For this post, I interviewed Professor Jenna Stearns, Assistant Professor of Economics at the University of California, Davis. She is a labor economist; and her research is centered on understanding what she calls “family-friendly” policies in the workplace. She is particularly interested in how they change the decisions women make about their employment, their family structure, and their health.
In “Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies?,” Professor
Stearns and two co-authors, Heather Antecol and Kelly Bedard, look at an
example of a family-friendly policy that I myself, as an academic, have taken
advantage of: stopping the tenure clock after childbirth or adoption. So, I was
naturally drawn to this research. Most of you probably don’t know how this
detail of the tenure system works in the academic world. This is a policy that
allows assistant professors to extend the time until they come up for tenure,
typically by a year. Initially, colleges and universities created these
policies only for women, to “level the playing field.” That is, to try to help
make up for the time women spend away from work after childbirth. But now it is
most common for these policies to be gender-neutral, so that both new mothers
and new fathers can take advantage of them, usually a maximum of twice before
tenure time.
In this paper, the authors study the effects of these
policies only at the top 50 Economics departments in the United States. They
have data on over 1300 assistant professors hired in these departments between
1980 and 2005. They can’t tell exactly who took advantage of this program, but
this is where the power of statistical analysis comes in. By separating out the
various characteristics of the professors and the universities, they can
estimate the effects the policy has had, and on whom.
The news is disheartening for women, but could be worse. They
find that males at an institution with a gender-neutral clock stopping policy have
about a 17% higher probability of getting tenure than they would have had before
their institution adopted a clock stopping policy. On the other hand, women are
about 19% LESS likely to get tenure after their institution adopts the policy.
However, while tenure rates do fall for women at these top 50 institutions, the
evidence shows that these women do go on to get tenure at other, sometimes, lower
ranked institutions. What seems to be happening is that at the most prestigious
institutions, the clock stopping policy allows men time to produce additional
publications in the top 5 journals in Economics. On the other hand, women are
not able to increase their publications in these journals. At these
institutions, publishing in these journals is key to earning tenure.
I think this research is important because it adds something
new to the evidence on why women are not able to make it to the top of their
professions. However, Professor Stearns is careful to point out that these
results may be somewhat specific to Economics as a discipline. In Economics,
especially at the most prestigious institutions, publishing in the top 5
journals is important for earning tenure, and it can take a long time to get these
papers published. Hence, the one-year extension of the tenure clock early on in
their career is very valuable for assistant professors in these departments, if
it helps them get their research into these outlets. The gender-neutral clock
stopping policy may not prove to be detrimental to women in other fields.
I asked Professor Stearns how she thinks these policies
should be designed differently, now that we know they are not working the way
they were intended. The thing is, one of the reasons tenure clock stopping
policies have changed from female-only to gender-neutral is because of the
stigma associated with taking time off at childbirth: women feared that they
were being perceived as less committed to their careers under the female-only
version. But Professor Stearns believes that this work shows that the policies
need to take into account that it is women who generally bear most of the
burden of childcare; and that any policy should be designed to help encourage
men to prioritize childcare -- during the tenure clock stopping, and in general.
She suggests that the benefit can perhaps be available for both males and
females, but be more generous for females.
I wondered whether this work has implications outside the
world of academia. Professor Stearns mentioned law firms, where young lawyers come
up for partner, in a similar way that assistant professors come up for tenure. They
have one shot at it, early on, so policies like this could be similarly
effective (or not?!) in the law profession. I am very curious about the potential
implications for enacting family-friendly policies likes this more widely in
the business world, and maybe even in other professions.
I asked Professor Stearns about some of her other research.
She is currently working on a project that looks at the effects of different
types of maternity leaves. So this work is specifically about policies designed
only for women who take time off after childbirth. While some of these provide
mothers with an income stream, others instead ensure that their jobs will be
waiting for them. Her preliminary findings are that the latter types of
policies work better to keep women in their jobs in the long run.
Let’s talk! I would love to know what you think about this
example of unintended consequences. Please submit comments and questions.
