THERE STILL AREN'T enough women at
business schools. While schools have
made progress over the past five years bringing
in more women as students,
faculty, and administrators-women are
still underrepresented at virtually every
level. Not only that, their salaries lag
behind those of their male peers.
While the gains are to be applauded,
the inequality still needs to be recognized
and addressed. When women are
not well-represented at all ranks and in
all roles in the business school, students
do not see diversity reflected in either
their faculty or their school leaders. Not
only that, the institution suffers, because
it will not benefit from the diverse
perspectives and approaches that lead to
better decisions and better results.
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To discuss the issue of increasing
gender diversity, last August we convened
a panel of senior business school
leaders at the American Marketing
Association's Summer Academic Conference
in Boston. There we examined recent data collected by AACSB International
and discussed ways business
schools could address gender disparity
in their leadership ranks.
Some of the numbers are encouraging.
Compared to five years ago, AACSB
member schools have increased the percent
of women at each faculty rank, with
the largest increases being at the level
of dean and assistant dean. Yet, overall,
women are still underrepresented,
according to comparative data that tracks
a subset of AACSB member schools over
a five-year period. The chart below shows
the rough percentages for the number of
women acting as deans, associate deans,
and department chairs in 2018. The low
number of female department chairs
is significant because leadership often
begins at the department chair level.
But one of the most interesting data
points shows that women fill 66 percent
of the assistant dean positions, the
only level at which women are more
numerous than men. However, these
deanships are disproportionately at the
undergraduate level-which tends to be
less strategically important for business
schools, as it brings in less revenue than
programs at the graduate level. And
anecdotal evidence suggests that while
assistant deans are often responsible
for the day-to-day, internal work of the
business school, they have less impact
on setting strategy for the school. Thus,
even when women have leadership positions,
their power is limited.
One reason women are not reaching
the higher leadership ranks is that they
are not progressing to full professors at
the same rate as men. While the percentage
of women at each rank has increased
slightly over the past five years, there are
fewer women at each ascending level.
This indicates a narrowing funnel for
women seeking leadership roles.
In terms of compensation, the picture
for women is no brighter. Despite more
than 50 years of calls for equal pay for
equal work, women still make significantly less than men at all levels, according
to AACSB data. Specifically, women
across all ranks of business school faculty
earn 87.3 cents for each US$1 earned
by men. The good news is that new women
hires are receiving more equitable
pay—although this means the gap is even
greater for faculty who have already been
in the workforce for some time.
This is the glass ceiling at work:
Women are not only present in lower
numbers than men, they are hitting barriers
as they progress through the stages
of leadership, and they're earning less at
every turn. These discrepancies are not
likely to change unless we identify and
address some of the roadblocks women
face in their careers.
OBSTACLES IN THE WAY
What are some of these roadblocks holding
women back? We identified eight
potential hindrances during our panel
discussion at the AMA conference.
We call them "potential" hindrances
because they do not apply to all women
at all schools-and they might apply to
minorities and some men as well. But
all of them should be considered as we
strive toward gender equity:
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Women negotiate less. According to
research by Hannah Riley Bowles, Linda
Babcock, and Lei Lai in Organizational
Behavior and Human Decision Process,
women are likely to feel social disincentives
to negotiate because they fear
being seen as aggressive. They are also
less likely than men to negotiate unless they are signaled that negotiations
are acceptable, according to research
published in Management Science by
Andreas Leibbrandt and John A. List.
Some organizations have programs in
place to address this issue. For instance,
in January of 2018, the Massachusetts
Office of State Treasurer and the American
Association of University Women
launched a statewide program called
"Just Ask!" Each year, the program expects
to train 5,000 women in the art of
salary and benefit negotiation.
Women operate "by the book."
Women are less likely than men to apply
for a position unless they meet all the
stated qualifications, which they tend to
take literally. In addition, women faculty
more often report "a lack of transparency
and clarity regarding promotion
criteria," write Kimberly Buch and
co-authors in Change: The Magazine
of Higher Education. This means that
women don't reach as quickly for jobs
at the next level and they progress more
slowly through the ranks.
Women receive less enthusiastic
recommendations. In the peer-reviewed
world of science and academia,
letters of recommendation serve an
important gate-keeping function for
positions, promotions, awards, and recognitions.
However, in a piece published
in Discourse & Society, Frances Trix and
Carolyn Psenka find that letters of recommendation
written for women tend
to be shorter than those written for men
and more often describe women as
communal rather than agentic (that is,
less likely to be competitive). The letters
also contain more references to the
women candidates' teaching than their
research, whereas letters of recommendation
for men focus on their research.
In addition, the letters contain more
instances of language that might raise
doubts about the candidates.
Women aren't good at self-promotion.
While many men enjoy
talking about their achievements,
women shy away from being boastful or
overconfident, and often they don't claim
personal credit, writes Deborah Tannen
in Harvard Business Review. This has an
unexpected effect in terms of research
citations. While citations often are
viewed as gender-neutral, men are more
likely than women to reference their own
work, Dalmeet Singh Chawla notes in a
piece in Nature. This can skew the impact
of citations. Thus, the tendency of
women to be modest about their accomplishments
may prove a disadvantage to
female candidates seeking higher ranks.
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Women receive lower teaching
evaluations. There is rising evidence
that women, and certain other groups,
suffer a bias in their teaching evaluations.
Lillian Macnell, Adam Driscoll,
and Andrea Hunt published a study in
Innovative Higher Education, showing
what happened when they manipulated
the implied gender of the instructor of an
online course. They found that women
received significantly lower evaluations,
even on criteria that were identical. Ben Schmidt reviewed teaching evaluations
from Rate My Professor and found that,
across all disciplines, men and women
are often described by gender-stereotypical
language. (See the interactive chart.)
Women lack mobility. Many schools
believe that the open market is an efficient
way to make salary adjustments,
but they might be wrong. A study by Kelly
Ann O'Meara, John Fink, and Damani
Khary White-Lewis in NASPA Journal
About Women in Higher Education
found men and full professors are more
likely to receive outside offers that will
lead to more competitive salaries. The
researchers suggest that women face
several barriers to receiving such offers:
They are underrepresented at higher
ranks, receive fewer scholarly accolades,
negotiate less, and face continuing implicit
bias in the hiring process.
Women are more likely to be
caregivers. Family and medical leave is
protected under law in many countries,
but when employees take leave to become
caregivers, their institutions often
interpret this as a signal that they are
less committed to their careers. Since
women are more likely than men to take
family leave, their absences might negatively
affect their career advancement.
This is particularly true for parental
leave, which uniquely disadvantages female
faculty relative to male faculty. Research
by Heather Antecol, Kelly Bedard,
and Jenna Stearns, which was published
by the IZA Institute of Labor Economics,
found that the adoption of gender-neutral
tenure clock-stopping policies substantially
reduced female tenure rates while
increasing male tenure rates, thereby
widening the gender gap. Specifically,
their data show higher rates of top-tier
journal publications for men compared to
women, indicating that men may use the
clock-stoppage time strategically to be
more productive in their research.
Women pay a "gender tax." To
achieve diversity on committees and
teams, business school administrators
intentionally recruit women and minority members. Thus, women and
minorities pay a "gender" or "minority"
tax because of their more limited numbers,
particularly as they achieve higher
ranks. Research by Cassandra Guarino
and Victor Borden in Research in Higher
Education confirms that women perform
more service than men; the authors also
found that women's service is more likely
to be internal to the department, college,
or university, and less likely to serve the
profession or the community. Women
may be asked to do more, may have a
harder time saying no, or hold a different
view of service obligations than men.
WHAT COULD CHANGE
In our AMA meeting, we were happy
to hear schools share examples of how
they are addressing gender equity. For
instance, some are choosing not to pay "disloyalty bonuses" to professors who
seek competing salary offers. While it's
unlikely that the potential hindrances
will ever be eliminated completely, we
identified several actions that administrators
could take to lessen some of the
effects of gender disparity:
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Commit to the goal. Leaders should
openly profess a desire for equity,
acknowledging that historical practices
or processes may have unintentionally
created disparities. When they commit
to continuous process improvement,
they can focus on identifying future opportunities
rather than assigning blame
or defending the past.
Assess current representation.
Leaders should know where their
schools and departments stand. What
is the gender representation for faculty
across the business school, in various
Business education (71.4%)
Manufacturing and tech
management (66.7%)
Business communications (66.3%)
academic disciplines, and in each degree
program? When hiring, administrators
commonly focus on departmental-level
needs, but they also should consider
diversity goals that improve representation
at the program level.
Assess career progression. Leaders
should analyze how men, women, and
minorities progress through the academic
ranks at their schools. Is adequate
feedback given to faculty so that they
know when they meet promotion criteria?
If certain groups are taking longer
to progress, does the school have faculty
development programs that explicitly
target those who have spent extended
time as associate professors?
Examine pay gaps by gender. Are
there salary differences between men
and women? Are there differences in how
research, travel, and other compensation are funded for men and women? Are
pay differences related to performance
or to other criteria?
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Examine criteria for assignments
and evaluations. Leaders should
determine if service commitments
or teaching assignments are allocated
disproportionately to women
or minorities. Administrators also
should consider whether they need
to adjust their criteria for teaching
and research.
We believe that if administrators
are willing to examine the data, they
can gather a wealth of information
about how they're doing on gender
parity and determine if there is need
for action at their institutions.
Calls for systemic change to
achieve gender equity are not new;
we have long been discussing the
need to improve the career prospects
of women in academia. But it is still
daunting for individual schools, and
individual departments, to move
forward with changes.
Nonetheless, we believe meaningful progress can be achieved when administrators evaluate their situations and address the existing hindrances. The good news is that the schools that are the first movers on gender parity are most likely to see the greatest benefits. They'll do a better job of recruiting and retaining faculty, recruiting students, improving long-term alumni development—and changing academia for the better.
Pam Scholder Ellen is an associate
professor of marketing and associate
director of WomenLead at Georgia
State University's Robinson College
of Business in Atlanta; June Cotte is
the Scott & Melissa Beattie Professor
in Marketing at Western University's
Ivey Business School in London,
Ontario, Canada; and Joseph K.
Goodman is an associate professor of
marketing and logistics at the Ohio
State University's Fisher College of
Business in Columbus.
This article originally appeared in BizEd's March/April 2019 issue. Please send questions, comments, or letters to the editor to [email protected].
Related Reading
For a look at how gender disparities affect public universities in Massachusetts, read "Tracking Gender Disparity Among Academics."