Mary Ann Mason has spent more than a decade studying why until today there is such a large gender imbalance at the topf of the academic hierarchy. In this great article she provides numerous insights into her research.
One of the topics, mentioned in this article concerns the disadvantage that having children brings to tenure-track candidates: Among tenured faculty 70% of men are married with children compared to 44% of women. Another article on this topic maybe highlights the “baby penalty” for tenure track candidates even more clearly. Married mothers of young children are 35% less likely to receive tenure than young fathers.
That describes the problem that tenure-extension policies introduced by US universities in the 1990s and 2000s tried to address. Give tenure track candidates an extra year for each child to earn tenure. So far so good.
However, as important research subsequently showed, these gender neutral policies actually put men further at an advantage. Under these tenure-extension policies a male economist was 19% more likely to earn tenure. In contrast, women’s chances of gaining tenure were actually reduced by 22 percentage points.
This great article in the New York Times describes the whole problem and is a great intro to why policy making needs to take into account gender-specific issues. If it fails to do so, it might even exacerbate the problems it is trying to solve.
More such stories can be found in “Invisible Women” by Caroline Criado Perez.
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