Leroy Gonsalves (BU School of Business)

"Challenging the Specter of Motherhood in Academia: Universalistic Tenure Clock Extensions and Faculty Diversity"

Leroy Gonsalves, Kwan Woo Kim, Gal Deutsch, Alexandra Kalev, and Frank Dobbin

The “specter of motherhood” continues to hinder women’s careers in academia. Work-life policies such as tenure extensions are thought to be ineffective due to policy-use hesitancy, discrimination against users, and misuse by fathers. We draw on the work-life literature to suggest that tenure extensions may help increase the share of women among tenured faculty. We further propose that universalistic features – eligibility for both mothers and fathers and automatic enrollment – may reduce hesitancy and discrimination. We consider race, using the job demands-resources model to predict that Black, Hispanic, and Asian women and men, with weaker average financial and social childcare resources, will benefit most from universalistic features. We test these ideas using data for 400 U.S. universities adopting extensions between 1994 and 2016. Results indicate that early concerns about tenure extensions unfairly benefitting men may be unfounded. Universalistic extensions seem to best support women of all races and non-white men.