Human Capital or Cultural Taxation: What Accounts for Differences in Tenure and Promotion of Racialized and Female Faculty?

Abstract

Achieving tenure and promotion are significant milestones in the career of a university faculty member. However, research often indicates that racialized and female faculty do not achieve tenure and promotion at the same rate as their non-racialized and male counterparts. Using new original survey data on faculty in eight Canadian universities, this paper examines differences in tenure and promotion among racialized and female faculty and investigates the extent to which explanations of human capital theory and cultural or identity taxation account for these disparities. Logistic regression confirms that controlling for human capital and cultural or identity taxation washes away the differences between male and female faculty for achieving both tenure and promotion. However, differences for racialized faculty remain, thereby offering evidence of discrimination in the academic system.

Caregiving and Conferencing: Supporting Faculty Participation in Conference Travel

“…Organizational practices and processes also tend to reward and value masculinity and privilege male workers. Universities are not only gendered, but also racialized (Daniel, 2019;Wijesingha and Ramos, 2017). Faculty of color may experience a continuum of racism from deliberate to implicit bias (non-deliberate stereotyping), isolation from and marginalization by colleagues, hidden workloads when they serve on multiple committees to add diversity or advise or mentor racial minority students, and devaluation of their racialized research (Trower, 2003;Trower and Chait, 2002).…”

More Than a Pipeline Problem: Evaluating the Gender Pay Gap in Canadian Academia from 1996 to 2016

“…The pipeline effect describes the tendency for women to leave academia earlier than men due to the intrinsic nature of a heavily male-dominated field. Wijesingha and Ramos (2017) explain this in terms of the "human capital theory," which holds that, based on existing measures of faculty productivity and years of experience, a woman's lack of career progression could be justified if she is less productive or less experienced than her colleagues (p. 55). Getting more women into academia should therefore lead to parity in gender representation and pay parity over time as more women embark on this career path; however, this is not happening.…”

“…13, 22). Wijesingha and Ramos (2017) refer to this theory as the cultural taxation hypothesis, in which women's teaching and service work "inhibits productivity and ultimately leads to the denial of tenure and promotion" (p. 55).…”

Earnings Differences among Senior University Administrators: Evidence by Gender and Academic Field

“…Monks and McGoldrick (2004) and Essaji and Horton (2010), examined administrators below the rank of president and found that females earned between four and thirteen percent less than their male counterparts; however, neither study examined any personal characteristics of the administrators such as academic field and academic rank which have been shown to affect the compensation of university presidents / vice-chancellors (e.g. Baimbridge & Simpson, 1996;Monks, 2007), which undoubtedly biases their estimates of the gender earnings gap given differences in the distribution of males and females across academic fields (Binder, Krause, Chermak, Thacher, & Gilroy, 2010;Brown, Troutt, & Prentice, 2011;Warman, Woolley, & Worswick, 2010) and academic ranks (Ginther & Hayes, 2003;Mcdowell & Smith, 1992;Ornstein, Steward, & Drakich, 2007;Wijesingha & Ramos, 2017). Therefore, there is a significant opportunity to explore the male-female earnings differential among university administrators throughout the executive hierarchy.…”