Intertwined Discourses of Merit and Gender: Evidence from Academic Employment in the USA

In the USA women currently gain about 44% of doctoral degrees and a similar share of initial academic appointments. However, overall women hold about 33% of faculty positions and are slower to earn tenure and be promoted to full professor. Academic achievements have lower salary payoff for women, and they earn less than men with comparable qualifications and accomplishments. In the micropolitics of academic life, women remain on the margin trying to prove they have the skills to ‘play the game at all’ while men realistically presume support and focus on strategizing reputation ( Gersick et al. , 2000 ). The gendered nature of academic life in the USA is interpreted in terms of Glick and Fiske's ‘ambivalent sexism’. In this view, gender stereotypes are ideological and prescriptive rather than simply descriptive; their influence on academic employment processes is unlikely to diminish simply with the passage of time or accumulating evidence on women's capabilities. While insightful, alone this framing leads to the pessimistic view that ambivalent attitudes toward women are intractable. Adding a feminist perspective on discourse allows a somewhat more optimistic view: intertwined discourses of gender and merit are sufficiently complex and heterogeneous to provide openings for resistance, renegotiation, and rewriting.