Transparency: Equitable Parental Leave Will Help Scholars Avoid Some of the Chutes

Equitable and transparent parental-leave policies help to mitigate the chutes and ladders dynamic. Specifically, institutions of higher education must have universal, clearly communicated, transparent, and equitably applied parental-leave policies for faculty, staff, and students. Administrators, department chairs and unit heads, and deans must ensure that all faculty are aware of parental-leave policies. In Crawford and Windsor’s (Reference Crawford and Windsor2021) survey on family formation, an astounding proportion of scholars were unaware of parental-leave policies at their institution. Parental leave is not a “women’s issue.” It is not sick leave and neither is it vacation leave, and universities should not treat it as such by requiring women faculty to rely on those forms of paid time off for family-formation purposes. Parental leave also is not research leave; therefore, departments and universities should establish accountability practices to ensure that male non-birth partners do not use that time to increase their publication pipeline (Antecol, Bedard, and Stearns Reference Antecol, Bedard and Stearns2016). Research on the effect of equitable parental-leave policies on women’s status in academia is, to date, inconclusive. Recognizing that parental leave is not a panacea, we also advocate for a semester of research leave for women who are new parents to level the playing field.

Stand Up: MENtorship Programs Will Help Address the Hidden Curriculum

A key factor in the loss of women from the discipline has been the informal mentoring—that is, the hidden curriculum—that men received from senior colleagues. Women typically did not receive this guidance because there were few senior women scholars to provide mentorship and because women often were excluded from the types of informal gatherings in which men shared information to help junior men colleagues “learn the ropes” through a hidden curriculum.

Formal mentoring such as panels and workshops on the topic of mentoring itself are disproportionately organized, implemented, and attended by women, giving the impression that concerns about disciplinary inequity are “women’s work.” Because they have experienced the effects of Academic Chutes and Ladders more acutely than their male colleagues, women take on the bulk of the unrecognized and uncompensated mentorship labor in their departments, professional associations, and the discipline. Women spearhead programs designed to keep women in the discipline and educate them on the hidden curriculum (Barnes and Beaulieu Reference Barnes and Beaulieu2017). Because these programs target junior women almost exclusively, men in all ranks are absent from conversations about bias and inequity. Men also need mentoring on gender (in)equity issues because they are colleagues; supervisors; letter-writers; and article, manuscript, and tenure-case reviewers for women colleagues. We call on men to join as active allies in the pursuit of gender parity. Male colleagues with tenure have a crucial role in changing departmental, institutional, and professional culture.

Whereas women are socialized to recognize, understand, and navigate the patriarchal structures of the academic profession, men are not. Men are not taught to recognize the unearned privileges they inherit as beneficiaries of patriarchal systems. Unless an individual man makes an effort to look for, learn about, and understand the inequalities that threaten to hold his women colleagues back, he will not be exposed to these realities. To this point, we recommend implicit bias training to help all faculty—not only those serving on hiring, tenure, and promotion committees—better understand existing inequities.

When mentorship efforts target women alone, we miss the vital opportunity to engage with the “men in the middle”—those men with secure academic jobs and awareness of broader societal discussions regarding the need for more equal burden sharing in the profession. These men in the middle have the leverage to facilitate change in their department, on their campus, and in the discipline—and they can serve as effective mentors to junior scholars.

Much of the informal mentorship that occurs in conference bars and dinners after research presentations benefits early-career men. Women do not so much “leak out” of the career pipeline but rather have less knowledge about the location of the career chutes (and therefore are less able to avoid or overcome them) and ladders (and therefore are less well equipped to identify and take advantage of them). We propose the creation of MENtorship panels and workshops at conferences that match students and junior faculty with senior men scholars to formalize, institutionalize, and professionalize the skill set that male colleagues need to have to be exceptional advocates and allies. Our point about mentorship programs is that the work of creating and maintaining formal mentorship networks and efforts aimed at increasing diversity and inclusivity in the discipline should not be assumed solely by women. Senior men colleagues must have a stake in increasing women’s access to upward mobility within our discipline.

Women faculty often integrate hidden-curriculum lessons in their lectures and class discussions (e.g., email etiquette, contacting difficult-to-reach faculty, proper forms of address, and resumé and cover-letter preparation); this is yet another form of women caring for the academic family. Women’s contributions often are essentialized, and women—especially women of color—often are besought to serve on committees for descriptive representation. Undergraduate and graduate women seek out women faculty for their credentials as women rather than scholars for the same reason. Desperate for mentorship by demographically similar scholars, women students may fail to scrutinize their choice of mentor.

If women are the only ones voicing criticism of the discipline as currently structured, gender inequities are written off as “women’s issues” and we miss the broader implications for people of all genders and identities. Men who are secure in their career with tenure must raise their voice in support of women students and colleagues.