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5. Publications and PerformanceIn a major university, promotion and tenure are usually based on excellence in at least two of the following: teaching, research, and service. Since excellence in teaching graduate classes is predicated on the instructor being at the cutting edge of the subject, this presupposes excellence in research. Furthermore, the academic's reputational standing (most especially after the attainment of full professor rank) rests on research performance. The usual measures of research performance are publications and citations. Before examining these two measures in more detail, it is interesting to look at the study conducted by Davis and Astin (1987). They are investigating the factors which contribute most to an academic's reputation and the esteem in which that person is held. Their data is restricted to the ``highly productive'' scholars (as of 1980 and 1982) in the social sciences, where the number of papers (rather than books) was the operative measure of performance. The most significant predictor of reputation and esteem produced by their regression analysis was the number of chapters in a book (be they invited (new) papers or a reproduction of an earlier highly regarded paper), and not, in fact, the number of publications per se as might have been originally expected. The explanation is simple. The invitation to make a contribution to the book in and of itself presupposes the invitee has already established a reputation or level of excellence worthy of such an invitation. Although not directly addressed by Davis and Astin, the same conclusions may be made relative to invitations to serve on national boards or panels, many of which ultimately produce major publications of some description. Although women have performed at least as well in graduate school, they publish less than do men. A study on citations showed that in mathematics 2.9% of articles classifiable by gender were written by women although 13% of the membership of professional associations were women and 7.6% of those doctorates in the mathematical sciences employed in educational institutions in 1979 were women (from Vetter (1981)). A study by Goldberg (1968) was repeated by Paludi and Bauer (1983) in which it was shown that publications perceived to have been written by women were considerably less favorably reviewed than those thought to be written by men (see Table 6). In this study, 180 men and 180 women were asked to rate comparable articles, one-third of which were ``authored'' by John T. McKay, a Joan T. McKay, and a J. T. McKay. The most favorable rating was one, with five being the least favorable. Upon questioning later, the majority of the raters believed the articles by J. T. McKay were in fact authored by a woman and this belief is reflected in the mean scores shown in the table. It is interesting to observe that women also rated male-authored papers more highly than they did for Joan T. and J. T. papers, but not quite as favorably as did men rate men authors.
Women are likewise disadvantaged in evaluations based on citations are made. Ferber (1986) observed that women tend to cite women and men tend to cite men more than citations of the opposite sex. In a separate study, Table 7 shows the percent of citations of women, men, and joint authors in articles in mathematics written by men and women, thus substantiating these perceptions. The larger study (covering many fields) from which these results were extracted did, however, show that this disadvantage to women decreased as the proportion of women in the field increased; so this is encouraging for the future.
Women also tend to publish at a lower rate as their careers advance. Cole and Zuckerman (1984) suggest this is possibly due to the lack of rewards at the level they see their male colleagues enjoying. That equal rewards for equivalent research performances are not forthcoming has been substantiated by several studies, including those by Bayer and Astin (1975) and Cole (1979), who demonstrated that such men enjoyed higher ranks than women, especially in the more prestigious universities. The improved resources that come with rank, such as better teaching assignments, greater access to graduate students, etc., are thus denied, at least to a degree, with an increasing reduction in access to these resources over time. This effect is further compounded by the fact that women tend to be less visible than men, their work is perceived to be of lower quality and rarely are women cited as having made major contributions (see Cole (1979) and Davis and Astin (1987)). This is demonstrated, for example, by the low number of women who serve as invited speakers at professional meetings. These studies parallel those by Deaux and Taynor (1973) in which men applicants for a study-abroad program were more favorably viewed than identical women applicants, and by Fidell (1970) in which university chairs rated identical applicants, preferring those believed to be men, and, furthermore, tending to offer the men positions at the associate professor level and women at the assistant professor level. Sandler (1986) summarizes these and similar studies stating that ``the same professional accomplishments are seen as superior in quality and worthy of higher rewards when attributed to men than when they are attributed to women.'' Nieva and Gutek (1980) provide a more indepth look at the factors behind these differences in evaluation. Deaux and Emswiller (1974) observed that when women were perceived to have performed as well as men on ``male-related'' tasks their good performance was due to external factors such as luck or effort whereas the man's good performance was due to internal factors such as skill or ability. Finally, men are frequently appointed to positions, most especially senior and administrative positions, on their potential, in contrast to women who not only had to prove themselves first but had to do so under intense scrutiny (Sandler (1986)).
Copyright ©1991
American Mathematical Society. Reprinted with
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