Hierarchies and paradoxes: How women in non-tenure-track faculty positions experience a gendered organization.

Abstract

Despite efforts by colleges and universities to increase gender equity among faculty and administrative leadership, institutions of higher education are gendered organizations. Using critical qualitative inquiry, we interviewed 23 faculty who identified as women in non-tenure-track positions at two public regional comprehensive universities to explore how they encountered a gendered organization in their work. Participants identified three salient experiences of a gendered organization: taking on extra work, being mothers in the classroom, and confronting the physical body. These findings implicate larger structural habits of colleges and universities in the non-tenure-track faculty work environment, habits that reproduce gendered notions of work and women's place in academia. Furthermore, these findings demonstrate how hierarchies between men and women in academia are reinforced and how paradoxes are introduced in women's work in non-tenure-track faculty positions.