Long before women donned power suits and took over corner offices across America, the fairer sex was firmly in control of one profession: teaching. Though the image of schoolmarms in high-necked shirts and sensible shoes is long gone, the tradition of women in education remains strong. According to the National Educational Association, only nine percent of elementary school teachers today are male, meaning that women tower over men in this crucial area of education. But the tables turn drastically when it comes to education at the university level, where men overwhelmingly dominate teaching positions.
Georgetown is no different from schools of similar caliber in its dearth of women professors, but straight numbers may paint a picture much worse than the true reality of academic life for the women at the front of classrooms across campus.
On Oct. 26th, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released a new report, called the AAUP Faculty Gender Indicators 2006. In the report, colleges and universities across the United States are evaluated for their gender diversity based upon four factors: the full or part-time employment status of professors, tenure status for full-time professors, promotion to full professor rank and average salary. According to the report, only 22.7 percent of full professors at Georgetown are women. Never ones to lose in a numbers game, the Ivy League’s big three, Princeton, Harvard and Yale, outdo Georgetown in female disparity, reporting only 16.7 percent, 20.4 percent and 20.2 percent respectively of women professors on their full-time faculty. Such statistics beg the question: how far has the struggle for gender equity in American universities come?
According to Martha West, professor of law at U.C. Davis and co-author of the AAUP study, the deficiency of females at prominent universities is not surprising. “The more prestigious and higher status [the university] the more resistant it is to change, the more power the white male system has against change” West said. She does not see Georgetown’s Jesuit identity as playing a significant factor in the number of women professors on campus, but points to the University’s status as a doctoral institution as a more relevant contributor to the low number of females. Research universities have a poor record of retaining women on their faculties, and Georgetown makes no secret of its quest to rise to the prestige of the ivy-covered halls of America’s historic bastions of academic power. Fellow Jesuit institutions such as Holy Cross, Fordham and Boston College showed significantly higher numbers of female professors than Georgetown, though all hold lower spots on the U.S. News and World Report’s college ratings. Indeed, it seems that rather than attracting successful female academics in droves, top-tier universities drive women away.
An oft-cited complaint among female professors concerns the inconvenient and unavoidable coincidence of the university-imposed tenure clock and their own biological one. In order to attain job security, professors at Georgetown are expected to produce extensive research and publish a number of papers within a seven year tenure probationary period. This high-stress atmosphere of academic competition can be an all-consuming commitment and one that does not accommodate family life well, especially for young mothers. Judith Tucker, a professor in the History Department, can remember the strain of completing her research and raising a family at once. When Tucker first came to Georgetown in the 1980s, there was no maternity leave for professors.
“I had my babies in the summer and forged ahead,” she said matter-of-factly. Starting a family slows down an academic’s productivity, a fact Maria Donoghue, a professor of biology new to Georgetown this year, learned during her time as a professor at Yale University. Obtaining tenure in the sciences is an especially arduous process because of the sheer amount of research that must be completed in order to attain much-sought-after grants. Sitting in her cozy Reiss office overlooking the tranquil late-afternoon vistas of the silenced bulldozers by Harbin Field, it is difficult to picture the self-possessed Donoghue taking part in the frenzied tenure process she describes. While at Yale, she had both of her children and can recall giving birth on a Saturday and being back in the lab on Tuesday, baby in tow. With a wry smile, she characterizes her time on the tenure track as “absolutely crazy.” Donoghue left Yale just as she was going up for tenure, finally fed up with the system that she says leaves many women beaten down.
Childcare is a daunting challenge that faces families with working parents across all facets of society, and the university culture is neither different nor simpler to navigate for young mothers. Kathleen McNamara, a professor in the government department who spent the early part of her academic career at Princeton University, was disappointed by that university’s paltry accommodations for young families. She was shocked when she learned while pregnant with her own child that Princeton had no parental leave. McNamara calls herself the “squeaky wheel” who pushed for the administration to institute the policy.
“You need to be very stubborn to make it all the way,” she said of success in a university setting, It’s not hard to imagine McNamara stirring the pot. She sat in her bright office amidst bookshelves filled with tomes large and small, dressed in head-to-toe black, sporting a vaguely nautical silk scarf and a subtly mischievous air. Georgetown, McNamara says, is much more “welcoming to women and families overall.” Small things, such as scheduling department meetings during lunch rather than in the early evening when kids must be picked up from school, make a huge difference to mothers like her. Hoya Kids, the University-operated childcare center, was started in 1997 in order to assist faculty members in their quests for reliable daycare. McNamara recognizes the center as helpful, but says Georgetown must expand the service in order to allow more faculty children to attain spots; her own son was on the Hoya Kids waiting list for a year.
Though statistics show Georgetown has great disparity in the number of male and female professors, a selective number of departments buck the trend. The humanities have historically retained strong numbers of female professors, while the economics, government, physics and chemistry programs at Georgetown remain overwhelmingly dominated by male faculty. Government department chair George Shambaugh recognizes the disproportionate male to female ratio of faculty within his department and points to the hiring process as the problem. It’s not unusual to receive close to 100 applicants for a position in the government department, only four of which may be female. The irony of this situation, as Shambaugh points out, is that there is an equal number of women and men with PhDs in political science, but the trend of gender equity has yet to “percolate through the system.” Because there are so few female candidates for professorial positions, when one comes onto the job market, competition between universities can turn the wooing process into a costly affair, where the old adage that you can’t buy love holds no sway. Judith Tucker pointed to the success schools such as University of Michigan have had in recruiting women, especially in the sciences, because of special funds that have been set aside for the purpose of encouraging successful women to apply for positions. Rather than the university administration mandating certain candidates be hired on the basis of their sex, special funds encourage the acquisition of the best teachers and scholars whose gender, in addition to great academic ability, make them sought after commodities. Tucker sees the beauty in this strategy because it allows department heads, jealous of their autonomy, to retain control over the hiring process but also vary their staff. She bemoans the fact that Georgetown doesn’t have such special funds to diversify its faculty.
“Georgetown is proud of its record in hiring female faculty,” Assistant Vice President for Communications Erik Smulson stated. He went on to say, “we actively pursue opportunities to recruit women and minorities,” though he avoided queries about the possibility of Georgetown’s creating a special trust to attract female professors and was mute on the efforts the University is making to appeal to female graduate students.
Smulson pointed to the New Parent Leave Option, made effective in Nov. 2004, as one example of Georgetown’s family-friendly policy. The New Parent Leave Option allows faculty to take a semester-long, full-paid leave during care for a new child, while the University’s tenure policy allows for the tenure track period to be interrupted for the birth of a child or other situations requiring medical leave. For some, though, these efforts are not enough. In Oct. 2005, Pamela Fox, director of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program, wrote a memo on behalf of the Steering Committee of the Women’s and Gender Studies Program to the president of the faculty senate. The memo calls for an extension of Georgetown’s traditional seven year tenure probationary period to ease the strain of family and work pressures.
“We argue that a ‘family-friendly’ institution should encourage more, rather than less, flexibility in work schedules for both men and women,” it stated.
For all the special funds and incentives, the scarcity of young women entering into academia lies at the heart of the University system’s gender inequity problem.
Michelle Farrell, a 27-year-old graduate student in her fourth year in the Spanish and Portuguese Ph.D. program, stands at the threshold of her burgeoning academic career, anticipating the challenges that professorship and the daunting tenure process will bring. She is clearly at home in the university setting, personal and appropriately verbose for all her language study; she greets friends in Spanish as they pass by and talks enthusiastically about her own undergraduate pupils. Farrell maintains that the presence of women teachers in graduate programs is important.
“I think confidence-wise it’s good to see female professors,” she said. Farrell intends to teach at the university level upon completion of her degree, and already the realities of tenure and the anticipation of a changing personal life weigh upon her mind. There is an air of uncertainty about her when she muses on the potential for motherhood in her future.
“If you want a more traditional route, it can be overwhelming thinking about the long road ahead,” she said, especially considering the realities of age and fertility, though such quandaries don’t keep her up at night just yet. One observation Farrell makes about women who are able to successfully juggle research work and family life is that they are those endowed with strong support systems. The financial security provided by a successful spouse or a family member’s willingness to look after children or inherited wealth are undeniable advantages that some women in academia can lean upon.
Maria Donoghue has also observed the phenomenon of what she calls academic “power couples.” During her time at Yale, Donoghue says she was aware of a number of duos who were promoted and tenured based upon their joint success. The wives in these couples, though bright, had not completed the same volume of work as other women on the tenure track, but because of marriages to successful men, were tenured anyway. No matter how taboo the notion may seem to feminists, hitching your star to a man appears to remain a reality in the dog-eat-dog world of prestigious academic institutions.
Some women choose to avoid the world of “the academy” altogether. Deborah O’Donnell, a third year Ph.D. student in Georgetown’s biology program, will most likely forgo a career at the university level, in part because of the hectic lives led by professors on the tenure track at such schools. Instead, O’Donnell says, she’d rather consider positions at smaller colleges which emphasize teaching over research, seek a job as a high school teacher or go into what she calls “industry work.” One attraction of working in the private sector for O’Donnell is the prospect of a more defined work schedule that clearly delineates a time frame for things such as maternity leave. As far as finding a job and settling down after graduation with her husband, a medical resident at Georgetown, O’Donnell says her future location “depends on my husband, which doesn’t bother me.”
McNamara maintained that “one of the biggest obstacles women face is that they are married to men with their own careers” and often, when it comes down to choices concerning location for jobs, the woman’s career seems to be the expendable one. The best advice that she can give to her female Ph.D. students, McNamara said with a sly smile, is to “make sure you marry the right man!” Her husband followed her to D.C., she said, because he understood that the job market for professorships is not flexible, while he could find a position in almost any city. Such mentoring from senior women in universities is exactly what many female graduate students want; according to McNamara, “women are hungry for practical information and seek older women in the field for advice.” Other female professors at Georgetown agree that there is a certain collegiality among women in the University, both students and professors. But this informal network may not be enough to push for real change in University policies that female faculty may identify as problematic. Those women on campus who need advocacy the most—mothers—are the ones with the least time to spare.
Despite the present problems, Georgetown appears to be on the right track in fostering a healthy amount of growth in the numbers of female faculty. Of those professors currently completing the tenure probationary period, 42.1 percent are women, a figure significantly more promising than the current numbers on full-professors allow. Georgetown may find its way to greater academic prestige by reversing the Ivy League’s strategy of smothering competition in favor of the family-friendly collegial work environments women such as Donoghue and McNamara praise. Rather than the antiquated old-boys network that once reigned supreme, a sorority of quiet success is slowly emerging from the hallowed halls of academia. For the time being, the women of this network can only savor the joys of small victories and forge ahead on their road less traveled.
