Gender and Academic Promotion to Full Professor in Ontario

Abstract

This is a study of 933 academic promotions from associate to full professor in Ontario, Canada for the period 2010-2014. Publicly available sources provided a bibliometric profile including gender, year of promotion, university, academic discipline, salary, type and number of publications and number of authors for each promotion to full professor. We found a large gender gap in academic promotions favouring men, which is explained mainly by a structural focus on male-dominated academic disciplines. We also found large differences in numbers of publications by academic discipline, which was substantially reduced after considering the number of authors per publication. Business professors were paid substantially more than other professors at the time of promotion. Our study focused on publications, and given this limitation the results should be taken in the context that there are multiple considerations for promotion. Publication quality and impact, grants and patents, were not adjusted for.

Should Google Scholar be used for benchmarking against the professoriate in education?

“…The higher H-index of males is also reflective of previous findings in other fields, such as social work (Carter, Smith and Osteen 2017), and research suggesting that men are more likely than women to be promoted to full professor (e.g. Millar and Barker 2020). While these data suggest that women lag behind their male colleagues in research performance, even though there are more of them in the education professoriate in this sample, more needs to be done to bring the factors underpinning this discrepancy to light.…”

“…In addition, full professors have commonly been publishing for many years, and "late career stage faculty members are disadvantaged as a result of changing productivity output-they produce more books over time" (p. 158). It should also be noted that woman may publish more books and men more articles, and therefore weighting journal articles as a superior output can have consequences for gender parity in academia by making it harder for women to compete for promotional opportunities (Millar and Barker 2020).…”

Glass ceiling or murky waters: The gendered and racialized pathway to full professorship in Canada

“…Numerous research studies have shown that women are less likely to be full professors in Canada compared to men (Counter et al, 2020;Doucet et al, 2012;Millar & Barker, 2020;Nakhaie, 2007;Ornstein et al, 1998;Ornstein et al, 2007;Qamar et al, 2020;Stewart et al, 2009;Wise et al, 2004). Statistics Canada estimates that women account for 28% of full professors in 2016-2017, an increase from 3.4% of full professors in 1970-1971(Statistics Canada, 2017a.…”

“…They state that while it is tempting to examine a host of disciplines when looking at disparities in promotion, a simple conceptualization of arts versus science (citing Snow, 1959) is adequate for determining differences in promotion. Millar and Barker (2020) found that promotion to full professor in Ontario was more evident in STEM and business fields.…”

“…For instance, women are less likely to work in STEM disciplines (Canadian Association of University Teachers, 2008;Xu, 2008) and women are promoted faster in fields such as education, humanities, medicine and fine arts than men (Ornstein, Stewart & Drakich, 2007). Millar and Barker (2020) found that gender disparities in promotion to full professor in Ontario was explained in part by academic discipline. However, Nakhaie (2002) found that in terms of publications, those in STEM tend to publish more, with multi-authored articles being the norm (Zeng et al, 2016).…”