The Story Only Few Can Tell: Exploring the Disproportionately Gendered Professoriate in Business Schools

Abstract

In American business schools, the higher the position, the lower the female representation, especially when including additional intersections of identity such as race, sexual orientation, and ethnicity. Our article aims to supplement existing research regarding gender bias and underrepresentation in academia, particularly in business schools. Such research can uncover faculty gender issues, work toward mitigating the existing biases related to diversity and inclusion, and bring a needed voice and discussion for the purpose of moving toward solutions. To build our hypotheses, we provide a literature review regarding academic satisfaction, perceived performance weight–teaching and perceived performance weight–service differences between genders, and gender issues with the academic pipeline to full professor. Next, we utilize data collected from a sample of n = 696 academics from American business schools and find that women faculty have significantly lower academic satisfaction throughout all ranks and institutions. Our results further indicate that there are differences in perceived performance weight–teaching and perceived performance weight–service between female and male academics at the ranks of assistant and full professors at various types of institutions. Last, we offer conclusions and implications, limitations, and future research suggestions that include studies regarding intersectional faculty, academic mobbing and bullying, incivility, and academic satisfaction.

#MeToo, #MeThree, #MeFour: Twitter as community building across academic and corporate institutions

“…Bartos and Ives (2019) indicate that beginning with graduate school, women are indoctrinated into the “rules of the game,” wherein they must adhere to patriarchal norms. Research also finds that satisfaction is substantially lower for women faculty and that high‐level positions in academic institutions are dominated by men (Krishen et al, 2020). As such, academia or higher education institutions are different from corporations or firms in several ways: (1) reporting mechanisms and channels for sexual harassment tend to be vague, (2) academic freedom allows faculty to argue against sexual harassment policies, (3) leadership roles in academia such as department chair and associate dean are most often temporary, obligatory, and held by untrained individuals, (4) tenure makes it difficult to fire tenured faculty who are perpetrators, and (5) masculine cultures are more likely to engage in sexual harassment (Tenbrunsel et al, 2019).…”

Embracing Diversity in Marketing Education

“…The first article by Krishen, Lee, and Raschke (2020), “The Story Only Few Can Tell: Exploring the Disproportionate Gendered Professoriate in Business Schools,” reviews the literature on gender bias and underrepresentation in business schools and utilizes research concerning gender inequality to examine academic satisfaction and the perceived weightings of research, teaching, and service among women faculty. The authors report that there is a significantly disproportionate number of females in business schools, despite women generally outpacing men in both undergraduate and graduate graduation rates.…”

Educational Scholarship: Looking Forward While Casting Backward

“…Two articles in this special issue received recognition in the press. The article by Krishen et al (2020), “The story only few can tell: Exploring the disproportionately gendered professoriate in business schools,” was referenced by Janjuha-Jivraj (2020) in a Forbes article. ScienceDaily (2019) picked up on the article, “Tolerance for cheating from the classroom to the boardroom: A study of underlying personal and cultural drivers,” by Brodowsky et al (2020) that focused on the need for cultural sensitivity in the classroom.…”