What Factors Hold Back the Careers of Women and Faculty of Color? Columbia U. Went Looking for Answers

Last year Columbia University announced that it would commit $100 million over the next five years to recruiting and supporting the careers of underrepresented minority faculty — on top of the $85 million it had spent since 2005. Despite Columbia’s hefty financial commitment, the pace of faculty diversity on the Ivy League campus has been stubbornly slow. The university has also studied the progress of women through the academic pipeline.

A new report, released by Columbia on Thursday, provides a detailed picture of the factors that have played a role in making the recruitment and retention of minority and female faculty such a challenge for the institution.

The 145-page document features empirical evidence on how tenure-line faculty in the arts and sciences at Columbia feel about or experience key parts of academic life, like salary, workload, work-life balance, and the climate in their departments. The report revealed that women and minority professors at Columbia navigate numerous inequities, all well-documented throughout academe, in a workplace whose climate isn’t conducive to their success.

The report covers a group of academic units referred to at Columbia as the Arts and Sciences, which includes Columbia College, the School of General Studies, the School of Professional Studies, the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences, and the School of the Arts.

The findings, which are detailed and both quantitative and qualitative in nature, will be sure to resonate with the lived experience of faculty members on other campuses.

“We feel like equity is a cornerstone of integrity. It’s really essential for the best scholarship to thrive,” said Maya Tolstoy, a professor in the department of earth and environmental sciences and chair of the Arts and Sciences faculty-governance committee that spearheaded the study. “We wanted to do a deep dive in the data and shine a spotlight on these issues. Now we can present it to the faculty in a transparent way and commit to action.”

The equity study, two years in the making, was inspired by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology’s landmark look nearly two decades ago at the discrimination faced by female science professors on the campus. At Columbia, more than 30 faculty members split into three groups, each of which surveyed (both confidentially and anonymously) their fellow professors from the natural sciences, social sciences, and humanities, and analyzed salary and other faculty data provided by administrators. The three groups interviewed women and underrepresented minority professors in those divisions as well.

Tolstoy, who is also interim executive vice president of Arts and Sciences, said she was struck by how much “the smaller things” contribute to faculty feeling disenfranchised from their departments. “The added burden of committee service, the invisible labor, the belief that people don’t value their work — those kinds of things add up,” she said.

Here are some of the most striking takeaways — broken down by disciplinary cluster — from what the report calls “concerning disparities” that women and underrepresented minorities experience relative to their white male colleagues at Columbia.

Natural Sciences

Women were three times more likely than men to have experienced harassment by colleagues — with 55 percent of women saying they’d been harassed. Roughly two women out of three said they’d been discriminated against. Faculty members, in general, are dissatisfied with the options available for filing a formal complaint about either harassment or discrimination.

“There has been no real structural change that has allowed me to voice my concerns without retaliation,” said a professor who was interviewed by the committee.

Experienced harassment by colleagues at Columbia

Experienced discrimination by colleagues at Columbia

Female faculty were more likely than men to believe that there are “unwritten rules” in their department, to think that they have to work harder to be taken seriously, and to fee

l excluded from an informal network in their department. Forty-three percent of faculty interviewed by the committee, both male and female underrepresented minorities, “spontaneously described” a culture of cronyism that is pervasive and which the report said typically works in favor of the majority group. “There is a lot of cronyism — people favoring those who are like them,” one professor said.

‘I believe there are unwritten rules’

‘I have to work harder than some of my colleagues to be taken seriously in the department’

‘I feel excluded from an informal network in my department’

Faculty members think diversity and inclusion efforts at Columbia are spread too thin for Arts and Sciences to benefit.

Interviewees widely believed that Arts and Sciences needs a tenured faculty member “in a position of authority to help guide diversity efforts” and make sure best practices are followed, as one respondent put it. “At the faculty level we’ve done well with women — but not underrepresented minorities,” an interviewee said. “Do you want to have superficial numbers for the sake of superficial numbers? We have that.”

The report also noted that a process for hiring diverse faculty isn’t consistent in most departments. Or it doesn’t exist at all.

Humanities

There’s a sharp disparity in how women and men view the climate and opportunities in their departments.

“One colleague has never spoken to me,” said one faculty member who was interviewed. “Only last year did he even make eye contact with me in the hallways.” But some interviewees who are veteran professors at Columbia see signs of change. “The department now aggressively tries to be gender-conscious and inclusive,” one faculty member said.

‘I feel that the climate and opportunities for female faculty in my department are as good as those for male faculty’

Women and underrepresented minorities do more service and administrative work, and the invisible labor of mentoring students that they engage in isn’t rewarded in the tenure-and-promotion process.

The issue of workload came up repeatedly in interviews and survey comments. “I cannot do my intellectual work if I am required to do all this administrative work,” one faculty member said. “This has not been the case for my male colleagues, who are less present. It’s been a very gendered thing within my subfield.” Women also, on average, serve on more university-level committees — some of them especially time-consuming — compared with men.

Average number of commitments

Affordable child care and tuition at nearby private schools, including the School at Columbia University, also emerged as an issue for faculty members in the humanities.

Almost 60 percent of women were dissatisfied with their current child-care arrangements, compared with 34 percent of men. One survey respondent said that because she can’t afford child care, she takes care of her son in the afternoon instead of working. Caregiving also falls to women more than men and “should be considered in relation to issues of salary and cost of living,” the report said.

One of the main reasons women say they would consider leaving Columbia is to get more time to do research. If a new job came with more time, three out of four faculty members in the humanities would consider pursuing new employment. Other reasons for leaving that more women than men cited include “to reduce stress,” “to address family-related issues,” and “to find a more supportive work environment.”

Social Sciences

Women are more stressed about the tenure-and-review process than men are, with nearly 80 percent of women describing the process it as stressful compared with about a third of men. They also are less likely to agree that the criteria for tenure are clear. Just 6 percent of women thought so, while 34 percent of men did.

For faculty of color who earn tenure, service expectations only increase after tenure, one respondent said. Another said that “the way tenure criteria are used at Columbia decreases the prospects of increasing diversity.”

The rates of tenure for underrepresented faculty, especially black and Hispanic professors, are far lower than for their white colleagues. Half of white faculty members received tenure, while just 38 percent of black and Hispanic professors did.

And 62 percent of black and Hispanic tenure-track faculty didn’t get tenure, either because their tenure cases were denied, they were told their tenure bid would likely fail, or they left Columbia before tenure. The same held true for about 50 percent of their white colleagues.

Faculty members think soliciting outside offers to earn a raise or other perks is a terrible system and they resent feeling as if they have to engage in the practice.

Some professors said the culture of outside offers at Columbia was “more pervasive than at other institutions, and that the secrecy surrounding salaries” was especially high. A female interviewee said she doesn’t understand why there can’t be “a more standardized meritocratic system that rewards people for work [and] collegiality.”

Tolstoy said curbing the overreliance on outside offers is a priority. “We have to have the option for merit-based salary reviews for faculty who feel that they’ve been outperforming the average for some years now,” she said.

Next Steps

The report includes recommendations such as creating a system to reward service and recognize invisible labor; clearly defining what constitutes harassment, discrimination, and bullying; providing incentives for departments to improve diversity; and making decision-making more rules-based and more transparent.

Tolstoy said some recommendations, like revising policies on how named chairs are awarded and posting updated bylaws for departments, centers, and institutes online, are already underway, while others are aspirational and the details still need to be fleshed out with faculty input.

“I’m actually quite proud of what the leadership has allowed us to do here in terms of asking these hard questions and talking openly about the data,” she said. “Our hope is that we can make Columbia a model of how to do this well.”

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.