Gender, Career Disruption, and Academic Rewards

Abstract

In recent years there have been numerous claims of an academic wage gap that favors males [6, 12, 13, 14]. Scholars also have noted that rank and/or tenure differences exist between male and female faculty members [5, 8, 17]. Others have suggested that different criteria are used to evaluate male and female faculty members and that females reap fewer returns for their achievements [16]. Researchers offer competing explanations of sex-related academic reward differences. One explanation focuses on discriminatory practices of employers and colleagues. Its proponents argue that women in male-dominated professions are perceived as deviant and are treated as such [11, 25]. Discrimination in academia can take many forms, including but not limited to excluding women from informal collegial networks [18, 29]; a disregard for feminist or gender-related research [7, 29], which may be used against women in tenure decisions [30]; and subtle or overt sexual harassment [30]. A second explanation assumes sex differences in research productivity. Scholars from various academic disciplines have claimed that males out-publish females [9, 22, 26]. Thus, a difference in academic rewards is attributed, in part, to productivity differences between males and females. A third perspective on the relation between sex and academic rewards focuses attention on career disruption. Scholars have noted that faculty women are more likely than faculty men to interrupt their careers, even when women are the primary earners [27]. Interrupting a career does not generally occur because of pregnancy or child rearing; rather, professional women interrupt careers more often for a job-seeking spouse