Faculty promotion evaluation and gender equity in business schools

Abstract

This article aims to address the fairness of promotion evaluation (appointments to the rank of full professor) process in Canadian business schools as perceived by tenured business female faculty. Our analysis is underscored by two studies with two different data collection methods (survey data analysis, policy content analysis) and driven by procedural justice as the main theoretical lens. The first study addresses the perspective of our survey participants (N=198) by revealing that they believe the process of promotion evaluations is fair. Intrigued by this result, we undertook a second study to review the language of faculty collective agreements in these schools to explain partially why our participants believe in the fairness of promotion evaluations. The language of these faculty collective agreements suggests that the above result makes sense considering that they regulate promotion evaluations and decisions. However, this does not mean that the process of faculty promotions is free of gender discrimination as these faculty collective agreements have not addressed all the antecedents and predictors of gender inequity per se.

The findings of this article are relevant because the issue of the underrepresentation of female faculty as related to promotion in senior academic ranks in Canadian business schools is under-researched. The existing studies on faculty promotion evaluations are too general and have not specifically addressed the fairness of business schools’ faculty promotion evaluation systems from the perspective of tenured business female faculty. Plus, the relevance of the findings of this article lies in the fact that contrary to most general studies on female faculty experience with promotion evaluations at Canadian universities and internationally, these findings suggest that such experience in Canadian business schools is not always associated with gender discrimination and negative perspectives among female faculty.

Keywords

Business schools gender promotion evaluation

Introduction

This research article addresses the perspective of tenured female faculty on the process of promotion evaluations in Canadian business schools as general research on gender equity shows that today’s women are still discriminated against in the workplace despite making gains in the labor market. Proponents of human capital theory such as Polachek and Siebert (1993), Powell and Butterfield (1994), Bobbit-Zeher (2011) and Bohnet et al., (2015) have attempted to explain this unfairness by arguing that staffing systems across all organizations are inherently biased against women. Bohnet et al., (2015) for instance, suggest that gender-based discrimination in hiring, promotions, and job assignments is difficult to overcome. Gender bias leads to unintentional and implicit discrimination that is not based on a rational assessment of the usefulness of gender in predicting future performance. However, these scholars also argue that in the past decades the workplace has made great strides towards equity for female employees.

A consideration of the aforesaid rationale leads us to try to respond to the question of whether tenured female faculty in business schools believes that they are unfairly rated during promotion evaluations. Herein, faculty promotion evaluations solely refer to the formal university appraisal process that tenured faculty members undergo when applying for full professorships. Gender refers to women and is used as the epicentral component to design our survey questionnaire, discuss the literature review, and analyze and interpret the findings. Fairness refers to a promotion evaluation process that is perceived by study participants as being free of incidents of gender bias discrimination. It is primarily used in relation to participants’ positive and subjective ratings of their promotion evaluation experience.

Considering that this research was conducted through two studies (quantitative and qualitative), we employed an explanatory sequential design. This method refers to a research process whereby quantitative data collection and analysis occurred first and was then followed by a qualitative data collection and analysis (McCrudden and McTigue, 2019) to support the quantitative findings of the first study.

Literature review and research rationale

Research significance

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.

The second reason is that women are underrepresented in the rank of full professor (23%) at Canadian business schools, as reported by the 2015–16 Salary Survey of the Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business (AACSB). European and US business schools are no exception to this pattern. The average percentage of all full-time female faculty, not just full professors, employed by the top 85 business schools on the Financial Times 2015 European Business School Rankings, is 33%. It is even less than that (23.3%) at the top 10 European business schools (Roseberry et al., 2016: 2). A study on AACSB member schools reveals that women are underrepresented in tenure ranks, earn less than men, progress slowly through the promotion system, and hold fewer leadership posts (Scolder-Ellen et al., 2019). Thus, the findings of a study such as ours could provide management scholars in other industrialized countries with research orientations on the intersection of gender inequity and faculty promotion in today’s business schools.

An institutional mapping of Canadian business schools

Since their establishment in 1907, Canadian business schools have been lagging in the representation of women in higher academic ranks. 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. By 1981, this figure had increased to 39% and by 1992–93 to 47% of programs (Chambers, 2015), meaning that achieving gender parity in academe is feasible. Although the ratio of female to male faculty in business schools in Canada has improved over the last decade, most of the gains have come in the lower ranks (Chambers, 2015). Today, no study has been undertaken by researchers to explain why these schools have failed to diversify their professorial workforce.

Moreover, Dyer and Devine (1988) argued over 30 years ago that the underlying factor behind this issue is the embeddedness of tokenism in the academic culture of Canadian business schools. Tokenism refers to the culture of making only a symbolic effort to do a particular thing, especially by recruiting a small number of people from underrepresented groups to give the appearance of gender or racial equality within a workforce (Kantor, 1993). Consequences of tokenism include representativeness, role encapsulation, gender stereotyping, and attributional ambiguity. Tokenism results from the context, not from the competence of the tokenized person, nor necessarily from intentional prejudices of workplace colleagues whose biases may be unconscious (Niemann, 2016: 1). Considering that the rank of full professor remains male-dominated, it is logical to assume that tokenism is still a causal factor of gender inequity today. Similarly, Canadian business schools have been accused of not doing enough to recruit women in their MBA programs. According to a recent report of the Financial Times, only two women are currently serving as deans of Canadian business schools with MBA programs (Jack, 2018). Most of the employment equity initiatives undertaken to address this issue are developed by university administrations at the central level than at the business school level. The priorities of business academic administrators (e.g., deans, department chairs) are more directed towards pushing for globalization and meeting the conditions of accreditation. This market-driven leadership model has come under criticism in the past years.

While the factors causing the underrepresentation of business female faculty in the rank of full professor have not yet been investigated by Canadian researchers, findings of studies (e.g., Minefee et al., 2018; Trevino et al., 2015) conducted on business schools by researchers outside of Canada uncover some of the causal factors that may explain this lack of gender parity. A study by Minefee et al. (2018) on the crisis of equity in AACSB member schools shows that mechanisms of social closure-discriminatory evaluation, knowledge and resource hoarding, and the preservation of dominant group identities limit the hiring and promotion of female and minority faculty. Additionally, the failure of initiatives to diversify business school administrations, faculty, and doctoral student bodies has created a leaky academic pipeline. This problem may partly explain why so few women achieve full professorships in Canadian business schools. To address the status quo, Minefee et al. (2018) suggest that the AACSB should work towards helping its accredited schools reduce social closure in academe. A critical report of gender equity in US business schools suggests that it takes longer for female faculty to be promoted to full professorships and they are less likely to be promoted to that rank (Trevino et al., 2015).

Another institutional factor contributing to gender inequity in business schools is the institutionalization of male power. Faculty gatekeepers who control promotions to senior academic positions in business schools are tenured associate and full professors, and their numbers are overwhelmingly male (Trevino et al., 2015). This gender disparity in the higher ranks of academe can lead to masculinized evaluation practices that frame promotion cases in business schools, leading to biased decision-making. In turn, this can undervalue female faculty members’ scholarly contributions that do not conform to the taken-for-granted patterns established by successful male faculty (as reported by Trevino et al., 2015: 439). Although gender parity is still lacking at the rank of full professor, there is not enough institutional commitment among business schools to address the status quo (Reilly et al., 2016).

Women in senior academic leadership

The underrepresentation of female business faculty in academic senior ranks is part of the organizational pattern entangling the bureaucratic structure of Canadian higher education, political, and corporate institutions. For example, a 2018 equity report by the Conference Board of Canada (a not-for-profit policy think tank) states that despite constituting 48% of the Canadian workforce, women are underrepresented in senior leadership across most occupations. Just 4.1% of women are board chairs in publicly traded firms while women represent 26% of members of the federal parliament elected in 2015 (Edge et al., 2018). In the academic workforce, 26% of full professors are women (CAUT, 2018). 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). In 2017, only 20% of Canadian university presidents were women, a figure that has not increased since the 1990s, and most university senior administrators and vice-presidents are men (Smith, 2017). The aforesaid statistical figures suggest that the institutional culture of Canadian academia is underscored by a glass ceiling problem.

Although it has also been pointed out in the literature on Canadian higher education that there has been steady progress towards gender equity in academia since the 1970s, a lot more needs to be done to close the gender gap today (Edge et al., 2018; Smith, 2017). To address this bureaucratic discrepancy, 77% of universities have developed equity, diversity, and inclusion plans (EDI) (Charbonneau, 2019). To monitor the implementation of their EDI plans, universities have been collecting hiring and promotion data on gender and ethnicity for incremental policy change (Universities Canada, 2019). EDI policies involve implementing anti-bias programs, mentoring programs, and equalizing the allocation of resources. Anecdotal to the existence of these EDI plans is the five-year national strategy, The Action Plan for Inclusive Excellence, adopted in 2017 by university presidents across Canada to self-monitor their diversity achievement through demographic data recording (Charbonneau, 2019; Universities Canada, 2019).

On mentoring, for instance, universities have encouraged women to stand for election to committees, Senates, and the Boards of Governors. Universities have implemented professional development plans (e.g., the Women Faculty Mentoring Program at the University of Ottawa; Women in Academic Leadership workshops) to enhance the leadership skills of female faculty (Charbonneau, 2019; Edge et al., 2018; Universities Canada, 2019). On the equitable distribution of resources, universities have tried to push for a fair pay system and attempted to increase the appointments of women in academic chair positions. On tackling issues of gender bias, some universities are providing training on unconscious bias for university governance and peer-review committee members as well as other decision-makers involved in the hiring and nomination processes (Edge et al., 2018; Universities Canada, 2019).

Adding to the development and implementation of EDI plans, universities continue to adjust their staffing policies (Charbonneau, 2019; Universities Canada, 2019) on the principles (e.g., equal pay plans, anti-harassment regulations) of their provincial labor laws (e.g., Labor Relations Act of Ontario; Pay Equity Act of Quebec; Employment Standards Act of British Columbia) and federal labor laws such as the Federal Contractors’ Program (FCP) and the Employment Equity Act (EEA). The EEA was passed in 1985 by the federal government after the 1984 Abela Commission and was amended in 1995 to achieve equality in the workplace (Agocs, 2002). However, despite the existence of EDI plans and progressive legislation, gender equity in faculty hiring and appointment to senior leadership remains elusive across Canadian universities (CAUT, 2018; Universities Canada, 2019). Arguably, the failure of business schools to increase the representativity of women in senior academic positions is an institutional problem ubiquitous to the entire Canadian higher education system.

Theoretical framework: Procedural justice

Procedural justice refers to how an allocation decision is made (as defined by Konovsky, 2000: 492). Two procedural justice theories exist, namely objective procedural justice and subjective procedural justice. Objective procedural justice refers to factual justice and subjective procedural justice refers to perceptions of objective procedures or to the capacity of an objective procedure to produce fair evaluations and decisions (Konovsky, 2000). Of these two theories, subjective procedural justice is frequently used by researchers (Cropanzano and Greenberg, 1997). For that reason, subjective procedural justice was chosen as the theoretical lens of our study.

Since the 1970s, several studies of fairness perspective by management researchers have employed subjective procedural justice as a theoretical prism. These studies (Cohen, 1985; Folger and Konovsky, 1989; McFarlin and Swenney, 1992; Taylor et al., 1995) have shown that employee perceptions of fairness are contextual and that decision control (authority to make a decision) is an important contributor to perceptions of justice. Employees are more likely to perceive that a decision is fair if they feel they have had a voice or a sense of process control. And they are more likely to accept unfavorable outcomes when they perceive that the process of arriving at the decision was fair (Cropanzano and Greenberg, 1997; Folger and Cropanzano, 2001). Perceptions of fairness are predictors of job satisfaction and employee engagement (Clair, 2015; Haynie et al., 2016). A sense of dissatisfaction with the evaluation process often leads to the development of turnover intentions. The fairness of the promotion process is a catalyst for trust-building, workplace socialization, and retention (Heslin and Van de Walle, 2011).

Today, management scholars continue to employ this theoretical lens in their study of evaluation systems and behavioral patterns in contemporary organizations. Clair’s (2015) study of peer-review systems, for example, used a group engagement model of procedural justice to identify the evaluation malpractices related to scientific misconduct. Heslin and Van de Walle (2011) and Haynie et al. (2016) took the same approach in their study of employee fairness perceptions. 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.

Among these procedural justice issues, there is the devaluation of women’s work performance. A study by the Council of Canadian Academies (2012), for example, points out that research excellence associated with female researchers tends to be undervalued during the process of promotion evaluations. A recent study by Dengate et al. (2019) suggests that in addition to the devaluation of women’s research output, the service of female faculty is undervalued. Most female faculty who participated in that study recommended significant reforms to the traditional promotion evaluation system. This procedural justice paucity is not only limited to the academic workplace, as research (Heilman, 2001; Ridgeway, 2011) in the USA has shown that the performance of female employees across most occupations is undervalued by managers during promotion evaluations. Female employees tend to receive significantly lower performance ratings than their male colleagues, even when their workplace behaviors or skill levels are similar (Heilman, 2001; Ridgeway, 2011). For that reason, we have developed the following assumption.

Hypothesis: Tenured female faculty believe that the process of promotion to full professor at Canadian business schools is not fair to women.

Study 1

Data collection method

A questionnaire was designed to collect survey data among tenured female faculty employed at Canadian business schools. It was informed by the conceptual framework provided by Lawrence et al. (2014) in their study of the perceived fairness of tenure review among 2,247 faculty members at 21 US research universities. Drawing from the theory of subjective procedural justice and past studies on faculty evaluation, they raised a number of questions that suggest the process of tenure and promotion decision-making often lacks clarity and transparency. The evaluation climate is chilly for women and minority faculty as the process is often entangled by inappropriate and irrelevant criteria which render the playing field unlevel. Promotion decisions are partly subjective and often made in secret. The members of evaluation committees are not always familiar with the research work of a candidate. Studies show that faculty complain that inconsistent criteria and procedures result in a perception that the high-stakes personnel decision is based on departmental politics and not the merits of a candidate (as quoted by Lawrence et al., 2014: 162). Six of the seven items assessing faculty perceptions of the process of promotion evaluation used in our questionnaire were based on the method designed by Lawrence et al. (2014). This method involved exploring participants’ opinions about each item with a set of questions on the clarity of promotion criteria and standards, the reasonableness of performance expectations, the belief that promotion decisions are based on participants’ performance, and participants’ sense of participation in the promotion evaluation process. We added a seventh item, namely the issue of rating bias. The following scale was used: 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = somewhat disagree, 3 = neither agree nor disagree, 4 = somewhat agree, 5 = strongly agree. Two (academic disciplines and ancestry) of the four socio-demographic characteristics employed by Lawrence et al. (2014) were used and contextualized to our study (see Table 1).

Table 1.

Socio-demographic variables.

Discipline:
Accounting, Finance, Economics, Marketing, Strategic management, International Business, Production/Operations Management, Quantitative Methods, Behavioral Science/Organizational Behavior	Hotel/Restaurant Management, Health/Hospital Administration, Human Resource Management, Management Entrepreneurship, General
Ancestry: White, Black, Asian, Latino, Middle Eastern, Indigenous, Other

Instrumentation

Before sending out the survey questionnaire to random participants across Canada, we conducted a pilot study at our institution that involved electronically sending the questionnaire to our business faculty colleagues through Qualtrics. Twenty colleagues responded to the survey and we received feedback from some of these colleagues on the need to categorize the demographic variables in line with the multicultural configuration of the Canadian general population. As a result, we used the demographic structure of Statistics Canada to increment our population sample. Overall, our pilot study was successful as these colleagues understood the questionnaire and were satisfied with the way that the survey was administered.

Population sampling

The procedures that led to the sampling of participants consist of randomly emailing 2,000 survey questionnaires to full-time female faculty employed at Canadian business schools. These workplace addresses were procured by screening the virtual profiles of associate and full professors as posted in the academic units (departments) of all N=60 Canadian business schools. These business schools consisted of institutions with and without international accreditations (AMBA, AACSB, EQUIS). We used Qualtrics to send those questionnaires to potential participants. In total, N=341 participants responded to the survey, a response rate of 17.05%. Then, we conducted a data clean-up on the collected survey responses. This action led us to suppress the responses of N=143 participants who did not fully complete the full questionnaire. Only the data of those N=198 participants who responded to all questions asked in the survey were kept and statistically analyzed. We took this measure in order to ensure the consistency and reliability of our data. Most of the study sample consisted of white females (95.3%) with the balance being non-white. As a result, the component of population categories was not measured during the analysis of data. In total, the completion of data collection and clean-up took us approximately three months.

Measure

Akin to Lawrence et al. (2014), we used a simple statistics model to analyze and represent the survey data (see Tables 2 and 3). We analyzed those data through SAS to test our hypothesis by measuring respondents’ ratings of all items. Cronbach coefficient was used to measure the validity and reliability of variables derived from summated scales.

Table 2.

Simple statistics (PE= Promotion Evaluation).

Variable	N	Mean	Std dev	Sum
PE 1	198	1.10606	1.55569	219
PE 2	198	1.26768	1.72296	251
PE 3	198	1.17172	1.61868	232
PE 4	198	1.24747	1.72893	247
PE 5	198	1.11111	1.54715	220
PE 6	198	1.08081	1.54576	214
PE 7	198	1.29798	1.77607	257

Table 3.

Validity and reliability.

Cronbach coefficient alpha	Raw variables		Standardized variables
Variable	Correlation		Correlation	Alpha
PE 1	0.791331	0.931683	0.792447	0.932669
PE 2	0.796663	0.93125	0.79831	0.932144
PE 3	0.825776	0.928527	0.825297	0.929717
PE 4	0.771509	0.933641	0.770836	0.934594
PE 5	0.84214	0.927381	0.84184	0.92822
PE 6	0.796894	0.93124	0.796911	0.932269
PE 7	0.803863	0.930773	0.804435	0.931595

Survey result

The results of the survey data analysis show that our participants have a positive view of the fairness of the promotion evaluation process (coefficient alpha=0.939954). A consideration of this result suggests that our hypothesis is not validated by the responses of participants. But it does not suggest that female faculty are not discriminated against in business schools considering that they are still underrepresented in the academic workforce of these organizations. As argued by Acker et al. (2012), the lack of obvious discrimination in the outcomes of the evaluation process does not mean that the experience of navigating the promotion process is free of any discrimination. Our result cannot be generalized to the whole female business faculty workforce because of our small sample size. For that reason, we suggest that full-scale studies on the intersectionality of gender and faculty promotion in Canadian business schools should be undertaken by management scholars. 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. To supplement this quantitative study, we analyzed the university faculty agreements of some of these business schools to explain why our participants believe that the evaluation process for faculty promotion is fair.

Study 2

Method

The method used in existing studies on the fairness of faculty promotion processes is chiefly based on a faculty perspective. The use of the language of faculty collective agreements as a data source is not that common in management studies. By language, we mean the textual statements and guidelines of these collective agreements as related to faculty appointments and gender equity. Faculty collective agreements refer to the currently written bargaining contracts between each university and the faculty union or association of that university outlining the terms and conditions of employment. However, few studies have been published with collective agreements as a data source. For example, in their study of the strengths and weaknesses of workplace gender equity plans in France, Milner et al. (2019) used a sample of 186 collective agreements as a data source. Inspired by the methodological framework employed by these researchers, we find it important to extend our study to include the recent faculty collective agreements of universities with accredited business schools. Why? Because these faculty collective agreements inform faculty promotion processes in Canadian business schools. Furthermore, they can help us to explain why our survey participants hold a positive perspective on the process of promotion evaluations. A content analysis was employed to review the language of those faculty collective agreements. We limited our faculty collective agreement sample to intensive research universities (N=6) with MBA programs and AACSB accreditation.

Content analysis

The content of those faculty collective agreements was analyzed through the following three components: gender bias, motherhood penalty, and equal representativity in the hierarchical mechanisms of power. Drawing from the rationale of procedural justice, we analyzed those faculty collective agreements to determine how they address the issue of unconscious gender bias in promotion evaluations. The factor of motherhood penalty was used in the analysis of those faculty collective agreements because, as argued by Mason et al. (2013), motherhood limits the prospect of female faculty with children from climbing the academic ladder. Due to domestic labor segregation, female faculty are at the disadvantage of competing with their male colleagues who have more time to meet the criteria (e.g., publishing more) of promotion. We analyzed those faculty collective agreements to determine whether their content levels the playing field between female faculty and male faculty. The factor of equal representativity in the spheres of power in academe was analyzed because it has been argued by some researchers (e.g., Kanter, 1993) that this component partly contributes to gender inequity. Kanter (1993), for example, argued that the underrepresentation of women in the senior leadership structure of universities and departments reinforces discrimination against female faculty. Because of their minority status in the hierarchy and bureaucratic stratification of these organizations, female faculty have less influence in decision-making processes (Bagues et al., 2017). Academics are typically evaluated by departments, personnel committees, and administrators who are predominantly male (Bagues et al., 2017). If women are to be retained and promoted, they must be found to be acceptable by this power structure.

The following actions were undertaken to conduct the content analysis on faculty collective agreements, including the validation of these data sets:

Read the materials three times without interruption to identify the textual patterns.

Summarize the content of the materials through the components of gender bias, motherhood penalty, and equal representativity.

List the strengths and limitations of the language of the materials as related to those three components.

Discuss the overall interpretation and implication of the language of the materials as related to gender equity.

Review result

The result of our analysis of sample faculty collective agreements suggests that the conditions for faculty promotion in Canadian business schools are written in gender-neutral language. A consideration of this gender-neutral language can explain why our participants believe in the fairness of the process of promotion evaluations. This may be the case considering that research shows that in unionized workplace settings, the regulation of personnel management by collective agreements is often a predictor of fairness while limiting workplace discrimination and gender pay gaps (Dickens, 2000; Milner et al., 2019). But these faculty collective agreements do not adequately address the risk presented by unconscious gender bias in evaluations. There is no reference on how to level the playing field between female and male faculty. No indication is made towards addressing the issue of motherhood penalty. Neither are there provisions made to increase the representativity of women in tenure committees and senior administrative positions (e.g., deans, department chairs) to mitigate the androcentricity of institutional power and enhance the participation of women in decision-making. However, the criteria for promotion in these faculty collective agreements are clearly defined, but no guidelines are provided on how to measure those criteria, thus leaving a loophole for subjective interpretation and gender discrimination. Nevertheless, these faculty collective agreements clearly define the parties that are involved in the evaluation process, the performance expectations (e.g., research, teaching, service), and the timing of the evaluation process. Arguably, female faculty may be aware of what is required to be promoted and thus are more prepared to undergo the evaluation process. This preparation may help them to navigate the evaluation process with fewer difficulties.

The gender-neutral language of these faculty collective agreements infers that faculty promotion is purely based on merit. At HEC Montreal, the Convention Collective Intervenue entre l’Université de Montreal et le Syndicat General des Professeurs et Professeures de l’Université de Montreal, for example, clearly outlines what a candidate needs to include in his or her tenure and promotion dossier (Article CP 4). It identifies four main merit criteria for promotion to full professor (Article CP 5.02, Article CP 5.03): performance in teaching, in research, in service, and contribution to the reputation of the university. Likewise, at the Smith School of Business, an emphasis is put on individual merit. As stated in Article 30.6.3 of the Queen’s Faculty Agreement, an appointment to the rank of full professor can only be granted when there is clear evidence of demonstrated performance, professional growth, and the promise of future development. At the Telfer School of Management, the Collective Agreement between The University of Ottawa and The Association of Professors of The University of Ottawa underscores the same meritocratic stance. As indicated in its Articles 25.3.2 and 25.3.3, promotion to the rank of full professor shall be granted when a member meets all tripartite merit criteria (research, teaching, and service). The University of British Columbia’s Guide to Reappointment, Promotion and Tenure Procedures at the Sauder School of Business points out that for promotion, competence is required in both scholarly activity and teaching. At the Desautels Faculty of Management, the gender-neutral language of McGill University’s Regulations Relating to the Employment of Tenure Track and Tenured Academic Staff echoes the same meritocratic stance. The same could also be said about the Rotman School of Management considering that the University of Toronto’s Policy and Procedures on Academic Appointments makes it mandatory for faculty members to meet the merit expectations of promotion.

While these faculty collective agreements do not adequately address the issue of unconscious gender bias, they suggest that members of promotion committees should not take part in the evaluation process when there is a conflict of interest or where there may be a reasonable apprehension of bias. The issue of bias in these faculty collective agreements is defined in general terms (e.g., race, disability, etc.). Even the current university employment equity policies do not discuss how to create conditions to increase the representativity of women in higher academic ranks. The tone of these equity policies is more centered on preventing disparate treatment (intentional discrimination) against women and minorities and less so on disparate impact (unintentional discrimination). For example, the Policy on Harassment, Sexual Harassment and Discrimination Prohibited by Law of McGill University, the Human Resources Guideline on Civil Conduct of the University of Toronto, and the Employment Equity Policy of the University of British Columbia, forbid discrimination in faculty hiring and promotion. But they fall short of providing guidelines on how to tackle the problem of unconscious gender bias in promotion evaluations. Nevertheless, some of these policies (e.g., Strategy for Advancing Equity and Diversity at UBC; Guidelines for Employees on Concerns and Complaints Regarding Prohibited Discrimination at McGill University) have called for more accountability by advising that faculty evaluators should receive diversity training to mitigate the influence of unconscious bias in promotion decisions. Arguably, business schools’ efforts to fight gender inequity may be more centered on overt discrimination than on the prevention of unconscious discrimination.

Limitations and recommendations for future research

The fact that our participants harbor a positive perspective on the process of promotion evaluations implies that the structural factors hindering the promotion of female business faculty may not only be related to promotion evaluations. Arguably, the above findings cannot be generalized and do not address all the determinants that could have helped us to further explain why women are still underrepresented in the senior academic ranks of Canadian business schools. Due to this limitation, it could be beneficial for management scholars interested in the study of gender discrimination in business schools to study non-related evaluation factors to better explain this inequitable organizational pattern. Perhaps, examining the systemic factors that were not considered in this study may help these researchers answer the question of why the gender ratio of business full professors has not changed despite the existence of EDI plans and fairness promotion regulations. Doing so could result in more in-depth findings on that question considering that research (Doucet et al., 2012; Ibarra, 1992; Ibarra et al., 2010) suggests systemic factors such as research output, network differential, and mentoring imbalance also contribute to gender inequity in organizations and academe. The proponents of human capital theory (Polachek and Siebert, 1993; Powell and Butterfield, 1994) have also raised the same point by arguing that gender inequity at work is not only related to unconscious discrimination against women; other structural factors (e.g., the division of labor, domestic segregation) also contribute to this organizational pattern.

Because researchers (Feldman et al., 2013) argue that mentoring in academe plays a crucial role in promotion likelihood, researching the intersectionality of faculty mentorship in business schools, for example, may lead to an understanding of how gender inequity intersects with professional development opportunities and faculty promotion. Female faculty have fewer mentors and face greater professional isolation, a factor that increases the likelihood of these education workers leaving academia before gaining tenure than their male colleagues. This inequitable organizational pattern exists across most occupations (Ibarra et al., 2010) where research suggests that women at work are 24% less likely than their male colleagues to get professional feedback from senior managers who are mostly men. Only 54% of women have access to the mentoring services of senior managers in their career (Warrell, 2017).

Management scholars could also investigate and explore the effect of networking segregation on the promotion likelihood of business female faculty because the scope of today’s research (see Brutus and Donia, 2010; Erkut, 2002; Finch et al., 2017) on Canadian business schools is chiefly limited to the study of meritocratic factors (e.g., student evaluation, research productivity) than on non-meritocratic factors. Doing so is essential because studies by Ibarra (1992) and Greguletz et al. (2018) show that networking differentials reinforce gender imbalance in the distribution of promotion and power in organizations. Men are more likely to transform their homophilious professional relationships into opportunities of social support, informal sponsorship, and career advancement than women. The study conducted by Greguletz et al. (2018) on 37 high-profile female managers employed in large German corporations shows that women build less effective professional networks than men. Three decades ago, Barbara Orser (1992) raised the same concern by arguing that in Canadian business schools, promotion partly depends on the quality and strength of professional networking. The paucity of professional networking is one of the systemic factors that limit the career advancement of female faculty in these business schools. Yet, up to now, what Orser (1992) stated decades ago has been barely investigated by contemporary management scholars in Canada. The few studies that exist on business faculty socialization, such as the work of Finch et al. (2017), have not investigated how professional socialization affects the career of female business faculty.

In an academic organizational context where research is more valued for promotion than teaching and service (Acker et al., 2012; Dengate et al., 2019; Stewart et al., 2009), it could be essential for management scholars to study how research productivity intersects with gender, and how this intersection affects faculty promotions in business schools. Are female business faculty less likely to be promoted because they publish less? This is one of the questions that needs to be answered considering research (Mason et al., 2013; Stack, 2004) shows that, in general, women publish less than men. Answering such questions could be informative for policymakers because Stack (2004: 891) argues that despite the side-effects of domestic segregation (e.g., motherhood endeavor) on the research productivity of female faculty, there is little systematic research on that issue.

Considering that there is a need for research addressing what can be done to reduce gender inequalities in the workplace (Bohnet et al., 2015; Rivera and Tilcsik, 2019), the above recommendations for future research are not only addressed to management scholars in Canada but also to those in other industrialized countries where the professorial structure of most business schools is marked by vertical segregation (see Roseberry et al., 2016; Scolder-Ellen et al., 2019; Trevino et al., 2015).

Conclusion

The relevance of the findings of this study lies to the fact that contrary to most general studies on female faculty experience with promotion evaluations at Canadian universities (Acker et al., 2012; Dengate et al., 2019; Stewart et al., 2009) and internationally (Bagues et al., 2017; Kanter, 1993; Mason et al., 2013; Minefee et al., 2018), these findings suggest that such experience in Canadian business schools is not always associated with gender discrimination and negative perspectives among female faculty. Arguably, the phenomenon of gender discrimination in the academe needs to be addressed within the context of each particular academic unit or discipline (e.g., medicine, business schools, etc.). Why? Because the experiences of female faculty with promotion evaluation may differ from one academic unit to another academic unit. The findings of this study also infer the idea that gender discrimination may not be the only main organizational barrier limiting the promotion of female faculty in senior academic ranks and leadership. Meaning that researchers need also to investigate other organizational barriers that may be contributing to the underrepresentation of business female faculty in the rank of full professor. Employing a research method that is not only informed by scholarly literature and theories on gender discrimination or equity may lead to the development of another understanding of why business female faculty or female professionals, in general, are underrepresented in senior leadership.

Moreover, the findings of this study raise one policy implication that the leaders of business schools and other higher education institutions need to take into account. This policy implication involves the need to increment faculty EDI plans with human resources management policies that address issues of bias or unconscious gender discrimination.

Doing so is important because the language of equity as epitomized in the content of faculty collective agreements analyzed in this study often overlooks issues of unconscious discrimination and mostly focuses on issues of overt discrimination. As noted in the body of literature on equity in human resources management systems (Cortina, 2008; Noon, 2018; Van Laer and Janssens, 2011), diversity programs often fail because the language of those employment policies is often superficial and does not sufficiently address issues of unconscious discrimination at work. Employees from underrepresented groups do not often feel the effect of those employment equity policies (Krentz, 2019). For that reason, similar to this study, some leadership literature (e.g., Krentz, 2019) also recommends that leaders must build a clear case for change and set concrete goals to adequately address issues of equity in the workplace.

Footnotes

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 author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Ed Dandalt

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