According to research published today by Joya Misra, Jennifer Hickes Lundquist, Elissa Holmes, and Stephanie Agiomavritis, female faculty members may hit a glass ceiling as they approach the top of the ivory tower.
The study, published in Academe, was based upon surveys and interviews with 350 faculty members at the University of Massachusetts Amherst. It found that both male and female professors a worked similar number of hours, but males spent significantly more time on research than women, which ultimately translated into a shorter path to full professorship. In some cases, “men [spent] in excess of two hundred more hours on their research each year than women… [while women devoted] an hour more a week to teaching, two hours more a week to mentoring and five hours more on service.” All this confirmed recent scholarship finding women’s academic advancement stalls at the associate professor level.
To create a more balanced pathway to full professorship across the genders, Misra et al. suggested several methods to change the culture of service. Read the full study here.