This March 30th essay from The Chronicle "Why we need more full professors" highlights some barriers women face to promotion to full professor and points out they can be eliminated if there was enough institutional will and realization of what is to be gained. The author writes "The lack of gender parity among full professors is not primarily a pipeline problem (women comprise 45 percent of associate professors); it’s a timing problem." This is mostly tied to the gendered caregiving which is notably still present in the home, but also persists at wirj, Furhter, differential workload policies, such as those which tie a faculty member’s teaching load to their research output, make it "nearly impossible to publish enough to earn a course reduction" to get back 'on track'. Bias also impacts who can more readily earn a national or even international reputation. And the piece concludes with the important reminder that the institutinal will to overcome these and other obstacles to diversify "full professors is a relatively low-cost fix with high-impact reverberations across all other aspects of university life, including overall diversity and more robust, representative research."
