Rethinking Higher-Ed Careers
For much of the seven years she worked in higher education as a social-media strategist, Deseré Cross Ward was the only Black woman in her office.
Her dual identity as a woman and person of color often led to heightened scrutiny and ignorant comments, Cross Ward says. But it was the 2020 movement protesting systemic racism in the U.S. that pushed her to reckon with her own experiences. By 2021, she decided to start her own communications-consulting company and leave higher ed — likely for good.
“When 2020 hit, it was the pandemic combined with the racial upheaval in our country. My identity as a Black woman caused me to experience that time in a very different way than my white colleagues,” said Cross Ward, who was in charge of social media for the president’s office at the University of Texas at Austin at the time.
Cross Ward’s departure is part of the wave of departures sweeping the country in the wake of the Covid-19 pandemic — a phenomenon known as the Great Resignation.
Disproportionate Burden
While stress, low compensation, and poor work-life balance have pushed many to rethink their careers, the pandemic’s impacts have had uneven effects. Women and people of color have borne a disproportionate burden, getting pushed out of the labor force due to child-care responsibilities or choosing to leave higher ed after taking on taxing and uncompensated racial-equity work.
In 2021, around 181,000 Black women left the U.S. labor force between September and November, according to the Brookings Institution. Though there is no public data that tracks how many Black women in staff and professional positions have left academe, many within higher ed have noted the ongoing loss of talent.
Contributing to the disparities, many of the resignations and labor shortages are concentrated in financial-aid and admissions offices, communications offices, dining and residence halls, and other staff and professional positions — jobs largely held by women and underrepresented groups.
Black and Hispanic employees are most prevalent among universities’ service and support staff in positions like groundskeepers, dining-hall workers, and secretaries, which tend to offer the lowest pay. For staff roles not requiring a college degree, Black employees made up nearly 17 percent of campus staff in 2018 despite being only 13 percent of the country’s labor force at the time, according to the College and University Professional Association for Human Resources.
Within the diversity, equity, and inclusion sector, there’s also been a high volume of turnover reported at some universities. Four staff members hired to lead racial-equity work at Bates College left in a year.
Universities across the country reckoned with racist practices and histories throughout 2020, many forming or bolstering diversity, equity, and inclusion committees and other groups or forums in attempts of addressing the issues.
Like many Black faculty and staff members, Cross Ward saw a need and chose to help advance this work, even organizing a three-day virtual event to support Black students.
“Nobody’s asking me to do these things, but there’s a need,” Cross Ward said. “There was a need for somebody to step up and lead the Black Faculty and Staff Association and create spaces for Black people to share how things were impacting them at the university. There was a need for us to just sit down and come together and talk about Black integration.”
She wasn’t compensated for the additional work. She tried to get the university to consider paying the individuals stepping up to lead diversity and equity work, but conversations to pay University Resource Groups leaders never went anywhere, Cross Ward said.
She felt university leadership disregarded student and staff concerns about its alma mater, “The Eyes of Texas,” when a committee concluded in a report that its intent was “not overtly racist.” While it was a culmination of factors that led to her decision, feeling like her views were no longer in line with the messages she had to convey from the president’s Twitter account is what ultimately pushed her into leaving her position.
“I was tired, and I felt like my relationship with the university became very parasitic in the sense that I was putting in more than what I was getting out of it,” Cross Ward said. “I gained so much [working at the university], and I hated that it ended the way it did with me feeling like I was on a plantation in the sense that my work was being exploited and not really recognized.”
Possible Solutions
M. Yvonne Taylor was attending a Black Faculty and Staff Association Meeting last May when she learned that, like her, four other Black women were about to leave professional-staff positions at the University of Texas at Austin.
Today, Taylor is researching the experiences of women who left professional-staffing positions in academe during the Great Resignation as a doctoral student in the university’s Department of Educational Leadership and Policy. Having worked at five different predominantly white institutions over the course of her 20-year career in public affairs and development, Taylor wants to amplify the voices of women who’ve left and help universities better understand the structural barriers they face.
Historically, Taylor said, people have been attracted to working in higher education because they care about the mission, but the intertwined nature of Covid-19 and the 2020 racial uprising have pushed some people to rethink whether it’s worth remaining in academe after experiencing microaggressions, unsafe conditions, and inflexible arrangements.
“Higher ed has become less attractive because our talents are sought outside of higher ed and are highly compensated, and then other organizations can give a lot more flexibility,” Taylor said.
Low compensation, child-care responsibilities, limited opportunities to grow within roles, lack of recognition from departments, and not being compensated for the additional DEI work they take on are some of the reasons Taylor says the 14 women in her study have left their jobs.
She uses the term “knowledge workers” to describe the women serving in professional staff positions — roles that require specialized training and education and aren’t student-facing, such as marketing, communications, and business. Taylor noticed there’s a significant lack of research on their experiences.
While her research is currently only focused on these individuals, she says the gendered and racialized organizational structure of higher education marginalizes women, including students, in other roles as well. She hopes to continue growing the research with time, expanding it to other universities and types of positions.
Taylor said academe has lots to learn from those within its ranks who’ve been marginalized based on their gender, race, and sociocultural identity and position.
“The study does not seek to give voice to these women,” Taylor said. “It seeks to amplify their voices — our voices in a language that academia can understand — in order to provide academia with the opportunity to learn from us both how white supremacy functions within a single institution of higher education as well as how the academy can use this knowledge as a tool of liberation.”
