Not Moving On Up: Why Women Get Stuck at Associate Professor

The Chronicle of Higher Education
Monday, April 27, 2009
By AUDREY WILLIAMS JUNE

Message to deans, department chairs, and other administrators in higher education: Pay more attention to associate professors— particularly women, for whom the path to promotion is often murky and less traveled.
That's one of several recommendations from a panel of the Modern Language Association, whose new report, released today, describes how male associate professors in English and foreign languages are routinely promoted to full professor quicker than women are. To help reverse that trend, the MLA's Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession suggested several moves, such as backing away from the monograph as the dominant form of scholarship that counts toward advancement, attaching bigger salary increases to the jump from associate to full professor, and creating mentor programs that focus specifically on preparing associate professors for promotion. The report, "Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey," is available on the association's Web site.
"Every associate professor should be promoted at some point," said Kathleen Woodward, a professor of English at the University of Washington and the report's lead author. "Universities have devoted so much attention to assistant professors trying to get tenure, as they should, but associate professors are important, too."
The report shows that women at doctoral institutions take two and a half years longer than men to reach full professor. The gap shrinks to one and a half years at master's institutions, and the smallest gap—a year is at baccalaureate colleges. A closer look at private independent colleges by the association revealed that women there take three and a half years longer than their male counterparts to advance to associate professor.
Over all, the average time to promotion for female associate professors is 8.2 years, compared with 6.6 years for men.
And although many studies show that female academics spend more time caring for children than do their male peers, the association's report found that such family obligations aren't the tipping point when it comes to advancement. Women are promoted more slowly than men, no matter what their marital or parental status is, according to the report, for which 400 professors were surveyed.

Full Story: http://chronicle.com/daily/2009/04/16759n.htm?utm_source=at&utm_medium=en (Subscription required)

Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession Releases Its Report on the Associate Professor Survey
The Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, as part of the committee's Associate Professor Project, has written a report presenting findings of the MLA's 2006 survey of MLA members who hold the rank of professor and associate professor and teach English or other modern languages in United States colleges and universities. The data reveal differences in the career paths and progress of men and women in the fields of language and literature represented in the MLA, including the number of years spent at the rank of associate professor before promotion to professor; time devoted to research, teaching, service, and other professional activities; time given to personal commitments such as child care, elder care, and other family responsibilities; views of tenure and promotion; and job satisfaction.

Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey http://www.mla.org/
Full Report
Key Findings