I recently read an article headline that gave me a sense of deja vu. It was about BYU trying to improve gender parity in its faculty but with a twinge of fretting about too few women candidates in some fields. There have been some great posts about this in the past, including Michael Austin’s post at BCC that was prompted by my son’s observation that he had zero female professors at BYU-I. There was also this partial rebuttal post at T&S that actually mostly agreed with Michael’s post, although the comments mostly said “Wah! What about the men??? Where are they supposed to work if women are hired?????”
I was about 11 years old when I first heard about the ERA, the Equal Rights Amendment, that was in the news at the time. I had that smugly superior view at the time that no matter what argument there was, the Church would always know the truth and would always be on the side of right. That’s a belief I was able to hold despite the 1978 Priesthood Ban lift because I am white and was a child at the time so my cognitive dissonance wasn’t really sparked by that yet. I asked what the ERA was all about, and I was told by adults that it was a fight for women to receive equal pay for equal work. Well, what’s wrong with that? I naturally assumed the Church would be on the side of something so obvious and fair. Why wouldn’t it be?
As women entered the workforce in unprecedented numbers, it also seemed obvious to me that we were changing from a single breadwinner economy to a dual income economy, although I was too young to know these terms. It simply seemed obvious to me. As a youngest child, the role of unpaid care-giving didn’t occur to me yet. I simply saw that if the future norm was based on single earners (not a man earning enough for a burgeoning family), that wages for all would drop to accommodate a model in which there might be more workers per household or divorced single parents or never-married individuals with no dependents. Base wages would be based on assumption of one individual earning enough for that individual, not a score of financial dependents. Men would earn less, and women would no longer be shackled to abusive drunks or forced into a life of unpaid drudgery (even if they loved doing unpaid housework, cooking and childcare, I didn’t!), too afraid to divorce because it would mean a life of poverty. It would be better for women, perhaps an inconvenience for men, but better overall for humanity. You can’t fight economic evolution. Well, you can fight it, but you won’t win.
It’s now 40+ years later, and I’ve had a multi-decade highly successful career in business with lots of personal experience. How are we doing? Is there still a penalty for being a woman? The political parties are greatly divided on what the problem even is (or if there is a problem) and what to do about it (if anything). I recently read an article that BYU is struggling to get enough female applicants for teaching positions, and I also read the transcript from a great interview on the Freakonomics podcast with Harvard economics professor Claudia Goldin, talking about the wage gap and what’s really driving it.
The political left frequently quotes the current wage gap by stating that women earn 77 cents on the male dollar. This 23 cent gap is often scoffed at by the right who either deny that a wage gap exists, or who state that if it’s normalized for qualifications and job description it shrinks to something like an 8 cent gap. Actually, both of these different figures are right. How can that be? There is a larger gap in the first statistic because it figures in all working women, regardless of their chosen field, regardless of qualification, regardless of part-time or full-time status, and compares them to all working men; addressing this gap is a much bigger problem than simply ensuring equal pay for equal work, but this gap is still meaningful and worth investigating.
Here are some other factors at play in the second wage gap:
- Women who choose part time or secondary careers. Women may do this to be able to be a caregiver while also earning an income. They may need a secondary income as a family, or they may want to do something but have limited opportunities due to a spouse’s career inflexibility or demands, due to personal skills or education, or due to preferences.
- Women who choose lower paid work. I was once horrified by a comment a woman in my ward made at a graduation event for our kids. My son and her daughter were about to enter the same college in fall, and I asked what her daughter was going to study. She said she wanted to be a teacher which this woman (who had chosen not to work) deemed “a good career for a lady.” My horror was that there were jobs suitable to one sex but not the other, especially since both sexes require food and shelter. Women don’t get to pay 75% of what men have to pay for rent, clothing or groceries. It also implied that teaching should be underpaid because women do it, and that men shouldn’t become teachers because it doesn’t pay well enough.
- Wages drop in fields that women enter. From an article in the New York Times: “the difference between the occupations and industries in which men and women work has recently become the single largest cause of the gender pay gap, accounting for more than half of it. In fact, another study shows, when women enter fields in greater numbers, pay declines — for the very same jobs that more men were doing before.” So, it’s not just a matter of women choosing jobs that have more flexibility; it’s also that the jobs they take that were more lucrative for men suddenly tank in terms of earnings when women do them. A Bustle article cites double digit pay declines in several fields when they went from male-dominated to female-dominated: recreation directors, designers, ticket agents, cleaning positions, and computer programming. Jobs that were previously more lucrative (at varying education and skill levels) were suddenly seen as menial if women were doing them. Even jobs in STEM saw large pay declines when women started doing them.
- Glass ceiling effect. According to an article in payscale.com, 87% of women in legal firms are paralegals whereas 68% of partners in those legal firms were men. (The Church’s law firm, Kirton McConkie has numbers that are horribly, horribly worse, and the worst by far for Utah legal firms). Even at the American Express women’s conference I attended with over 200 female executives, mid-range VP level and above, the 4 C-Suite leaders there to speak to us were all men, men telling women with words and not living role models how to be successful.
- Women who take exit ramps. This usually occurs when jobs are too inflexible to allow for personal needs like maternity or elder care. While some jobs are necessarily inflexible, some inflexibility is just a holdover from the prior workplace construct in which men were not involved with families, so they didn’t require the time flexibility that households without a fully financially dependent wife might have had baked in.
- Workplace environment. Traditional workplace structures are based on a male workforce, not a mixed gender one. Second wave feminists (like me) usually adapted by being good at navigating a “man’s world,” fitting in as one of the guys and setting ourselves apart from the women. This approach has a shelf life, and really should not be the norm–it elevates some women at the expense of others. Additionally, sexist cultures or practices can make women feel unwelcome or can bar women from influence. In my own experience, two of these practices I encountered were 1) sales people taking clients to strip clubs for “entertainment,” and at the other extreme 2) male employees who refused to meet one on one with women or go on business trips with female colleagues. Both of these situations were rare, but they happened in my lifetime. In the first case, I worked hard along with some of my male colleagues to eliminate this culture, and we were successful at getting it changed. In the second case, our company was committed to equal opportunity for both men and women, and it ultimately hurt the men who took these stances, not the women. Still, when women are treated like a “special case” in a workplace designed for men, it can have a dampening effect on their ambition.
There are some hidden issues behind the wage gap:
Outright discrimination. This is usually hard to identify because it’s not obvious what the cause was, and nobody openly admits to discrimination. That’s why studies like the Heidi / Howard study are useful, in which two identical resumes are submitted, one with the name Heidi and one with the name Howard.
When I left American Express where I had a very successful executive career, I interviewed for a job at Amazon for which I was overqualified (I had held higher positions than the person I’d be reporting to). They flew me in to Seattle for an interview. I was concerned that due to their pay structure we might have a hard time making this move (base salary was very low, and the majority of pay is in stock options which vest over time). The interview experience there was very unusual compared to my experience in the financial services sector (but perhaps normal for these types of Silicon Valley firms). I interviewed with a series of peers to the role as well as the boss and the boss’s boss.
Their policy is not to give feedback on any interviews, a wise choice in my experience, so I can’t know what their views were or why I was not selected. However, my impression as a candidate was that the boss’s boss really liked me, the three other men I interviewed with were somewhat neutral toward me, and the one woman I interviewed with liked me all right but wasn’t a key decision maker for the role (which she apologetically said to me, so maybe she wasn’t that invested in the hiring decision); as I walked the halls, I saw very few women there at all. I was a little surprised by that as American Express had a much better female to male ratio.
Several of the interview questions seemed very strange, too, asking me about what big future investment I would make if I had carte blanche (to which I basically pitched Amazon Prime with new content shows which for all I know now was already in the works, but was not live at the time) and also how many palindromic years have there been since the year 0 (this one was not only offbeat, but the boss’s boss actually rolled his eyes and asked if that guy had asked me that question).
So was I discriminated against for being a woman? It’s impossible to say. They simply might have liked someone else better. If asked, I don’t doubt they would be able to come up with reasonable answers why they didn’t choose me. I’ve done enough hiring to know that while it’s always partly subjective, we always have rational explanations for our choices. Most of us don’t discriminate intentionally.
Self-selection / discouragement. Orchestras were noticing that fewer women were being selected, so they decided to do a blind audition where the musician was hidden behind a screen so that the selection would be made without knowledge of the player’s sex. This resulted in many more women being hired for orchestras.
Dr. Goldin points out that while we might think this was evidence of discrimination (that the judges were deliberately or unconsciously choosing male players), a result of the blind audition is that far more women were willing to apply for orchestra positions than previously had. Perhaps they believed they would face discrimination and opted out, or perhaps the old process made them uncomfortable or caused them to perform worse. For whatever reason, when women don’t believe they will face discrimination, they show up for more opportunities.
And this one goes to the heart of BYU’s problem. As a religious institution, BYU is not under the same requirements as secular institutions to avoid sex discrimination. As a result, those conducting interviews have a mix of beliefs and prejudices about the desirability of hiring women, and women who work there will encounter varying attitudes when teaching that they may not face in other institutions. For example, some students or decision makers may have negative feelings about women having careers, and there are no protections against these types of harms for women in a religious institution as there are in other work environments. Why would a highly qualified woman want to work in a place like that when she had other great opportunities where she would be respected and valued?
Ambition gap. Not everyone has a killer instinct or wants to live a life that is in dogged pursuit of money and advancement. Some men do, and some women do. Many of both sexes do not. When women are taught from a young age that they should be financially dependent on others and that they do not need to be prepared to financially support themselves and a family (or are given bad advice about how such a Plan B might work such as getting an education but having no work experience), they may not feel as interested in pursuing career opportunities or they may feel entitled to be financially cared for by a husband or others if they only live “righteously.” Couples can certainly choose to have one partner stay at home if that is their wish, but those choices will create disproportionate vulnerability for the dependent spouse.
This initially sounds like the premise of Sheryl Sandberg’s book Lean In. In this model, women either opt out of education and career opportunities, choose to care for family members instead of taking paid opportunities, or are discouraged from educational or other economic pursuits. And all of these things create a situation in which women earn less than men.
Dr. Goldin explains that rather than just encouraging women to “lean in,” we need to be doing more to encourage men to “lean out,” not only to even the playing field, but to encourage everyone to strive for more balance in their lives, more time flexibility, rather than pushing so hard for money at the exclusion of all else that workers are leaving vacancies at home that are either unfilled or that eventually require someone (usually a woman) to cover it. One of the innovations in this area is to provide paid paternity leave for men that is equal to paid maternity leave. If they don’t use it, it evaporates. The philosophical shift here is that rather than keeping the existing patriarchal structures (in which men toiled long hours and spent little time with family, instead putting work first), introducing large numbers of female employees (with potentially different values and priorities) should remake the workplace to fit and be attractive to a wider variety of workers and lifestyles.
Care-giving / time-flexibility. I was at a Women’s Conference years ago as a female executive at American Express, and Ursie Burns, CEO of Xerox was a speaker. She said (to this entirely female audience) that as women advanced their careers, we were leaving vacancies at home, and those vacancies would have consequences. That’s a fact, but not one that it’s fair to place solely on women. Men can give care just as women can; it takes two to choose not to tango. She pointed out that “for whatever reason” men weren’t filling those vacancies.
The reason seems pretty clear to me: patriarchy. We have an existing system that rewards men for earning well, and punishes everyone for unpaid care-giving. We also stigmatize men based on lower earnings and stigmatize women for care-giving faults or gaps. Whom does such a system benefit? Corporations, not people! There are men who would love to be a care-giver to their children or elderly parents, but who often do not because of being discouraged from “women’s work,” or being encouraged to do paid work.
Negotiating Skill. A lot of studies talk about the unwillingness of women to negotiate for higher pay, unlike their male peers. I found in my time as an executive that I frequently inherited women who were paid less than their merit, something which I corrected whenever I found it. I also had several male employees who were demanding and not particularly grateful for raises; by contrast, the women were frequently surprised and delighted by the recognition. To me, their behavior was entitled and emotionally immature. Perhaps not coincidentally, the men who behaved in these ways were sole breadwinners for a dependent family. Some of the women were, too, but they didn’t feel entitled to demand raises off cycle, and they had humble self-evaluations. They had to be talked up, whereas the men often had to be talked down to a more realistic self-perception. As we say in feminist circles, negotiate like you’re a mediocre man!
Jennifer Lawrence talked about this:
A hack of Sony Pictures e-mails showed that the actresses Jennifer Lawrence and Amy Adams got fewer back-end points than their male counterparts in the film American Hustle. Interestingly, when Lawrence later wrote about this revelation, she largely blamed herself. “I failed as a negotiator because I gave up early,” she wrote. “I didn’t want to keep fighting over millions of dollars that, frankly, due to two franchises, I don’t need… But if I’m honest with myself, I would be lying if I didn’t say there was an element of wanting to be liked that influenced my decision to close the deal without a real fight. I didn’t want to seem ‘difficult’ or ‘spoiled.’”
In fact, despite her findings that the wage gap is largely mischaracterized, Dr. Goldin shares a story about failure to negotiate that is right on point. She was asked to review a wage discrimination study, and she had not previously done consulting work and offered $2000 for her time (when she had thought she was just doing it as a favor). She accepted the offered pay without really thinking about it. Two other consulting researchers (men) were also hired to review the study. Because they had experience consulting, they negotiated and were paid about 1.5 times as high as she was–to review a study on wage discrimination!
So if BYU really wants to hire more women, what can the Church do to encourage that? Well, here are my suggestions:
- Put family first, including equal benefits and time flexibility for BOTH sexes.
- Pay an attractive paternity leave and maternity leave.
- Cover all family health care, including birth control (which is used for a whole lot of women’s health issues completely unrelated to pregnancy, for anyone who is still unaware of this).
- Be flexible enough for couples to both work for the university without harming one’s career in favor of the other.
- Conduct rigorous sexual harassment training and enforce it. Avoiding sexual harassment isn’t just about sexual advances (something you would hope BYU is decent at avoiding). It’s also about the sexist attitudes women have to endure in the workplace.
- Talk to and about women with respect.
- Don’t tolerate disparate respectfulness toward women who teach, either from students or faculty. With all the crazy things that the Honor Code outlaws, why isn’t this explicitly one of them?
- Don’t expect women to justify their career choices or to defend their actions. Period.
- Never assume that motherhood is in conflict with a career.
- Assume every student, regardless of sex, intends to enter a career after graduation. What they do is up to them, but nobody should ever be treated as a “less serious” or “less important” student just on the basis of sex.
- Act as if you are under the same non-discrimination requirements as other employers, even if you are not. Shouldn’t the Church do better as an employer rather than worse??
- Quit discouraging women from pursuing academic goals. From an article in the Daily Universe that was published ONE WEEK AGO, in 2019, some students still report being told ‘You’re taking the seat from a potential breadwinner, you probably won’t even pursue a career, so what’s the point of going to college? You can’t be a mother and pursue a career, you got into that program or got that job offer because you’re female.’ If the Church can’t fix this problem, BYU doesn’t deserve top women professor candidates. It hasn’t earned the privilege yet. You are a UNIVERSITY, for crying out loud, and these students have paid tuition just like their male counterparts. If I ran the University I would crack down on that crap so hard their misogynist heads would spin right off.
- Church leaders should model seeing women as authorities. Wow, do we have a long way to go on this one.
- Quote more women.
- Talk about prior female colleagues with respect for their intellect and ideas.
- Have women speak to men.
- Treat women as valuable for our minds and leadership, not just our ability to give birth or create a domestic haven for you to return to after a hard day of hunting woolly mammoths.
- QUIT TALKING TO WOMEN ABOUT WHAT IT MEANS TO BE A WOMAN. That is truly the quintessence of mansplaining. I hate to tell you this, but you are inherently less qualified on this topic than every woman you will ever speak to. Obviously.
- Make pay rates completely transparent. Publish what people are paid so that women know how much they should be making.
- I know I’d be skeptical given my experience at BYU as a student. When you make pay transparent, you also give power to the people working there, not just to the institution.
What other suggestions do you have for improving BYU’s ability to recruit women to teach at the university? Is it a worthwhile goal or a lost cause? Defend your answer in the comments.
Discuss.
Wheat & Tares 
I really like this one: “Treat women as valuable for our minds and leadership, not just our ability to give birth or create a domestic haven for you to return to after a hard day of hunting woolly mammoths.” But, to be fair, while it is a caricature of attitudes and doctrines expressed over decades by senior church leaders, it does not resemble the attitudes of many modern Mormon men — including a good number of baby boomers.
I don’t feel qualified to make additional suggestions as to how BYU could recruit additional qualified women to teach there. I suspect it is a lost cause without major attitude shifts at the GA level and time for new attitudes to become part of the general church culture. Heck, I know of qualified, temple-recommend-holding men who won’t apply for a job at BYU because of the Utah Valley church culture.
Oh, but here’s one for the Church: Hire a qualified woman as Church Commissioner of Education. I wonder why it hasn’t already been done. There is no necessary connection between that role and a role as general authority, e.g., Jeffrey Holland’s tenure as Commissioner.
Brava! Excellent, thorough analysis of gender wage gaps generally, and particularly at Church universities.
Another sex-based difference that should be flagged, particularly in the context of university faculty positions: demands for service to the institution.
Academics know that all professors have three expected duties: teaching, research, and service. Service to the institution can take on a variety of forms, including serving as Department Chair, leading searches for new hires or selecting new students, representing the department on institutional committees, and a number of other things along those lines. Sometimes these service roles may get extra compensation, though more often than not, professors are not compensated as these types of tasks are assumed to be part of the job.
I’ve seen several studies that consistently show female faculty are both invited for service opportunities and accept these invitations at far higher rates than male faculty. Why is that? First, women are socialized to be more socially agreeable, and are therefore willing to say yes more often than men, who tend to be OK being seen as a little more aloof (and thus say no). And because women tend to say yes more frequently, people trying to look for people to fill these service roles learn that including more women in your invitation pool will likely get the role filled faster than when the pool is full of men. Further, when women are underrepresented in the organization (like BYU), they’ll be sought out specifically for their different perspective, making them particularly high-value targets.
The net result of all of this is that women are put into this position where they are implicitly expected to give more (unpaid) service to the university, while at the same time held to the same standard of teaching and research load as the male faculty. All while getting paid less!
If BYU (and other universities, for that matter) want to hire more female faculty, setting clear expectations for university service obligations (and how exceeding those expectations can compensate for lower expectations on teaching or research) would go a long way to creating a more equitable work environment.
I’ve not overly thought about this one — I am not in a position to hire, fire, or apply for a job — so I don’t know what I think. But something struck me at first glance that I thought I would push back on you a bit to get your response.
It seems as though (leaving aside outright discrimination, which should be fought) these are individual characteristics of women (taken in aggregate). I have met tough negotiators who were female, but presumably the averages tend towards men being more aggressive and effective (I have no data and take your word on that). Likewise the ambition gap and child-care choices and discouragement.
So my initial thought is — why is it BYU’s responsibility to correct for these individual choices? The sounds, to me, similar to the benign sexism of low expectations — women are disadvantaged and it is up to the university to take paternalistic care of them. Is BYU morally obligated to hurt itself (which salary transparency does — jealousy issues aside, it gives negotiating leverage to the employee at the expense of the employer) because women in aggregate make individual decisions that have negative financial consequences for them?
And, not to dwell too much on a throwaway line, but putting the obligation on men to ‘lean out’ rather than on women to ‘lean in’ seems ridiculous. I am extremely successful in my profession — and I can tell you from experience and observation that there is no substitute for ‘leaning in.’ Leaning out doesn’t make room for another qualified candidate — it results in you likewise becoming unqualified. Now maybe my profession is different from being a university professor, but if the goal is to have professors at the top of their craft then leaning out isn’t a win for the men, the women, or the students they teach. And if leaning in isn’t possible, then maybe that career isn’t the right choice for that particular person (man or woman) unprepared to lean in. Not every thing has to be for every person.
Anyhow, those are my thoughts at first glance — I could be wholly wrong. But I don’t see why an institution (religious, educational, or otherwise) bears the responsibility to mitigate individual choices of those who want to work there.
PS: On the ERA, history has proven the Church leaders right (dare I say prophetic) as all of their doom and gloom concerns which were mocked at the time (men using women’s bathrooms is the one I can remember being laughed at) have now come true. Contrast them with where Sonia Johnson ended up, and I think you can have a good object lesson on why it is important to follow the prophet. Sonia Johnson is the first person I ever heard say “The Church is true but the Prophet is wrong on this issue.” Since then I have heard it frequently, and it never ends well for the person saying it…and yet the Church just keeps moving forward.
“it was a fight for women to receive equal pay for equal work. Well, what’s wrong with that?”
Conceptually, nothing. The devil is in the details. What exactly is “equal work”? Everyone on earth is in some way either superior or inferior to me; bringing to the table more or less value in difficult to measure ways.
In a factory setting where my job is to push the blue button once per minute, then it should not make the slightest difference who, or what, pushes that button; the value to the factory is exactly the same and thus so should be the compensation.
But the moment you introduce intangibles such as creativity and problem solving you start to have non-equality in difficult or impossible to measure ways.
The Supreme Court ruled that “separate but equal” is not good enough. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brown_v._Board_of_Education
The principle worry, as I remember it (I was in the Navy at the time) was that it would eliminate separate public restrooms. They cannot be separate but equal; they have to be ONE.
I am the sole breadwinner in my family. I have never demanded a pay raise, I am not particularly ambitious and remain grateful to be employed at all. I am highly service oriented and would probably work for free if it were possible. I am puzzled and somewhat dismayed by the animosity directed toward me by those that ARE ambitious and demanding pay raises.
Wondering: I think you make a great point that in terms of actual partnership in marriages, I would bet that a higher percentage of Mormon dads change diapers than their evangelical counterparts. And yet, there are still a lot of horribly sexist men who go uncorrected, even among contemporary Mormon students at the Y. Obviously, the attitudes of top leaders who are very old dogs indeed to be learning new tricks are going to be hard to eliminate, and likewise, academics will have to age and retire before they open vacancies for those who have more contemporary views of women’s potential. I love your idea of hiring a head of CES who is a woman. That’s a helpful first step.
Mike: interesting perspective. Yes, academics has its whole own culture that differs from other types of workplaces, and these have to be understood specifically. Dr. Goldin’s point in the interview was that some types of workplaces lend themselves more to the time flexibility that women desire.
Jonathan: Well, I’m glad you asked why BYU should care. I can think of many many reasons: 1) because women students perform better with sufficient female role models (just as male students do) and there are more female students than male, 2) the University’s continued relevance hangs on more equal representation, 3) it’s a black mark for the Church in the public sphere, making it appear oppressive to women, 4) graduating students will be more successful in the workplace if they are able to work in a mixed gender environment with both men and women in positions of authority (like professors are), 5) the institution itself is clearly wringing its hands over the dearth of women candidates (repeatedly in articles about it, like the one I linked).
On your next point about men leaning out, you are misunderstanding Dr. Goldin’s point. She’s not saying that men should leave the workplace so women can take their spaces. It’s not a scarcity mentality. She’s saying that when men lean out by demanding (or receiving) the same time flexibility women seek for work-life balance or family care obligations (such as paternity leave), then these become the norm for hiring and employee benefits, a cost all successful employers will bake into the model. Without men demanding and receiving these same concessions, there’s a tax on companies for hiring women which fosters an implicit bias. There’s something pathological about our obsession for leaning in, truly. We should work to live, not live to work, but that is not the current American way. It wasn’t always thus. (And I say this as someone who had an incredibly successful, leaning-in, high earning career). How common is it for men to die of a heart attack at 40 or 50 because they are really career driven? We don’t really bat an eye when that happens because it’s not that uncommon. That’s what the current system creates. Why not try to create a culture where both life and work are valued as in many other successful countries? That’s more aligned with the Church’s teachings anyway which are not only that women are responsible for the care of the family, but that fathers should also be involved in the family. Men and women would both benefit from more flexible work environments.
On your last point about the ERA, I couldn’t disagree more. Unisex bathrooms are a fantastic outcome as women don’t generally have to wait as long to get a stall. Most restaurants have one-seater rooms that have their own door, and either sex can use them, like on an airplane. Personally, I think the Church’s opposition to the ERA was simple knee-jerk conservatism (fear of abortion meaning free love chastity breaking, and fear of loss of income for men who were operating on the single breadwinner model) rather than a reasoned consideration of how women were impacted (not all women will marry, making marriage an economic imperative for women has MANY negative outcomes including choices between domestic abuse or poverty, abortion reduces unwanted children born into abusive situations, sexual harassment and discrimination against women in the workplace were totally legal norms at the time). Elder Oaks has vocally and repeatedly stated his view that women should receive equal pay for equal work. That may have been radical in 1979, but it’s a norm position now for society and also among the quorum of the twelve.
The lack of female professors as role models is a huge issue at BYU. It continues to enforce the belief that LDS women shouldn’t be pursuing motherhood and a career. All of the full-time female professors I had were single with the exception of one. I was so grateful for her because she was a tangible example of a Mormon woman who had a successful career and was married. This sadly seems to be very rare. Because of her example, I went on to grad school and have worked at leading tech companies.
Because sexism towards female faculty is such a problem, there is always a section about it in the syllabi for classes, in a section about class conduct basically. The professor I speak about actually told us a story about a time a male student got up in front of her class and started teaching. He seemed outraged that this female professor was younger than him and already had a PhD and had authority to teach him. Obviously this guy had serious issues and wasn’t the norm. However, I definitely observed male students in classes have disrespectful attitude towards female professors. There may not always be overt sexism, but there seemed to be an attitude that a female professor had to prove herself to be afforded the same respect male professors got by virtue of their maleness.
I had a great female chemistry professor at BYU-I. It does matter. But to have two alpha careers in one family and kids is really hard. So hard that most people don’t want to do it. Some people do but more don’t. While so many jobs are require long hours and are inflexible one parent usually has a beta career or no career. I went to a continuing education class in my field. The speaker was female, she has an advanced degree, works full time, runs her own office, speaks all over North America, has been quoted in the New York Times, and is considered a leader in her field. She mentioned in her intro that she has two children. This made me think of her as super women as I could not do all that she does and take care of two kids. But while she was talking she mentioned her forms in her office were a little more legalese than most. She said it because her husband went over them and he used to be an attorney until he quit to take care of their kids full time. So she wasn’t super human after all.
I think that until both male and female can have more flexible jobs married couples often have one take more time with the kids. It is usually the mom but it does not have to be.. Both need to be family friendly just not the womens. Maternity leave and paternity leave is important, especially if they can be staggered and not have to take it at the same time. Couples that I know that both have family friendly jobs are more likely to both keep working. But I don’t think there is anything wrong with being a stay at home parent. It just it should be a family decision and not based in what the church says you should do. BYU should be a leader in this but it is not. Tenure track at universities is known for being very time intensive and this happens in careers right during when women are biologically able to have children. Waiting until your mid to late thirties to have kids is also very frowned upon in the church but that is how more non member women are doing it.
My mother-in-law was a public school teacher in Utah for 30+ years. For many of those years, she supported 5 children and an often-unemployed husband as the sole breadwinner, and struggled to keep that family afloat. From what I understand, teacher’s wages in Utah haven’t improved much since then. In fact, at the time she retired a few years ago, she was made aware that newly hired teachers weren’t getting the benefits and pension plans that she had. According to her, teaching (like nursing, secretarial work and other traditionally female careers) is still widely considered a “throwaway” profession in the Utah patriarchal culture–that women are expected pursue the career only until they get married or start having kids, then abandon it in favor of domestic life. Contributing to the problem is the fact that educational administrators, politicians and policymakers in Utah are predominantly white LDS males with traditional views of how families should work. It’s just assumed that no one is trying to support a family on a teacher’s salary alone, so paying livable wages to teachers is not a priority. She also mentioned that BYU churns out a steady glut of elementary education majors (mostly women) who aren’t really serious about becoming teachers in the first place, so they teach for a couple years then quit, then another batch of fresh graduates step in to fill the vacancies. There aren’t enough incentives to retain experienced teachers, she says. So it’s another way in which BYU (and by extension, the Church) is part of the problem, not the solution. It’s especially sad in a religious culture that claims to place a high value on education.
I don’t mean to pick on Utah here, because it’s a problem everywhere, but Utah consistently ranks very high on gender pay disparity and it would be foolish to pretend that LDS culture doesn’t have anything to do with it.
But if states make it a priority to raise teacher salaries, it will have an added side affect of attracting more men to the profession, which not only levels the playing field but also provides more positive, nurturing male role models for children.
Excellent post.
I had to chuckle at the palindrome interview question. No way I could have answered that question in the middle of an interview. Jotting it down on a legal pad I think the answer is 100 (assuming two-digit numbers count as palindromes).
“there are still a lot of horribly sexist men who go uncorrected,”
The presumption here is that there is a “correct” and that you know what it is.
The immutable characteristic of aggression and thinking about sex nearly 24 hours a day (even while sleeping) is a male characteristic that would vanish in two generations if women would simply stop procreating with that kind, and choose nerds and geeks instead.
Wow, Michael, didn’t think your comments would again stoop to these low points after you comment about wanting to have sex with 14 yr old. . Just wow. So, there is a correct sexism now? Just wow.
As I’ve heard, the issue at BYU may lie mostly in disrespect of women and unwillingness to allow them in any position of potential authority equal to or over men. This is evidenced by the hesitancy to hire women to high-rank professor-track positions but no qualms to hire them for low-rank office support staff. The professor track generally would have more time flexibility than the explicit time constrained support staff. There seems to be no anxiety about an employed mother if she is only the secretary.
The trigger for applicability of Title IX is the receipt of Federal funds. It doesn’t matter whether a university is public or private, religious or not, if it accepts Federal funding it is subject to Title IX , which prohibits discrimination on the basis of sex in educational institutions.
Brian asks: “So, there is a correct sexism now?”
Indeed there is; every ism has a correct viewpoint but the details depend on who you ask.
In this context “correct” is not mathematical; like saying 2+2=4. Correct, in this context, means approved by the local authority and is usually rather capricious.
What is amusing to me is how so many people play both sides. In order to be transgender, each gender must mean something, have distinctive characteristics that you change FROM and TO. What exactly does it mean to be a man or a woman? You require rules for each, behaviors for each, and it is very clear to a transgender what are those rules. But do they exist outside of that person’s mind? No. The only objective reality is X or Y chromosome.
But from that X or Y comes all (or almost all) of human behavior including your decision to answer me in the way you did, and my decision to answer you in the way I do. You cannot change you and I doubt I can change me. What is certain is that you cannot change me and I cannot change you. We can learn to get along but with the advent of the internet that is no longer necessary or even particularly useful.
Michael, your comments rarely warrant a reply, cut you clearly don’t have any rhetorical currency when it comes to talking about sexism. I mean, you are basically equating sex drive with sexism in your earlier comment. For all your ‘philosophical’ ramblings, they don’t really mask your gross exaggerations to try to make a point. I mean, “‘geeks and nerds’ don’t have have sex drives large enough to engender sexism.” Your whole argument is offensive and absurd.
On your strange digression on the word ‘correct’ when it comes to sexism, you’re inventing a semantics game that isn’t there. But, when your losing, that’s all you can do.
Angela C’s statements on sexism carry a universe of weight over yours.
I am a woman and retired now. When I began my career as a pharmacist 50 years ago, I was being paid $5.00 an hour ( not unreasonable wage for that time). One day, my boss told me: “I was talking to some other pharmacy owners, and they are paying $6.00 an hour, so I am raising you to $5.50. “. I was I had to stay in that job because of location, but this was quite common. I have seen a lot of progress.
I probably would have botched the palindrome question. If there had been a year zero, the answer would have been 120 (10 from 0 to 9, 9 from 11 to 99, 90 from 101 to 999, 10 from 1001 to 1991, and 2002 to even out the total), but I may not have been able to think about it that way under pressure, and I may have had trouble deciding what to do about the nonexistent year zero.