No, "Inside Higher Education" – the data you reference do NOT indicate that “Tenure and Promotion Barriers Persist for Women, Faculty of Color”
Reporters often draw conclusions from social science data that go beyond what is warranted. That's irritating. But the worst is when the data don’t support the article’s thesis at all.
It is quite common for reporters, when writing about an interesting social science research finding, to draw conclusions that go far beyond what is warranted by a study’s results. That’s irritating, but the worst is when the findings don’t support a reporter’s thesis at all. A case in point of the latter is a recent article in the publication Inside Higher Education (IHE), titled “Tenure and Promotion Barriers Persist for Women, Faculty of Color”.
When I read the headline I was intrigued, and I read the article with some interest, in part because the thesis of the article is not consistent with what I experienced over the course of over forty years as a professor (serving on and chairing numerous hiring and promotion and tenure committees at every level of the university). In my experience throughout my career, and especially during the past twenty years, it was my sense that universities are eager to hire minority faculty, particularly African Americans, and then are equally eager for those faculty to be successful at the time of promotion. Given the difference between what I’ve thought was going on at my university all these years, and what was suggested by the title of the IHE article is what usually has been happening at universities, I was very interested to learn more about the topic by reading what the author of the IHE article had to say.
What I was expecting to read was an article that would start by laying out evidence for the phenomenon of interest (lower promotion rates for university faculty who are women and people of color in comparison with the rates for white males). After establishing that as a real phenomenon, I expected the article to focus mainly on a discussion of what the barriers are that are responsible for this disparity. There can, of course, be a lot of reasons why that difference might occur, and I was eager to read the reporter’s discussion of the topic. Spoiler alert – that’s not what the article did at all. In fact, the evidence that it marshalled in favor of a disparity in promotion rates is better explained by the possibility that there are no differences at all — and if there are no disparities in promotion rates to begin with, then there really is no reason to even consider the questions of different kinds of barriers.
Before discussing the article in more detail – just a bit of context for anyone who doesn’t know how academia works. University faculty fall into two categories: tenure track (TT) and non-tenure-track (NTT). TT faculty are usually hired as Assistant Professors without tenure, and then, after five or xix years, are considered for promotion to Associate Professor with tenure, and then, after another five to ten years, may become eligible for promotion to Full Professor. Assistant Professors who are not successful in being promoted to the Associate level with tenure usually are permitted to work for one more year and then are not eligible to continue at that university. Some Associate Professors are never promoted to Full Professor, but instead remain at the Associate level until they retire. NTT faculty usually: (i) are described as Instructors or Lecturers, (ii) have a high teaching load, (iii) are not expected to conduct research, (iv) are not eligible to move up through the ranks from Assistant to Associate to Full Professor, and (v) make a lot less money than TT faculty. Of course, anyone who writes for Inside Higher Education knows all of this.
OK – on to the article. I’ll simply quote from parts of it and then offer comments. The quotes are in italics.
The article begins with a simple statement of the supposed fact that promotion rates for women and people of color are not the same as the rate for white males:
The number of women and people of color on the tenure track has increased over the past seven years, but they still aren’t being promoted at the same rate as white men.
After reading that, one would expect the article to provide data regarding the rate at which women and people of color are promoted from Assistant to Associate and from Associate to Full. Nope. Not in this article.
As of last academic year, 26 percent of tenure track faculty were people of color, up from 21 percent during the 2016–17 academic year. Most of that growth, however, came from hiring more Asian and Hispanic or Latinx faculty, according to the study. For instance, in 2017, roughly 9.7 percent of full professors were Asian, which increased to 12.8 percent by 2023. In contrast, the percentage of Black full professors has only increased from 3.3 percent to 3.5nbsp;percent in the same timeframe.
The paragraph starts out talking about a change during the past seven years in the overall percentage of faculty who are people of color, then mentions that most of that change is related to change in the number of NEW faculty who are from specific racial/ethnic groups, then provides a “for instance” that says nothing about NEW HIRES but instead involves a swivel to talking about percentages of FULL Professors. As I hope is obvious –NONE OF THESE COMPARISONS MAKE ANY SENSE. None of them. The reporters transitions from talking about all faculty to talking about new hires to talking about full professors. It’s like comparing grapes to grape fruit to wine. It’s hard to even comment on the logic here, because there is none.
But let’s continue nonetheless.
The percentage of women on the tenure track also increased by 7 percent over seven years, but was mostly driven by a 36 percent increase in women of color. While Asian and Hispanic women saw the greatest boost in representation (a 74 percent and 73 percent increase, respectively, at the professor rank) the number of white women on the tenure track decreased by 3 percent over the last seven years.
Again, the article swivels dizzyingly back and forth between talking about overall percentages of TT faculty and percentages of Full Professors. But in any case, how increases of this magnitude in the percentages for Asian and Hispanic women can be spun into support for the argument that they are experiencing “baarriers to promotion” is beyond me. But the next paragraph in the article tries.
Despite these overall gains, the trend of women and people of color not being promoted to associate and full professors has persisted, according to the study. In 2022–23, 35 percent of assistant professors were people of color, and 53 percent were women. At the associate professor level, only 26 percent of faculty were people of color and only 47 percent are women. And at the highest rank of full professor, people of color represented 22 percent of faculty and women represented 36 percent.
This is NOT evidence of women and people of color not being promoted. The article is simply reporting the number of women and people of color who were Assistant, Associate, and Full professors in 2022/23. That is not a “trend” in PROMOTION rates, since those rates depend upon knowing how many women and people of color were eligible for promotion to Associate or Full and how many of them actually were promoted; any discussion of “rate” requires both a numerator and a denominator. The author is referring only to the numerator here.
What makes the matter even worse, the absolute numbers that the article reports are exactly what would be expected if (i) there has been an increase over the past 15 years in the percentage of new TT hires who are people of color (which is what has, in fact, been happening), and (ii) there are not any “barriers” that work against successful promotions for women and people of color.
This point seems so obvious that I feel a bit odd even writing it: An increase over time in the percentage of Assistants who are women and people of color HAS TO predate an increase over time in the percentage of Associates who are women and people of color, which in turn has to predate an increase over time in the percentage of Full professors who are women and people of color. It takes TIME from a hiring rate increase to become translated into an increase in percentages of Associates, and it then takes even more time for it to be translated into an increase in percentages of Full Professors. This is not rocket science. It’s not even algebra.
The article then moves on to discuss NTT faculty, arguing that more evidence of the supposed “barriers” can be gleaned from highlighting an overrepresentation of women and people of color amongst NTT faculty.
Women also made up the majority (58 percent) of non–tenure track faculty in 2023, a 2.5 percent increase since the 2016–17 academic year. Faculty of color in those positions increased 24 percent from 2016–17 to 2022–23, making up 22 percent of non–tenure track faculty.
Interesting – and undoubtedly a result of universities having cut back, during the past seven years, on TT hiring and increasing the hiring of NTT faculty, while at same time striving to hire as many people of color as possible. Surely someone writing for IHE knows that, and it is irresponsible for a reporter to imply that these trends reflect any kind of bias against hiring or promoting people of color on TT positions.
The article then talks about salary disparities.
While a recent survey by the American Association of University Professors showed that although faculty wages beat inflation this year for the first time since the pandemic, pay disparities for women and non–tenure track instructors continue.
“Combined with the fact that these groups are less likely to be promoted to higher ranks in tenure-track positions, the result is that a substantial segment of faculty, primarily women and people of color, are employed in positions that pay lower salaries throughout their careers,” CUPA-HR said in the press release.
While the first of these two paragraphs strongly suggests unfair wage inequities (lack of equal pay for equal work), the second notes the real reason for the wage disparity is the overrepresentation of minority faculty in NTT positions — in which case, what’s the point?
How could an article based on such weak data and such shoddy reasoning get published in Inside Higher Education, one of the two leading national publications focusing on issues in higher education? First, I think it is safe to assume that IHE does not have editors who read all articles before they’re published, because the flaws in this one are so glaringly obvious that I cannot imagine they would escape any editor’s attention.
But even so, how could an article of this low quality have been written and accepted for publication? My initial hypothesis was that the reporter was probably an intern with very little experience. If that were the case, I would have been more forgiving. But she isn’t. In fact, the author has been writing for IHE for more than year and has a very large number of articles to her credit.
What I think is the explanation is simply that – this article was published, despite its obvious, and easily understood, flaws because the article’s thesis fits with progressive ideology — the contention that systemic racism and sexism permeates all institutions in our society. My guess is that an article arguing that the rates of promotion for people of color are exactly what would be expected if there are no special race-related barriers to promotion would simply not be published. And so, this article was written from a publishable perspective, despite the fact that the data presented in the article provides better evidence for a lack of barriers to promotion and tenure for women and people of color in academia than it does for the existence of some kinds of barriers.
And yes, I can appreciate that going to all this effort to criticize one article in IHE may reasonably be questioned or considered to be overkill, but: (i) reading it was so irritating that I needed to rant, and (ii) its publication is emblematic of the political bias that is present in so much of education reporting today. IHE should do better. I don’t expect that they will.