for STEM women on the academic career path

Evaluating Faculty for Promotion and Tenure

Evaluating faculty for promotion and tenure can carry the same pitfalls as evaluating candidates in the search for new faculty Some additional factors need to be considered, such as sub-field bias, minority and women faculty bear the burden of extra service - fewer faculty to interact with students (UIC student body as a whole has no majority ethnic group, whereas the faculty body does not have the same distribution in gender and ethnicity found among the students). A body of research reveals that student-faculty interaction is more difficult for the faculty member who is underrepresented; thus, interacting with the same students in teaching is not the same experience for the underrepresented faculty as they are for majority faculty. Women lecturers are treated differently by engineering students than their male counterparts especially in departments where students are predominantly male, such as engineering. This may also be reflected by student ratings of professors in standardized questionnaires, as shown by research on standard student evaluations of teaching. The following presentations were prepared by CJJ for Executive Committees which are also the Promotion and Tenure Committees in the Colleges of Engineering and Liberal Arts and Sciences, and also for the campus-wide P&T committee as a form of strategic intervention and education.

A Model for Training Workshops for Promotion & Tenure Committees

For P&T Committees
LAS Executive Committee	COE Executive Committee	Campus-wide P&T Committee

The Research Studies that are the Basis for the Presentations for P&T Committees:

Presentations used data from the following sources (although we drew from others as well):

• Accentuate the Positive: Are Good Intentions an Effective Way to Minimize Systemic Workplace Bias?, William T. Bielby, Virginia Law Review In Brief, 2010, 117, 95 http://www.virginialawreview.org/inbrief/2010/02/28/bielby.pdf
• Minority Vulnerability in Privileged Occupations : Why Do African American Financial Advisers Earn Less than Whites in a Large Financial Services Firm?, William T. Bielby, The ANNALS of the American Academy of Political and Social Science 2012, 639, 13- 32. Jan 2012 issue.
• Undergraduate Teaching Faculty: The 2010-2011 HERI Faculty Survey, S. Hurtado, K. Eagan, J. H. Pryor, H. Whang, & S. Tran, Oct 2012 Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA, available at: http://www.heri.ucla.edu/monographs/HERI-FAC2011-Monograph.pdf , a more recent one at: http://heri.ucla.edu/monographs/HERI-FAC2014-monograph.pdf
• A Threat in the Air. How Stereotypes Shape Intellectual Identity and Performance, Claude M. Steele, American Psychologist, 1997, 52(6), 613-629.
• Faculty of Color: Teaching in Predominantly White Colleges and Universities, C. A. Stanley, ed. Jossey-Bass, 2006.
• UC Berkeley Committee on the Status of Women and Ethnic Minorities 2005 report. http://academic-senate.berkeley.edu/committees/acfr/advancement-and-promotion-junior-faculty-uc-berkeley
• www.coache.org COACHE is the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education at the Harvard Univ Graduate School of Education. They have been conducting tenure-stream faculty surveys at over 150 four-year colleges and universities some for multiple years to assess the experiences deemed critical to their success.
• The Status of Women on the Stanford Faculty: Report to the Faculty Senate Spring, 1998, P. Findlen, E. Freedman, N. Kollmann, C. Ridgeway, M. Roberts, and D. Satz, available here
• Exploring the Color of Glass: Letters of Recommendation for Female and Male Medical Faculty, Frances Trix and Carolyn Psenka, Discourse and Society 2003, 14(2), 191-220.
• Teaching the Retrenchment Generation: When Sapphire Meets Socrates at the Intersection of Race, Gender, and Authority, Pamela J. Smith, William & Mary Journal of Women and the Law, 1999, 53, 162–63.
• Gender Stereotyping: Student-Faculty Interactions Feb 18, 2010 UIC Town Hall vignettes.
• Women faculty at work in the classroom or, why it still hurts to be a woman in labor, Bernice R. Sandier, Commun. Ed. 1991, 40, 6-15. A growing body of research describes how students—both male and female—treat women faculty differently than male faculty. The behaviors which are discussed do not occur in every class, and some are also directed at male faculty members, although not to the same degree. When these behaviors occur again and again they send a powerful message to the woman professor and to students that women are outsiders to the academic enterprise.
• When authority = she: a male student meets a female instructor, Joan V. Gallos, Journal of Management Development, 1995, 14(2), 65-76.
• Student Evaluations and Gendered Expectations: What We Can't Count Can Hurt Us, Joey Sprague and Kelley Massoni, Sex Roles: A Journal of Research 2005, 53, (11-12) 779-793.
• Bias, the brain, and student evaluations, Deborah J. Merritt, St. John's Law Review 2008, 82, 235-287.
• Student evaluations of teaching: are they related to what students learn? A Meta-Analysis and Review of the Literature, Dennis E. Clayson, J. Marketing Educ. 2009, 31(1), 16-30.
• Observations on the Folly of Using Student Evaluations of College Teaching for Faculty Evaluation, Pay, and Retention Decisions and Its Implications for Academic Freedom, William Arthur Wines and Terence J. Lau, William and Mary Journal of Women and the Law, 2006, 167, 13 .
• Personality and the Student Evaluation of Teaching, Dennis E. Clayson & Mary Jane Sheffet, J. Marketing Educ. 2006, 28, 149-160.
• Student evaluations of teachers. Students rate most highly instructors from whom they learn least, Miriam Rodin and Burton Rodin, Science 1972, 177, 1164–1166.
• Half a Minute: Predicting Teacher Evaluations from Thin Slices of Nonverbal Behavior and Physical Attractiveness, Nalini Ambady & Robert Rosenthal, J. Personality & Soc. Psychol. 1992, 64, 431–441.
• Thin Slices of Expressive Behavior as Predictors of Interpersonal Consequences: A Meta-Analysis, Nalini Ambady & Robert Rosenthal, Psychol. Bull. 1992, 111, 256–274.
• Student Ratings in a Consumerist Academy: Leveraging Pedagogical Control and Authority, Jordan J. Titus, Sociological Perspectives, 2008, 51(2), 397–422.
• Are Student Evaluations of Teaching Valid? Evidence from an Analytical Business Core Course, Penelope J. Yunker & James A. Yunker, J. Educ Bus. 2003, 78, 313–17.
• There are a large number of research articles about Student Evaluations of Teaching (SET). A bibliography categorized by SET research topics (SET versus student achievement, student learning, discipline, class size, course modality, student gender, student expected grades, student perceptions of rigor, student perceptions of faculty personality & non-verbal behaviors, faculty grading practices, faculty gender, faculty ethnicity, faculty sexual orientation, faculty age, faculty rank) has been prepared by Sarah Lang, Center for Teaching and Learning IUPUI here.
• Dual-Career Academic Couples: What Universities Need to Know, Clayman Institute, Stanford University, 2006, available here
• No credit where credit is due: Attributional rationalization of women's success in male-female teams, Madeline E. Heilman and Michelle C. Haynes, J. Appl. Psych. 2005, 90(5), 905-16. In 3 experimental studies the authors explored how ambiguity about the source of a successful joint performance outcome promotes attributional rationalization, negatively affecting evaluations of women.
• RAISEProject has data analysis of awards by gender here.
• Nepotism and Sexism in Peer-Review, Christine Wenneras and Agnes Wold, Nature, 1997, 387: 341-343.
• The Impact of Gender on the Review of the Curricula Vitae of Job Applicants and Tenure Candidates: A National Empirical Study, Rhea E. Steinpreis, Katie A. Anders, and Dawn Ritzke, Sex Roles, 1999, 41(7/8): 509-528.
• Science faculty's subtle gender biases favor male students. C. A. Moss-Racusin, J. F. Dovidio, V. L. Brescoll, M. J. Graham and J. Handelsman, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U S A. 2012, 109(41), 16474-9.
• Orchestrating impartiality: The impact of "blind" auditions on female musicians, Goldin and Rouse. American Economic Review 2000, 90, 715-741.
• Why so slow? The advancement of women, Virginia Valian, MIT Press, Cambridge, 1998.
• ADEPT (Awareness of Decisions in Evaluating Promotion and Tenure) GATech tool, simulation of P&T meetings, case studies.
• Processes in Racial Discrimination: Differential Weighting of Conflicting Information, G. Hodson, J. F. Dovidio and S. L. Gaertner, Personality and Social Psychology Bulletin 2002, 28, 460-471.
• Constructed Criteria: Redefining Merit to Justify Discrimination, E. L. Uhlmann and G. L. Cohen, Psychological Science 2005, 16, 474-480.
• The gendered division of labor among STEM faculty and the effects of critical mass, Coleen Carrigan, Kate Quinn, Eve A. Riskin, Journal of Diversity in Higher Education, 2011, 4(3), 131-146. Sep 2011 issue.
• Service and Gender Inequity among Faculty, Karen Pyke, PS: Political Science and Politics, 2011, 44(1), 85-87. (January 2011) Published by American Political Science Association.
• Report on Work-Time, Housework, Carework, and Work-Life Balance, Joya Misra, Abby Templer, and Jennifer Lundquist, University of Massachusetts, Amherst 2009.
• Associate Professors and Gendered Barriers to Advancement, Joya Misra, Jennifer Lundquist, Elissa Dahlberg Holmes, and Stephanie Agiomavritis, Report, University of Massachusetts, Amherst, 2010.
• Engendering the University through Policy and Practice: Barriers to Promotion to Full Professor for Women in the Science, Engineering, and Math Disciplines, Dana M. Britton, Gender Change in Academia, 2010, pp 15-26 Springer, presented at the Conference on Gender Change in Academia: Re-mapping the fields of work, knowledge, and politics from a gender perspective. International Conference at the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen, February13-15, 2009.

Other Examples of training of P&T Committees

• ADEPT (Awareness of Decisions in Evaluating Promotion and Tenure) at Georgia Tech. The ADEPT instrument is a tool that allows learners to participate in promotion and tenure committee meetings. It consists of a downloadable application that contains nine case studies (fictional career accounts with accompanying questions for discussion), three types of activities based on these cases, a bibliography of bias in faculty evaluation, and links to Georgia Tech and other resources about evaluation. Individuals can use ADEPT to participate in a virtual promotion and tenure meeting, where depending upon their response, the meeting takes different directions and generates different outcomes in promotion and tenure.

Guides to Best Practices in Tenure Evaluation:

• Good Practice in Tenure Evaluation Advice for Tenured Faculty, Department Chairs, and Academic Administrators (AAUP, American Council on Education)
• Recommended Best Practice in RPT process, Georgia Tech
• Reform the Tenure and Promotion System?