In the global context, women are 49.6% of the total population, and in what history has categorized as the “elite professions,” there is near equal parity between male and female-identifying persons. In American Higher Education, parity has nearly been met with female-identifying academicians comprising of 47% of the professoriate, yet 65% of the senior ranks of the professoriate are still male. Women are less tenured and less promoted than males. Globally, women are less published. In the American academy, women are invited to present less and are recognized less for their accomplishments. While the disparity numbers in research or scholarly productivity have been reported for decades, an examination of the systemic factors contributing to the disparities has not. This chapter seeks to present the overwhelming intersectionality of gender and scholarly productivity in the academy through the lens of intersectionality theory and the implications for a continued need for sweeping reforms in the practices exacerbating the inequity in higher education for women.
TopIntroduction
In the United States democratization of higher education has failed to benefit men and women equitably. The increased access to higher education and educational opportunities in the late 19th Century suggested the future for those traditionally underrepresented in the academy would be a bright one. What emerged for women, akin to the Reconstruction era for Blacks in the U.S. South, was a bright hope that regressed to more subtle and ultimately systemic codifications of discrimination and inequities. The systemic discriminatory practices have become so prevalent that in many corners of the academy there are still celebratory “firsts.” The first female president-- The first Black female PhD recipient-- The first to break a ceiling clearly built and maintained by practices that have recently come into mainstream discussion regarding their impact on equity in higher education.
For many woman in the academy the 20th century became the struggle for equal status in higher education. The law school at University of California, Berkley hired its first female faculty in 1923. It was not until 1973 that the UC Berkeley’s College of Engineering hired its first woman faculty member. Yale awarded its first full professor rank to a woman in 1961. In 1919 Harvard University appointed its first woman to faculty rank, but it did not tenure its first female academician until 1948. As reported of its fall 2011 candidates for tenure only 22 percent of those newly tenured faculty were women. Women comprised 47 percent of the professoriate in private-4 year institutions in 2009-2010, thus showing how 22% reflects actual disparity in promotion and tenure practices still experienced by women in the academy.
More recently a number of equity researchers have begun examining not only the disparity in scholarly productivity between men and women in the academy, but also the systems that exist so as to contribute to those disparities (Aiston & Jung, 2015; Frandsen, Jacobsen, & Ousager, 2020; RissleR, Hale, Joffe, & Caruso, 2020; Steinþórsdóttir, Einarsdóttir, Pétursdóttir, & Himmelweit, 2020). A number of outcome factors have been presented as evidence of the sweeping inequities to include differences in grant funding, scholarly publications, and even doctoral mentorship (Bouvy, & Mujoomdar, 2019; Cruz Castro, & Menéndez, 2020; Lundine, Bourgeault, Glonti, Hutchinson, & Balabanova, 2019; Meek, 2019; Witteman, Hendricks, Straus, & Tannenbaum, 2018). This chapter presents the overwhelming intersectionality of gender and scholarly productivity in the academy through the lens of intersectionality theory and the implications for a continued need for sweeping reforms in the practices exacerbating the inequity in higher education for women.