We need to dismantle the promotion patriarchy in academia from the inside

Everyday gender injustices are entrenched in academia via its systemic flaws, rigid policies and the fierce (often white male) protectors of the hierarchical status quo. And nowhere is the patriarchal beast better fed than through academia’s promotion processes and policies. 

While the gendered nature of academia has been sluggishly shifting for the better across the 21st century, promotion “traditions” have remained resistant to change. Many women in academia are still tenured and promoted at far lower rates than their male colleagues, despite decades of advancement in feminism. Indeed, there is an under-representation of women in senior positions across the sector. The institution needs radical disruption from the inside out. 

Linearity in the institution: from lecturer to professor

One of the most common structural inequalities that women in academia face is the preferred linear pathway from lecturer to professor. Very few women have uninterrupted time across their academic careers, and many still bear the domestic cognitive load in their personal lives. 

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Postdoctoral women can endure a “motherhood penalty” for career breaks and on their return to work choose to sidestep senior academic responsibilities involving long working hours, competition, productivity and requirements for constant availability. 

Some women choose to opt out of academia completely, leading to a gendered brain drain. 

Delaying motherhood in academia is common, as is completing a PhD later in life for family reasons; both strategies interrupt research and career trajectories. Maternity leave and flexible working are still non-existent for employees in higher education institutions and research bodies in many parts of the world.

Implicit bias within the promotion system 

The promotion system for lower-ranked teaching-researchers (the majority of whom are women) prioritises high-quality research outputs, successful grants, conference attendance and PhD completions. The disciplines in which academics work can affect their career pathways, with science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) subjects being viewed as more important and attracting higher research funding than arts or education, where far more female academics reside. Fewer women lead these research grants, too, which indicates gender bias in funding systems. 

And the institutional discrimination does not stop there. With fewer women as chief investigators, they are less likely to be lead authors of quality publications and conference outputs – key performance indicators that affect promotion potential.

The advantage increases as men climb up the university career ladder, since they are bestowed with more research time and higher numbers of PhD students with whom they can co-publish. Men quickly learn to play the academic game, while women in academia are much more likely to be engaged in service activities (such as teaching, student support, committee membership or conference organisation). 

Women’s institutional “housework” involves non-promotable activities when compared with revenue-generating research tasks. Students’ subject evaluations are notoriously gender biased, too, yet universities still cling to this unreliable evidence for promotion purposes. 

Troubling the promotion system from the inside 

Lessons from successful women in academia have been touted as solutions to the promotion predicament, yet they fail to reach the beating heart of the sector’s gender inequity. Women academics often feel othered by hegemonic masculine norms that freely flow through the institution’s arteries.

Here’s how we can rebalance the system:

• Ensure that women of every rank in the university, not merely associate professors or professors, are involved in the regular review and development of more equitable promotion processes and policies.
• Collate promotion feedback from applicants each year, asking specific gender-related questions to monitor where change is most needed. 
• Embed more flexible, holistic ways of framing academic “success” in promotion criteria. Build them into each career level, reducing the dominant research bias that favours male academics.
• Ensure women at all levels of the university are called upon to be promotion mentors, giving them opportunities to take on this role in accordance with the promotion level sought (for example, Level B females mentoring Level A applicants). 
• Embed equal employment opportunity statements in promotion applicants to permit all applicants, especially women as marginalised staff members, to summarise their personal and professional challenges. Concessions made for these challenges must be transparent and communicated to each applicant in their feedback from the promotion committee; this is particularly important if the applicant is classed as unsuccessful due to not meeting certain alleged requirements.
• Allow academics to weight their applications in alignment with their teaching-research-academic citizenship workloads. While universities prioritise research, the reality is that heavy teaching workloads actively prevent lower-ranked (often female) academics from meeting higher research standards. 
• Remove student subject evaluation surveys as evidence of effective teaching, due to their inherent gender bias.
• Include external committee members on all promotion committees to lessen in-house prejudice. 
• Allow the applicant to remove promotion committee members if they can sufficiently explain the perceived conflicts of interest they have with them. Only overrule these conflicts of interest in exceptional circumstances – this should be a committee decision, not a hierarchical one (since this is where male governance dominates).
• Ensure that promotion feedback prioritises staff well-being. Do not offload the communication of final promotion results to administrators, who are mostly women. Instead, organise a known support colleague for all applicants when promotion results are conveyed.
• Review promotion appeals with new committees to avoid hierarchical decisions where greater numbers of men are making judgements about female academics’ futures. Recognise that it is a red flag if all promotion appeals are unsuccessful in an institution. Listen to and act upon appellants’ promotion process feedback and their experiences of the appeal system.

Until we recognise, validate and action these types of systemic changes, we will continue to see our gendered academic bastions working to keep women out. Before more damage is done to women’s psychological and financial well-being, each and every university must take a hammer to the patriarchal monolith.