Last month, during a meeting at the White House, the deans of some of the nation’s top business schools committed to making their programs more accessible and appealing to women. They also noted a related challenge: hiring female faculty members. Data from a salary survey by AACSB International, an association of business schools, underscores the gender gap in what has long been a largely male-dominated workplace. In 2014-15, at the 497 American schools that responded, women made up 37.5 percent of assistant professors, roughly 32 percent of associate professors, and slightly more than 20 percent of full professors.
THE PROBLEM
More men than women on the faculty
In 2011, when Alison Davis-Blake was hired to lead the University of Michigan’s Ross School of Business, a look at the faculty revealed room for improvement when it came to gender diversity. Including lecturers and visiting professors, women were only a quarter of the faculty. In addition, the pipeline of female assistant professors eligible for promotion and tenure “looked pretty thin,” Ms. Davis-Blake says. Senior female professors told her they were concerned about what the makeup of the school’s faculty would be like after they retired.
“This wasn’t so much about replacing them,” says Ms. Davis-Blake. “They felt the faculty is stronger when it isn’t homogenous.”
Part of the problem for business schools, including Michigan, is that in some disciplines — such as finance and economics — few Ph.D.s are awarded to women. And without faculty role models, female business students may be less likely to consider careers in academe.
THE APPROACH
Lengthen the “short list” and hire No. 1 and No. 2
Ms. Davis-Blake, the business school’s first female dean, didn’t lay down mandates to hire more women — state law in Michigan bans public institutions from setting quotas or providing preferential treatment tied to demographic characteristics. Instead she took a fresh look at the recruiting-and-hiring process.
It usually involves sorting through CVs, recommendation letters, and the like to arrive at a short list of three candidates to invite for campus interviews. But Ms. Davis-Blake noticed that “it wasn’t uncommon” for female candidates to surface as fourth and fifth on the lists.
So she turned to the “nudge theory,” which calls for making small changes, rather than direct instruction, to influence decision making and behavior. In a move to broaden the pool of potential candidates for a given job, she says, she asked search committees to expand the shortlist to include the top five applicants and bring them all to campus.
“We’re in no way overturning the role of the faculty, and we’re in no way offering preferential treatment,” Ms. Davis-Blake says. “Our goal was just to make sure that a variety of people were considered for positions and had the opportunity to be hired.”
She also introduced another crucial tweak to the hiring process: the option to hire more than one professor from a single job search. Second-ranked candidates are almost always neck and neck with the top contender, she says. In one search, a woman was the next candidate in line, and the dean gave permission to hire both of them.
“If you’ve got two people that you’re really excited about, let’s just hire them both now,” Ms. Davis-Blake says.
Susan J. Ashford, a professor of management and organizations at Michigan, called that option “one of the best ideas I’ve heard in a long time when it comes to how to tackle this issue. It plays to what faculty want to do, which is hire more people.”
THE RESULTS
More female faculty
The change in the faculty at Ross, fueled by annual hiring, points to progress on the gender-equity front. Women make up 33 percent of tenure-track faculty, up from 25 percent in 2011. In the tenured ranks, the share of women is 20 percent, up from 17 percent. Over all, the faculty, which numbers about 200, is 30 percent female.
For the cluster of female assistant professors now at the business school, the next step is to clear the tenure hurdle. An informal mentoring group of female professors, along with policies that make balancing work-life issues easier — a critical issue for women on the tenure track — is among the tools available to help faculty.
Retention is also key. After tenure, top female business faculty can get recruited by other institutions.
“It’s a problem of our success,” Ms. Ashford says.
Ms. Davis-Blake, who is leaving her position at the end of the current academic year, says even with no set goal of how many women to recruit, there’s always more work to be done.
“This is not an issue of achieving some kind of magical number,” she says. “We’d like to have a diverse staff by many dimensions, and this is just one of them.”
Audrey Williams June is a senior reporter who writes about the academic workplace, faculty pay, and work-life balance in academe. Contact her at audrey.june@chronicle.com, or follow her on Twitter @chronaudrey.
