Last week, the Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Women published a report entitled “Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey”, which details its findings about it’s assessments of Associate Professors at private and public institutions. Among the key findings are:
“On average, it takes women from 1 to 3.5 years longer than men to attain the rank of
professor, depending on the type of institution in which they are employed and
regardless of whether they are single, married, or divorced or have children.

Women on average and across all institutions report that they spend less time on research and writing (7.7 hours a week) than men do (9.7 hours a week), and spend more time on grading or commenting on student work (7.5 hours a week) than men do (6.0 hours a week).

Men report greater job satisfaction than women in almost all cases; women at the rank of both associate professor and professor feel less authority, autonomy, and control over
their work lives than men do. Women report very high satisfaction in only one of nine
categories: having the authority to make decisions about the content and methods in the courses they teach (85.9% report being “very satisfied”).”

Wow. None of this is a surprise, but the last part is particularly interesting to me. As a recently promoted Full Professor, the Associate Dean in charge of the Tenure and Promotion Committee for my college and a Professional Tenure Coach, I am very familiar with the “stuck in rank” phenomenon among Associate Professors, regardless of gender, but had not appreciated the disconnect between job satisfaction and gender that may play a role in the degree to which men and women seek promotion to Full Professor. It’s clearly not just that women are parents and men are not. It’s clearly not just that men get mentored and women do not. There is a more pervasive issue at play here, and I think it has to do with differences in how men and women are socialized to communicate. At the core of this is that men are more comfortable asking for and getting what they need, and can say “no” more easily than women.
One book (and now website) that does, in my view, a really nice job of discussing these differences and providing strategies for women seeking to develop stronger communication styles is Women Don’t Ask: Negotiation and the Gender Divide (http://www.womendontask.com/_. Although I hope things are changing, my experience has always been that assertive men are often viewed as “Strong, decisive, and clear-minded” and assertive women are viewed as “Aggressive, b*tchy, and pushy*. In the close halls of the academy, it only takes a few perceptions of one (male or female, for that matter) as difficult, non-collegial or entitled for some serious damage to be done to one’s ability to get a fair shake in the political world of the University. It does mean one cannot succeed, but if the wrong people get fed up with a faculty member, the path to promotion to Full can be rockier than it needs to be.
I wonder if the tendency of women to take on more and more, to have more porous boundaries between work and home, and to hesitate to say no contributes to their extended time in rank and to their reduced job satisfaction? As strong, smart women, we can take control of so many things in our lives, but when it comes to admitting that we don’t have additional capacity to take on more, we may have a hard time, and as a result, impede our own progress. Key here is for women (and men, for that matter), whether academic or not, to prioritize valuing their own time and energy as much as we value that of others. If we do that, we can more easily stay on track for promotion, feel satisfied and appreciated at home and work, and meet our goals for both.