careers are gendered, and inclusive decision making.
While some research is familiar to scholars of gender in academia, chapters provide “twists” to the extant research, such as persistent organizational bias against caregiving, even when men are caregivers. Or, evidence that academic parents navigate caregiving bias by carving “third paths” against dominant expectations, thereby changing cultures through their resistance. Interestingly, women’s networks are not smaller or less dense than men’s, even in STEM fields, but women are dissatisfied with their networks. In addition, critical mass arguments need nuancing because change is “incremental” as women’s representation increases, and “experiences of tokenism, sexual harassment, and other discrimination . . . are independent of the proportion of women within the department” (p. 371).
Each chapter contributes to deeper understandings of academic lives through evidence of accumulated disadvantages, bias, outright discrimination, and gendered organizational policies and practices. Some provide novel insights into, for example, how disciplinary societies’ awards may undermine women’s achievements in STEM fields, or the unique pressures for parents in increasingly internationalizing STEM fields, or how the values of faculty life, premised on autonomy and flexibility, effectively obscure the ubiquity of bias and discrimination and frame issues of inequity and inequality as personal decisions to be managed individually. The illusion of choice on matters ranging from service commitments to parenting can “exacerbate the unwillingness to treat [these issues] as anything more than another choice about how to allocate one’s time” (p. 146).
Although more sustained attention to the experiences of women of color faculty would be beneficial, the global perspective is an appreciated departure from similar books. Authors present familiar patterns of inequality and inequity across differing international contexts, demonstrating how national sociopolitical structures can provide frameworks for understanding disparate patterns of gender representation in academic ranks. Most research does not allow for the important international comparisons some authors in this volume provide, or that readers can make across these chapters.
Regarding transformation, chapter authors study intervention efforts, offer suggestions from their research, or provide concrete steps for change. Many focus on departmental interventions to, for example, improve women’s career satisfaction and advancement, address implicit bias, train chairpersons to provide information and transparency on promotion or tenure criteria and processes, or create alternative paths to full professor that value service and teaching, thereby addressing the often-overlooked “stalling” for many women associate professors. Policy change is highlighted as key, particularly with respect to work–family integration. Yet, the chapters together underscore that transformation must occur at the policy and structural level and within institutional cultures and climates.
The editors and contributing authors provide hope (and evidence) that a better, more equitable academy is possible. As such, it is required reading for scholars of gender in the academy, graduate students aspiring to or studying academic careers, administrators, and faculty living the experiential realities covered in the book. It is an important contribution to understanding gender in the academy, and paths to transformation.