Abstract
Purpose:
We assessed citation impact scholarship of women in the top 25-ranked schools of social work in the United States.
Method:
We used a mixed methodology. Part 1 was a secondary data analysis of the top-25 U.S. News and World Report ranked schools from 2012 using the Hirsch h-index over a 10-year period. Qualitative interviews were conducted with graduates from top-ranked schools. We then examined the faculty websites.
Results:
The mean h-score was 18.64. The majority of these women were employed at the University of Washington (n = 6), followed by Columbia University and the Universities of Southern California (n = 3, respectively), Michigan, and California at Berkeley (n = 2, respectively).
Discussion:
The overall impact scores for these women are significant and speak to a number of factors including negotiating long-standing systemic and structural variables. We continue to describe elements of research cultures, which are essential to our profession’s academic development in today’s corporate university cultures.
Keywords
This is the fifth successive study in our knowledge-building journey assessing the citation impact scholarship of social work faculty in top-ranked schools of social work (Barner, Holosko, & Thyer, 2013; Barner, Holosko, Thyer, & King, 2015; Holosko & Barner, 2014; Huggins-Hoyt, Holosko, Briggs, & Barner, 2014). The present study acknowledges the leadership and scholarship of female academics in the top-ranked schools of social work in America.
In general, the literature on female academics in higher education, and particularly in social work, is fraught with various problems and limitations. For example, the well-regarded National Center for Education Statistics (NCES; https://nces.ed.gov/) in the United States, which serves as a repository for educational data, did not start tracking the variable gender among higher education faculty until 1986. While it contained information regarding university faculty demographics from 1970, only since 1986 did it provide information based on faculty appointments as full- or part time, gender, whether they worked at a public or private institutions, and whether or not the institution was 2 year or 4 year (NCES, 2015a). Additionally, these data are aggregated and not integrated with any subgroups that allow for easy comparisons. This was also noted in the largest social work study of female academics (N = 3,606) in the literature by Sakamoto, Anastes, McPhail, and Colarossi (2008). These authors echoed this sentiment by stating: “one of the most sticky differences we encountered was the various limitations of available data on social work faculty members by gender, rank, and minority status as well as on their earning and the nature of their work” (p. 55).
The U.S. Department of Labor, Bureau of Statistics (American Federation of Labor and Congress of Industrial Organizations [AFL-CIO], 2014) recently revealed that while women made up approximately 47% of the general workforce, they accounted for approximately 51% of the professional and technical workforce, which includes academia. However, within professorial rankings in 2011, males accounted for 306,557 of faculty and females accounted for 204,196 of faculty, a 40% difference between the two favoring males. Consequently, for nonprofessorial rankings, males accounted for 120,425 of faculty and women accounted for 130,041 of faculty, an 8% difference between the two, favoring females (NCES, 2015b).
Females in Higher Education
Females have a number of gender-based issues they must deal with in higher education. Foremost, gender inequalities are often cited using a top-down approach as a way to highlight various ways that they are formed and maintained (Froyum, 2010). A perennial point noted about this was the nature versus nurture debate (Collins, 2005; Jeanes, 2007; Parcheta, Kaifi, & Khanfar, 2013; Wiranto, 2013). While men are academically socialized and often considered to be more assertive, dominant, and self-oriented, women are considered to be passive, warm, nurturing, emotional, and friendly (Annavarapu, 2013; Di Palma, 2005; Parcheta et al., 2013). Overall, the literature revealed that women in academia face a variety of personal, structural, systemic, and gender-based challenges related to but not limited to several long-standing issues such as sexual discrimination (Brown, Caraway, Brady, Iwamasa, & Caldwell-Colbert, 2002; Jones & Taylor, 2013), racial discrimination (Anastas, 2007; Patton, 2009), pay inequality (Bent-Goodley & Sarnoff, 2008; Philipsen, 2010; Sowers-Hoag & Harrison, 1991), lack of promotion to higher ranks and administrative posts (Jones & Taylor, 2013; Lease, 1999; Sanders, Willemsen, & Millar, 2009; Sowers-Hoag & Harrison, 1991), balancing one’s work and personal life (Brown et al., 2002; Jones & Taylor, 2013; Lease, 1999; Mason, 2015; Philipsen, 2010; Young & Holley, 2005; Young & Wright, 2001), shorter career trajectory paths due to relocation and child care responsibilities (Fox & Dwyer, 1999; Jones & Taylor, 2013; Philipsen, 2010), unique forms of faculty stress such as social isolation (Patton, 2009; Smith & Calasanti, 2005), and underrepresentation in science, technology, engineering, and math disciplines (Bird & Rhoton, 2011; Hill, Corbett, St. Rose, & American Association of University Women, 2010; Mason, 2015; McCullough, 2011; Pollack, 2013).
Women also have difficulties obtaining viable mentorship from other women (Patton, 2009), deemed as womentoring in the literature. Fox, Fonseca, and Bao (2011) pointed out that the role of faculty is highly salient to one’s personal identity, therefore, navigating the academic ocean can be extremely difficult and anxiety raising without proper mentorship (Howard, 2009). This is exacerbated by performance evaluations that are characterized as being rather absolute and subjective. In other words, the evaluative process is vague, the appraisal process is inferential, and the decision for tenure is judgmental (Fox, Fonseca, & Bao, 2011). Philipsen (2010) stated: junior [female] faculty members need to establish themselves professionally, and those on the tenure track are often plagued by nebulous and ever increasing expectations of what it means to be worthy of institutional commitment. Many are not clear about how to design a life path that allows them to have both a career and a family, if they so desire. (p. 17)
Women in Social Work Academia
Selected data on social work education in the United States are reported by the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) on their website www.cswe.org. The earliest data collected in 2007 reported in 2008, and the most recent in 2013 provides an overview of faculty composition. In 2007, there were 8,590 full-time (4,635) and part-time (3,955) social work faculty members. The report provides information on 3,066 of the full-time faculty and underscored the notion that 66.7% were female and 33.3% were male. Comparatively, in 2013, there were 11,425 full-time (4,981) and part-time (6,444) faculty. There were 1,519 (30.6%) males who were full-time faculty and 1,769 (27.6%) males who were part-time faculty. As for females, there were 3,447 (69.4%) full-time faculty and 4,636 (27.6%) part-time faculty (CSWE, 2008).
As recommended by Holosko (2006), for this review, we selected articles written within the last decade and found 10 published studies about female academics in social work. It was surprising to us from this scant literature that women are still fighting for equal access to higher positions in social work, a field that advocates for fair and equitable treatment for all, regardless of demographics like those cited earlier (National Association of Social Workers, 2015; Sakamoto, Anastes, McPhail, & Colarossi, 2008). Despite all efforts, it is argued that the persistence of stereotypical gender roles ascribed to women continue to make their ascension up professorial ranks difficult (Jones & Taylor, 2013).
Although many issues cited earlier as real barriers and challenges to women in academia were noted, they often became manifested differently in social work departments. For instance, a few studies noted the issue of pay inequity in schools of social work, despite the gains made nationally in equal opportunity initiatives in American universities (Bent-Groodley & Sarnoff, 2008). When controlling for rank, degree, publications, experiences, and ethnicity, women were often undercompensated, a trend that surprisingly has not changed for years. In fact, researchers exploring pay inequity (Anastas, 2007; Sakamoto et al., 2008) presented data to suggest that females in social work made between US$3,000 and US$8,000 less than their equivalently qualified male counterparts.
While there are more women compared to men receiving advanced social work degrees, women are still disproportionately charged with performing normative gender roles that include, but are not limited to, making sacrifices for their families (i.e., relocating for their partners/spouses), negotiating the everyday nuances associated with child and/or family care, maintaining and taking care of the household, and other family planning events (Bent-Goodley & Sarnoff, 2008; Fox et al., 2011; Holley & Young, 2005; Young & Holley, 2005). For example, Holley and Young (2005) reported that 90% of 11 caregiving issues of female social work faculty included requests for leave time to take care of children or elderly family members. Young and Wright (2001) posited that when entering the working world, men completed a 50-hour work week, while women completed an 80-hour work week, as they have to work more to balance their home and work lives. As such, the decision to choose a tenure track position hinges on such family demands, and an individual’s ability to perform the job with needed familial and/or social supports (Bent-Goodley & Sarnoff, 2008).
As indicated earlier, the issue of proper mentoring was problematic for female faculty in social work. While most women do not have formal mentors at their host university, many form informal support groups in their work unit in order to ease the pressures of publishing, teaching, and achieving tenure. These informal support groups provided helpful insights about how to find more efficient home and work life balances (Bent-Goodley & Sarnoff, 2008; Simon et al., 2004). Other women reach across to other universities to be “womentered.” As noted by Young and Holley (2005), women in social work faculty try to situate themselves in positions that may enhance their productivity and career trajectory.
The purpose of this study was to assess citation impact scholarship of women in the top 25-ranked schools of social work in the United States. We sought the answer to one simple question: Who were the high impact female scholars in our top-ranked schools?
Method
Sample
The top 25-ranked schools of social work were obtained from the U.S. News and World Report (USNWR; 2012) website http://www.usnews.com/education. The USNWR analyzes data from various academic programs in North American colleges and universities every 4 years. From these top 25-ranked schools, h-indices were derived from eligible scholars comprising the study sample. The sample included female faculty holding full, associate, and assistant professorships at all of the top 25 schools of social work. Faculty with part-time or adjunct status and serving primarily in administrative capacities were excluded from these data due to low expectations and opportunities for conducting research (Barner et al., 2015). In the fall of 2014, the h-index for each eligible identified scholar was obtained from the Publish or Perish software with an “Author Impact” search criteria for publications found in the past 10 years (2004–2014). We used the cutoff point of >12 as the benchmark to determine the top 25 scholars in this ranking. It should be noted that the reported h-indices represent only the last 10-year span (2004–2014) of scholarship, not the lifetime accumulated h-index of the scholars.
In addition to these quantitative data, we interviewed five recent (within the past 4 years) graduates from the schools in which the largest number of these scholars were employed. The purpose of these interviews was to collect additional open-ended data on the scholarship environments of these five schools which included University of Washington, University of Southern California, Columbia University, University of California–Berkeley, and the University of Michigan. Finally, here, we also assessed the websites of each scholar to discern any additional information about research and productivity.
Data Analysis and Metrics for Scholarly Productivity
The h-index created by physicist Jorge Hirsch in 2005 is defined as, “if h of [a scholar’s] Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np – h) papers have ≤ h citations each” (p. 1). In other words, an h-index of 10 means an author has published 10 papers that have each been cited at least 10 times (Barner et al., 2013; Hodge & Lacasse, 2011; Lacasse, Hodge, & Bean, 2011). In short, this index is a composite of two factors, the number of papers published and number of citations per paper and presents a cumulative “career-long achievement” indicator that recognizes the most cited scholarship as being the most impactful (Lacasse et al., 2011). Hirsch’s h was obtained from Publish or Perish which generates 18 bibliometric and scientometric indicators interfacing with the result set of a publication search in Google Scholar, regarded as the most widely used database housing published literature available (Jacsó, 2009).
Limitations of the Data
Despite some methodological limitations and criticism, for example, self-citation biases, its accounting of more recent publications, the time at which it is used in an author’s publishing life often has parameters (e.g., 5 or 10 years), which may delimit one’s true career impact score, it provides a well-regarded and acceptable bibliometric to be used to assess individual faculty h-index citation impact. Another prominent limitation is that h ignores any influential papers above one’s actual h value, as this serves as the cutoff point for the computation. For example, a scholar may have an h-index of 5 and have a publication cited over 200 times in 1 year; however, the overall computed h will not change to 6 until 6 publications are cited a minimum of 6 times.
Additionally, in the data collection for this article, a phenomenon impacting the calculation and analysis is the issue of inaccurate or variant citations for individuals. As Harzing (2010) noted, Google Scholar along with other citation databases may include variations in references to the same item, resulting in some inflation of source data used by the metric. This study does not control for variance due to this phenomenon. Moreover, h metrics for individual authors may also contain similar variance due to lags in publication of articles in which their work is cited, the overall time elapsing between initial data collection and analysis, and variance in search terms used in metric calculations (Holden, Rosenberg, Barker, & Onghena, 2006; Lacasse et al., 2011). The calculation of the h-index, its variants, companion statistics, its interfacing with Google Scholar, and its free Publish or Perish software developed by Harzing (2010) provided us with an acceptable platform from which our five prior studies were conducted using the same data set in our knowledge-building journey.
It is important to note that, for the purposes of this study, h provides a snapshot of scholarly productivity for female scholars in the USNWR top 25 institutions. It in no way represents lifetime scholarly impact or achievement, and a perusal of additional data sets, such as Google Scholar profiles or Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) Web of Science could potentially produce differing metrics and/or values. Moreover, both articles and citations calculated by the h fall within the time frame of the analysis, from 2004 to 2014.
Results
Table 1 reports on the ranked h-indices of citation impact of females (N = 25) in our top 25 schools by USNWR.
h-Index (2004–2014) for Female Women Faculty in USNWR Top Schools of Social Work.
Note. N = 25. Overall, M = 18.64, SD = 9.79, Ra = 38.
aDenotes a private institution.
As indicated in Table 1, h-indices for these women ranged from 13 to 45. The M = 18.64, SD = 9.79, with an R a = 32. Also, in Table 1, 12 of the 25 faculties or 48% were employed at private universities. We used an independent t-test to compare private versus public and found no significant difference between these universities. The University of Washington ranked 4th by USNWR, had six scholars on this list, followed by Universities of Columbia and Southern California, ranking 5th and 13th, respectively, each had three female scholars. The University of Michigan and the University of California–Berkeley each had two scholars in Table 1.
Additional qualitative data about these scholars gleaned from their websites revealed that 16 of the 25 or 64% held academic positions that were named chairs, and 22 of the 25 or 88% were full professors. When we explored where they completed their final degrees, the University of Michigan ranked first with six (or 24%), followed by the University of Washington with four (or 16%), and California–Berkeley had two (or 8%) graduates. Their websites also revealed that 11 or 44% of these scholars were employed at the same universities where they graduated with their final degrees.
Discussion
We noted several findings requiring discussion. The first was how difficult it was to obtain and access reliable trend data on female academics in general and female social work academics in particular. Our foray into these piecemeal, incomplete, nonrecorded, and aggregated data sets was reminiscent of the children’s picture book game Where’s Waldo? This was indeed rather frustrating to say the least, in particular for a profession committed to representing women and diversity issues at all levels of education and training.
We were pleased to report that 69% and 72% of the full- or part-time faculty members, respectively, in these schools of social work were women (CSWE, 2015). Historically, social work was developed and led by a cadre of women who shaped its practice, research, professional socialization and in the communities where we practice our craft. Since records were kept by CSWE in 1951 about who enters social work, when, and why (Pins, 1963), the profession has had an 8:1 female to male ratio. Although statistics are not generally broken down about clients in our fields of practice, it would be safe to say that the majority of our clients are also women (Klineberg, Biddle, Donovan, & Gunnell, 2011; Oliver, Pearson, Coe, & Gunnell, 2005). So we are a female-centric profession anyway you look at it, and the continued growth of women faculty in this data set reflected this reality.
The literature also revealed that women in academia face a host of long-standing structural and systemic barriers in today’s universities. These present as formative challenges that hinder both their capacities to balance work and personal lives and mitigate their career trajectories to higher academic ranks and salaries. It appeared the literature we reviewed seemed content to simply table these issues and not offer many constructive offsetting strategies to address them. Oftentimes, they were minimized as simply being “part of the life of a female academic—and women just have to learn to live with them.” One exemplary exception to this was the pioneering and landmark work done by Mary-Ann Mason at the University of California–Berkeley who changed university policy related to balancing work and personal life for primarily female employees through the Schools of Law and Social Work (http://www.law.berkeley.edu/3133.htm) and across the university (http://www.uhs.berkeley.edu/worklife/worklifeoffice.shtml).
Given that 64% of this sample held named chairs and 88% were full professors, we deemed that these female scholars epitomized leadership and serve as role models for other aspiring female scholars in schools of social work. In short, these were demonstrably “the best of the best” female faculty in our profession in this study, although there may have been many others who were not noted, as they were not on the top USNWR top 25 list.
We were also pleased to note from their websites that 3 (or 12%) of these scholars were African American females (Hoyt et al., 2014). This bodes well and as indicated in the literature, they had to contend minimally with three systemic and structural barriers which included working in male-dominated domains, working as members of a 1% unrepresented minority among African American’s in academia, and having the likelihood of fewer same race mentors in their respective social work units and departments in which they worked. Indeed, this cohort of female faculty not only dealt effectively with these formidable challenges and barriers on a daily basis but overachieved in their national and international research and scholarship.
In reading the faculty websites of all these women at their respective universities, we noted some interesting trends. The first was that the top quartile of these scholars, routinely published in interdisciplinary venues both within their own academic units and across universities, nationally and internationally. This cross-departmental trend resulted in higher impact citation counts for these scholars and correlated with top-ranked international journals and collaborations with other highly cited coauthors. It was indeed encouraging to note the resultant impact of their work at national and international levels. Additionally, in the websites of these top five scholars, we noted an interesting trend related to where their degrees were completed and what types of degrees were obtained. Of the five baccalaureate degrees achieved, only one was in social work, and in the three master’s degrees, two were in social work. In their final degree, one was in medicine, one was in clinical psychology, one was in public policy, and two were in social work. We contend that, in the “reaching across” disciplinary phenomena described earlier, higher research productivity bearing greater citational impact scores exceeded those found in social work, when career length was not considered.
We believe the working hypothesis presented in our two previous articles (Barner et al., 2015; Holosko & Barner, 2014) indicating that having a research culture in a school of social work matters was further advanced by these data. The qualitative interviews conducted added additional insights about the actual elements of the research cultures in which these women worked. Independent of each other, all five graduates interviewed claimed that a vibrant and active research culture and infrastructure was “part and parcel” of the reputation of the universities where they received their doctorates. When asked about the elements of their research infrastructures, they specifically mentioned: the existence of high-quality professors who were research minded; resources available both within the school and the university at large to promote continuing research and scholarship; opportunities for collaboration to work with senior research faculty who had international reputations [like these top scholars]; opportunities to work with top-quality scholars who held large and/or continuing grants in topical and timely areas of study; the expectation for incoming doctoral students to be inculcated into the research and scholarship enterprise of the work unit as quickly as possible; opportunities for active and ongoing research mentorship; the expectation for doctoral students to take additional research methods courses to work on various projects either now, or in the immediate future; the expectation for doctoral students to publish while completing their doctoral degrees; student expectations to publish in top-impact journals; and the expectation that all scholarship conducted was to direct and inform our practitioners and/or clients.
In our previous work, we contended that a missing ingredient in any social work program’s research culture was the issue of senior research mentorship, and this was mentioned earlier as were others. Howard (2009) in his invited poignant and rather sermonic “letter to a young researcher” mentioned a few of these noted important factors. He also stated that “there are hundreds of social work schools and departments but few actively support a high active research life” (2009, p. 296). We contend that he was correct in this assertion and offers some additional data to corroborate this statement.
The data we wish to add about “what is included in a research culture in a school of social work” were the rather surprising finding that 11 or 44% of these females in the top-ranked schools of the country were gainfully employed in the universities from where they had graduated. It would be safe to assume, based on this finding that these universities by default, had research cultures within their degree programs, where these women were educated, trained, and then developed their own subsequent research minded career trajectories. As such, institutions like the University of Washington, the University of Michigan, Columbia University, the University of Southern California, and the University of California–Berkeley which housed 16 or 64% of these faculty, in our perception, could be deemed as having pervasive research cultures and infrastructures that obviously support female faculty.
If one was to reframe this notion from a student’s perspective, think of it from a prospective doctoral student’s lens. Not to disparage any of these highly ranked universities mentioned earlier, let’s look at the university where the majority of these women were employed, the University of Washington (with six). A prospective PhD female student visits the School of Social Work there, and she first notices the number of females on faculty (66%). Second, she realizes that there are many positive female senior faculty role models working there in the areas of research, scholarship, and teaching. Upon further observations and discussions on the site visit, she comes to realize that this is a university fully committed to the enterprise of research and scholarship. The final culminating point about the attraction of this university is that 6 of the top 25 female scholars in the nation have a good chance to be her professor, and 4 of the same women who graduated with doctorates from this university still work there. Indeed, if the student is so inclined to pursue a career in a female-friendly environment that promotes research and scholarship led by national leaders, she has obviously come to the doorstep of the correct university.
In sum, we applaud these 25 women for their exemplary leadership, scholarship, and research which has advanced the profession of social work for years to come. All have overcome historical, systemic barriers, and challenges and have not just “negotiated them” but have leapt over them. To date, the literature has not adequately defined a research culture in schools of social work; however, the encouragement to constantly build a better research culture has been the prevailing rhetoric. We feel that this article adds to the critical mass of delineating from both a female faculty and student perspective, the additional elements of a positive research culture based on the actual infrastructures of the top-ranked schools in the country.
Footnotes
Authors’ Note
This invited article was reviewed and accepted by the Editor of Research on Social Work Practice.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The authors received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
