The Retention and Promotion of Women and Minority Faculty Members: Effects of Institutional Hiring, Promotion, Diversity and Work-Life Initiatives, 1993-2008

Harvard University, Cambridge MA

Investigators

Abstract

U.S. colleges and universities have implemented a wide range of programs to promote diversity in the professoriate. Special recruitment programs, tenure extension policies for new parents, paid maternity leaves, mentoring programs targeting female and minority faculty members, dual-career hiring initiatives, and ethnic affinity networks for faculty are but a few of the initiatives. Which of these programs work? It is anyone?s guess, and critics argue that many of the programs may have no effects, or even adverse effects. This goal of this project is to understand the role of university recruitment, promotion, diversity, and work-family programs in attracting and retaining female and minority professors. The project will address questions such as: Do tenure extension programs for new parents help female faculty members win tenure, or do they do more to help male faculty members, who more often have spouses with low-demand careers? Do networking programs help African-American and Latino faculty members to succeed, or do they stigmatize and isolate those faculty members? Do formal promotion requirements help women and minorities to win promotion, or do they serve as window-dressing? NCSES' Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR) data from 1993 to 2008, as well as new survey data, will be used to address these questions. The project will develop and pilot a questionnaire designed to obtain historical data on university recruitment, promotion, diversity, and work-family programs, develop a sample of colleges and universities and matched SDR respondents, and build methods for analyzing the data. The goal is to show the effects of the presence, and adoption, of different programs on the career progression of male and female, majority and minority Ph.D.s. New methods will be developed for analyzing individual-level data from the SDR panels, using multinomial logit methods in hierarchical linear models, in which individuals are embedded in institutions. We will develop models that account for both left and right censoring in the data, but which make use of the multiple years of observation available for SDR respondents. Broader impacts: The result of this project will be to show which types of programs help schools to attract, retain, and promote women and minority faculty members, and will guide future administrators in making choices about program utilization and design. This project will also train 3 to 5 doctoral students to analyze data from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, and to use advanced statistical techniques to examine factors shaping the careers of U.S. scientists and engineers.