Ohio State women faculty are increasing in number, but are still lagging behind men.
About 33 percent of OSU’s 3,741 faculty members are female, up from 27 percent a decade earlier, according to the 2010 Status Report on Women.
Broken down by rank, about 43 percent of assistant professors, 37 percent of associate professors and 21 percent of professors at OSU are women, according to the report released earlier this month and prepared by the President’s Council on Women and the Women’s Place. In 1998, those percentages were 42, 29 and 12 percent respectively.
The Women’s Place, a university office that focuses on changing policies related to the workplace climate for women, has helped establish programs to hire more women, retain them and help them gain confidence with skills.
The report is based on data from Autumn Quarter 2009. Statistics for the 2010-2011 school year have not been compiled yet.
Hazel Morrow-Jones, associate provost for Women’s Policy Initiatives and director of the Women’s Place, attributes the increase to several factors.
When women become faculty members, they go through programs that help them understand how the university works, Morrow-Jones said.
Those programs include teaching faculty members how to manage labs and strengthen their time management.
Morrow-Jones said the ratio of female to male faculty is partly a result of interference between the tenure clock and biological clock.
Once faculty members decide to pursue a tenured position, they have six years to achieve what colleagues consider a qualified work record. If they don’t reach that goal, they have to leave, Morrow-Jones said.
That can put women at a disadvantage if they want children, some say.
After women go through undergraduate and graduate school, many are about 30 years old. Add on six years, and they would be in their mid-30s, Morrow-Jones said.
“The clock is ticking,” she said.
To accommodate families, the university implemented a one-year extension to the six-year time limit if a faculty member gives birth or adopts a child. That rule applies to men and women, and the university offers similar extensions for serious illness in the family, Morrow-Jones said.
Sara Watson, an assistant professor of political science, used the tenure-clock extension when she had her son during her second year pursuing tenure.
“The tenure clock stoppage is incredible helpful,” Watson said in an e-mail. “Absent a tenure clock extension, having a baby can really hurt a woman’s research productivity and thus her chances of getting tenure.”
Watson suggested that fewer women pursue tenure because “the deck is stacked against them” in the process.
Anna Cunningham, a lecturer in the Department of Sociology, said most developed nations have some form of paid parental leave policies.
Most offer between three months to one year of paid leave, but the U.S. does not.
Instead, the U.S. has the Family and Medical Leave Act, which guarantees up to 12 weeks of unpaid leave for those who work in a place with at least 50 employees and have worked there for a full year and at least 1,250 hours in the last 12 months, Cunningham said.
Employers are allowed to offer extended benefits, but only about 25 percent offer fully paid maternity leaves, she said.
Morrow-Jones said that although tenure extensions are helpful, they aren’t enough to balance the number of males and females who achieve tenure.
Even with the extensions, she said, there are still gender biases in the workplace. Most are unintentional, she said, and are more subtle than they have been in the past.
“Nobody calls women faculty ‘girls’ anymore,” she said.
The Women’s Place aims to increase the percentage of female faculty members at OSU but focuses on more than numbers. Instead, it’s more about improvement, Morrow-Jones said.
“My longterm goal is to put us out of business,” she said. “When we’re no longer needed, that would be great.”
