In 1937, Ruth Benedict became the first tenured woman at Columbia University. Promoted to associate professor of anthropology, her appointment marked the first step of the University toward opening the tenure process to women.
But over 70 years later, less than a quarter of tenured faculty at Columbia are women, according to statistics for fall of 2008, released in the spring of 2009 from the Columbia University Office of Planning and Institutional Research.
At the University, only 22.5 percent of tenured faculty members were women, according to the report. Both tenured and nontenured populations were heavily male. University calculations indicated that women held 38.8 percent of all academic posts. The report is released annually in the spring.
Since women compose one of several traditionally underrepresented groups in academia, the push for women to attain equality in tenure status has come up against many barriers—some within the campus and others rooted outside of the University.
A question of discipline
Stephen Rittenberg, the senior vice provost for academic administration, traces the underrepresentation of women in tenured positions to many factors, including the professor’s discipline or field and the process of mentoring junior faculty on the tenure track.
Tenure, the contractual right to lifetime employment at the University, must be awarded by the end of the seventh counted year of a junior faculty member’s appointment, or he or she must be notified that his or her appointment is discontinued.
Much of the decision making in the pre-tenure process occurs at the departmental level, beginning with the question of who to hire, according to Rittenberg. “By and large, the departments and schools do not recruit at the junior level without the expectation of looking for someone who potentially would be qualified for tenure six or seven years out,” he said. To prepare for nomination, junior faculty members undergo periodic departmental reviews and mentorship that can influence the candidates’ successful navigation of the tenure track.
Marianne Hirsch, a professor of English and comparative literature and co-director of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender, said that specific department cultures and stereotypes contribute to gender discrepancies. “The granting of tenure can depend on the structure of the field. Some fields are still very masculinized and traditional in the kind of work they accept and reward,” she said.
Categorized by discipline, the OPIR report revealed that the greatest degree of gender discrepancy was in the hard sciences. In the humanities, 38.3 percent of tenured faculty members were women, while in the social and natural sciences, these percentages were 25.8 and 14 percent, respectively.
Christia Mercer was the first female professor in the history of the philosophy department to be granted tenure in a process that she described as “from the inside.” Some professors are brought to Columbia and given tenure after having become prominent people in their respective fields. But Mercer gained tenure by starting as an assistant professor at Columbia and working towards recognition as a faculty member in the University.
A professor of philosophy, Mercer said that because mentoring processes can differ so widely from one department to another, it can sometimes become difficult for Columbia to manage the tenure process. “It makes it difficult to make changes across the University,” she said, adding, “It depends on how many women there are sometimes and how committed the department members are to equality.”
Mercer said that many women who start in junior teaching positions as she did face many challenges in the process of gaining tenure. “Women assistant professors are leaked out of the pipeline,” Mercer said. “They leave along the way because they may not feel included.”
She also noted that women often have to overcome psychological hurdles in the workplace because of certain “microinequalities,” which she said are rooted in the discrepancies in student and faculty treatment of junior female faculty.
“For example, at a party one of your senior colleagues introduces everyone else as professor ‘so and so’ and introduces the woman as ‘Rebecca,’ or people tell sexual jokes where women are the sexual objects. What studies have shown is that very, very subtle differences can add up—to add up to make women not feel included and not feel supported,” Mercer said.
In general, according to Mercer, women have to work harder to be taken seriously in the workplace. “I think women have to worry more as coming across as professional—coming across as strong, especially as authority figures,” she said.
Tenure or family?
To be awarded tenure, a faculty member must demonstrate an arsenal of scholarly achievements in his or her field. The criteria include extensive evidence of research, publications, peer esteem, teaching experience, and service to the University.
Jean Howard, a professor of English and comparative literature and former vice provost for diversity initiatives, said that many women must juggle a very high-level career with family life. While she was a professor at Syracuse University in the 1970s, Howard taught a full semester three days after the birth of her second child since there were no policies in place for childcare or maternity leave.
Though today’s standards are much more family-friendly, the struggle to meet the demands of the workplace are particularly difficult for women, who continue to bear household responsibilities, according to Howard. “Until universities and society supports women through the childbearing years in a real way, there is going to be certain limits on women’s achievement or we’re just going to generate this race of completely crazed superwomen, which just isn’t fair.”
Making the tenure process more accessible to women means taking the family into consideration. In recent years, there has been a concerted effort at Columbia to provide better support systems for faculty, especially ones that address the needs of faculty members with small children.
In 2007, Provost Alan Brinkley created the Office of Work/Life, led by Associate Provost and Director Carol Hoffman. This office has instituted a variety of services and programs, including affiliated childcare centers, tuition support, and relocation assistance. “It’s very challenging for a lot of women to be mothers and to be on tenure track,” Hoffman said.
Efforts for change
Though Columbia is not in poor standing in comparison to its peer institutions, simply being on the curve is “not enough,” according to Howard. “You will not find that Columbia is failing to meet the standard. The problem is that the standard is not high enough across the board and is particularly not high enough for a great urban institution,” she said.
In the past five years, faculty pressure to address these discrepancies has translated into some systematic changes.
In 2004, Columbia created the Office of the Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives, of which Howard was elected provost. Now led by Vice Provost Geraldine Downey, the office is dedicated to diversifying Columbia’s faculty by recruiting from a greater variety of educators, administrators, and researchers.
Working closely with the Office of the Provost, one of the early efforts of the Office of the Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives was to make the tenure process clearer to nontenured faculty. The office began to offer sessions to guide faculty through the process, detailing everything from how to write a grant to how publish a book. “It’s a tremendous process, but its doable if you just demystify it,” Howard said of earning tenure. “It has to been seen that people have done it, there’s wisdom about it, and that they can do it too.”
And statistics show that there have been improvements. Compared to the OPIR’s 2003 report, the number of tenured female faculty at the Morningside Heights campus has risen from 22.6 percent to 26.3 percent in 2008.
Though progress has been made, Howard stressed that change won’t happen overnight, and minority discrepancies—beyond gender—are integrated into the world of academia. Minority underrepresentation cuts through almost every department, she said.
“It takes a long time for faculties to turn over. We’re here for 40 years, students are here for four,” Howard said. “The undergraduate bodies reflect demographic change at a much more rapid change than faculties. But if you let faculties go untended and you don’t push for diversity in hiring, they’ll simply reproduce their whiteness and their maleness. You have to interrupt the reproductive cycle.”
Mercer said that she has seen that the Office of the Vice Provost for Diversity Initiatives has worked hard to find diverse associate and full professors in different fields and bring them to Columbia. And if this diversity continues to increase, the effort will spread. “Women feel more included if you have more female professors,” she said.
But ultimately, stereotypes remain integrated in the system. “I think students have the ideal Ivy League professor in mind, and that’s often—for a surprising number—the guy with the big eyebrows or with the beard,” Mercer said, adding, “So, if you’re a petite man or a woman in the skirt, you’re challenged.”
An earlier version of this article incorrectly stated that Benedict became an assistant professor in 1937 and not an associate professor. Spectator regrets the error.
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