The College Fix

Troubling findings reinforce ‘what I see on the ground every day’

University policies that are explicitly designed to give a boost to female scholars are actually putting them farther behind their male colleagues, according to a new study.

The results show that equal opportunity does not provide equitable results when it comes to the practice of “stopping the clock” on tenure evaluations, at least for professors in the top 49 economics departments in the U.S.

Stopping the clock – the “norm” at research universities today – is intended to help new parents during the probationary period in which they are considered for tenure, typically giving them an extra year before they are evaluated. It doesn’t require a leave of absence, so most candidates work during that time period.

The thinking went that the gender-neutral practice disproportionately helps female scholars, as they need more time to recover after childbirth and they take on the majority of childcare duties as new parents.

‘We might want to re-think these policies’

That turned out to be exactly backwards in the “Equal but Inequitable” study by Claremont McKenna College Prof. Heather Antecol and University of California-Santa Barbara Prof. Kelly Bedard and doctoral student Jenna Stearns.

It was published by the Institute for the Study of Labor, a German think tank associated with the University of Bonn.

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The researchers studied nearly 1,300 assistant professors hired between 1985 and 2004 by the top 49 economics departments in the U.S., judging by their 2010 rankings in U.S. News & World Report. They looked at how tenure decisions changed after clock-stopping policies that cover all faculty had taken effect.

Male success in getting tenure went up 19.4 percent while female success went down 22.4 percent.

The baffling results suggest that “we might want to re-think these policies, [though] it is not entirely clear what the ‘optimal’ policy should look like,” UC-Santa Barbara’s Bedard told The College Fix in an email on behalf of the three researchers.

Men roll the dice – and it makes women look bad

Antecol, Bedard and Stearns found that male professors in the study – but not females – were more likely to be published in the top five economics journals after the clock-stopping policies took effect.

Showing up in those journals – Quarterly Journal of Economics, Econometrica, Review of Economic Studies, American Economic Review and Journal of Political Economy – has a huge impact on tenure decisions in economics departments.

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These particular journals also have high rejection rates, meaning that submitting research to them is a risk for scholars who wants to be published before they are evaluated for tenure, the study says.

The extra year during the stopped clock is apparently being used by men to pursue these journals, and “these gambles pay off some fraction of the time” because their top-five rates rise, the study speculates. This improved success rate for men, though, suggests that “the departmental tenure standard” goes up across the board, and “more women then fail to meet” that new standard.

“Consistent with women having higher fertility costs, the results … suggest that women are less able to use the additional time strategically or effectively,” the researchers write.

In other words, women are using a policy intended to help scholars have families for its explicit purpose, but doing so puts them at a disadvantage.

“While it is easy to instruct [tenure] reviewers to ignore the additional time on the tenure clock, it is not so easy to know how it actually affects their thinking about the tenure case and hence their evaluation” of each candidate for tenure, Bedard told The Fix.

“It seems to us that university administrators need to re-open the discussion about the length of clock stopping offered, as well as the amount of teaching/service reduction extended, and the extent to which these are extended to men and women.”

‘Giving birth is not a gender-neutral event’

The study’s release has opened women’s eyes to how gender-neutral policies may not always be what’s best.

“The extra year for men just disadvantages women,” Alison Davis-Blake, dean of the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, told her economist colleague Justin Wolfers in his New York Times column. It’s a reminder that “giving birth is not a gender-neutral event,” she said: The study reinforced “what I see on the ground every day.”

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The University of Michigan has tenure policies that are more tailored to the effects of childbirth and pregnancy for women, whereas men need “ clear and compelling circumstances” in order to receive extensions, Davis-Blake said.

Northwestern University psychology and education professors pointed to the challenges faced by new mothers in academia months before the stop-clock study, in a U.S. News & World Report opinion piece.

“Academia ends up being more punishing to women with children than either law or medicine,” wrote Sandra Waxman and Simone Ispa-Landa.

They pointed to startling findings from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients: “Men with young children are 35 percent more likely than women with young children to secure tenure-track positions after completing their Ph.D.s.”

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IMAGE: goodluz/Shutterstock, UC-Santa Barbara