The Professional Lives of Women Psychologists at Small Colleges

Abstract

One hundred nine women faculty in psychology departments at small colleges through the United States responded to a survey about the benefits and challenges of establishing a career at a primarily undergraduate institution with an enrollment of 3,000 or fewer students. Participants reported high teaching and service loads, which made it difficult for them to spend time on their research and writing. Descriptions of campus climate were variablefrom supportive to very unsupportive of feminist teaching and scholarship. Despite the challenges, the majority of the participants had no regrets about their career paths. Advice to new women psychology faculty at small colleges is presented.The pipeline that was expected to carry a burgeoning number of women into senior faculty and administrative positions in higher education has not yet delivered as promised (White, 2005). In the field of psychology, women are now earning the majority of bachelor's, master's, and doctoral degrees, but the upper ranks of most academic psychology departments are still predominately staffed by men (Kite et al., 2001). Large numbers of women psychologists choose to practice psychotherapy or to work in other applied areas outside of academe. Moreover, those who select an academic career are less likely to join a faculty at a Research I University (Kite et al., 2001) than a faculty at a 4-year or community college, a pattern that broadly applies to women professors in other disciplines (White, 2005). One subset of these academic settings are colleges with undergraduate enrollments of 3,000 or fewer students. Because these small colleges enroll about 10% of college students across the United States, and approximately 8% of baccalaureate degrees earned at these institutions are in the psychology major, attention is warranted to the space afforded to gender issues in the undergraduate psychology curriculum and the support provided for the research agendas of feminist psychologists (Schuman, 2005).The American Psychological Association recently commissioned a Task Force on Women in Academe (see Fouad et al., 2000) to review the career progress of women psychology faculty and to make recommendations for improvement, but their comprehensive review presented

Literature Review of The University Teaching Trap of Academic Women

“…In smaller universities, Mooney, Chrisler, Nutt Williams, Johnston-Robledo, and O'Dell (2007) noted how heavy teaching loads are commonplace work practices for faculty which deter from both their research time, and research collaborations. Often these types of institutions provide no additional marking aid, nor teaching assistants to help offset the heavy teaching workload, and make use of their limited faculty with the addition of the expectation of high service commitments.…”

“…Both women of color (Benjamin, 1997), and American Indian women faculty (Tippeconic Fox, 2009) were called upon to undertake committee work that aligned with their diverse cultural backgrounds. One quarter of the women psychologists at a small university noted that they devoted at least thirty percent of their time to service related work (Mooney, Chrisler, Nutt Williams, Johnston-Robledo, & O'Dell, 2007). Given this, fifty-five percent of their sample suggested that they had little time for any productive scholarly research and writing (p.177).…”

Predictors of Gender Inequalities in the Rank of Full Professor

“…Human capital within academia is often measured by publication and citation records, even within teaching-focused institutions (Mooney et al, 2007). In theory, the more human capital academic employees have acquired, the higher their academic rank.…”