4-1 Research Investigation Progress Check 2

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Sociology

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Apr 3, 2024

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Running head: PROGRESS CHECK 2 1 Research Investigation Progress Check 2 Amber Powers SCS-200 Applied Social Sciences Dr. Mark Meis
PROGRESS CHECK 2 2 Research Investigation Progress Check 2 For my social science issue, I have decided to investigate how gender-based professional standards differ among tenure-track and tenured professors and how these standards have changed over the last 50 years since the Lamphere vs Brown lawsuit in 1975. This issue is significant because it highlights a significant issue in academia where gender-based discrimination has been a well-known and documented issue. Another possible application of this research, especially in the wake of the Supreme Court decision last year which overturned Affirmative Action, would be to help illustrate the importance of programs like Affirmative Action and Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion initiatives on college campuses by illustrating the impact they have already had for minority and marginalized groups in this setting. The most obvious social science principle that relates to this issue would be social norms. When discussing things like gender-based discrimination within a community, we are discussing the social norms that are used to discriminate against someone because their gender differs from the gender who normally fills a role. These social norms are the spoken and unspoken expectations of how you act and present yourself within society that distinguish what is acceptable behavior and what isn’t through both verbal and nonverbal cues, when these are weaponized for discriminatory practices they determine what behaviors and stereotypes are used against someone to bar them from being part of that group (MindEdge, 2016). The second social science principle that applies to this issue would be social roles. The role of professor, especially for those who identify with marginalized groups, is evolving with and driving the change in the standards of professionalism within this social role and the changing demographics of professors are the result of affirmative action policies designed to help less advantaged individuals to reach equitable positions as their more privileged peers.
PROGRESS CHECK 2 3 Social roles, such as professor or parent, are the boxes or job descriptions that we all fill in society that determine what is expected of us in each position we occupy (MindEdge, 2016). For the first of my three resources, I picked a journal article from Science Advances titled Gender and Retention Patterns Among U.S. Faculty. This journal article makes a specific important point about the attrition rate of women in academia noting that "women leave academia overall at higher rates than men at every career age, in large part because of strongly gendered attrition at lower-prestige institutions, in non-STEM fields, and among tenured faculty." (Spoon et al, 2023). This is relevant as it deals with gender-based differences in attrition rates at non-Ivy League universities. My thought process when looking for this source was to search for a resource that utilized the keywords “faculty attrition and gender differences” on Google Scholar. This source focuses on gender and retention whereas my other sources focus on other areas of gender-based professional standards over the last 50 years. My second resource to analyze is another journal article titled Demographic Inertia and Women’s Representation among Faculty in Higher Education by Lowell Hargens and Scott Long. It was published in the Journal of Higher Education on July 1, 2002. This article provides an insight into the discrimination that women have faced within institutions of higher education, specifically in the form of stagnant percentages of representation among tenured and tenure-track professors. This will be useful to highlight the ways that women’s careers tend to be impacted by gender-based discrimination in practices for hiring and promoting professors, as the rate of PhDs being awarded to women is increasingly outpacing the rates of women in these roles. This article differs from my other resources because it gives a midpoint view of the gender-based discrimination women have been facing in academia and the impact it has had on their professional careers over the last 50 years. I found this resource while searching for sources
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PROGRESS CHECK 2 4 using the keywords “gender-based discrimination and higher education and United States”. I was hoping to find a resource that would highlight instances of discrimination in United States based colleges and universities based on gender to help me understand how this topic has been addressed at different points over the last 50 years since the Lamphere vs Brown case. This source is also listed in the references section of my first resource. The third resource that I want to analyze is another journal article titled “The Effects of Gender Composition in Academic Departments on Faculty Turnover” by Pamela Tolbert, Tal Simons, Alice Andrews, and Jaehoon Rhee. It was published in the ILR Review in April of 1995. This article is different from my other sources as it deals with the impacts of differing percentages of women and other minorities in a department and how it relates to the turnover rate in the department. The findings in this article will help me to understand how changing gender dynamics in a department of a college or university impacts the likelihood of turnover and the effects of affirmative action policies in these departments. I found this resource by searching on the Shapiro Library using the keywords “faculty attrition and gender differences”. While this resource is a little older it is still from the period that I am researching and will give insight into how affirmative action policies were impacting the demographics of departments at colleges and universities during that time. Based on my investigation, a research question that I would ask is “How have affirmative action policies impacted gender-based discrimination among tenured and tenure-track professors over the last 50 years?”. A social scientist would need to investigate what affirmative action policies have been implemented over the last 50 years in the hiring and promoting practices for tenured and tenure-track professors by gender, how these policies have changed the demographics of college departments, and rates of gender-based discrimination over the last 50
PROGRESS CHECK 2 5 years as it relates to the changing demographics of these departments. The next steps would be to design a study that evaluates these variables in specific departments across the United States and then to evaluate the results and ask further questions based on their findings.
PROGRESS CHECK 2 6 Sources: Hargens, L. L., & Long, J. S. (2002). Demographic Inertia and Women’s Representation among Faculty in Higher Education.   The Journal of Higher Education ,   73 (4), 494–517. Lamphere, L. (2012, May 3). Becoming a squeaky wheel: Louise Lamphere, Ph.d. at tedxmosesbrownschool . YouTube. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EJfj0N4IE-A MindEdge, Inc. (2016). SCS-200: Applied Social Science . Ranganathan, M., Lalk, E., Freese, L. M., Freilich, M. A., Wilcots, J., Duffy, M. L., & Shivamoggi, R. (2021). Trends in the Representation of Women Among Us Geoscience Faculty from 1999 to 2020: The long road toward gender parity. AGU Advances , 2 (3). https://doi.org/10.1029/2021av000436 Spoon, K., LaBerge, N., Wapman, K. H., Zhang, S., Morgan, A. C., Galesic, M., Fosdick, B. K., Larremore, D. B., & Clauset, A. (2023). Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty. Science Advances , 9 (42). https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adi2205 Tolbert, P. S., Simons, T., Andrews, A., & Rhee, J. (1995). The Effects of Gender Composition in Academic Departments on Faculty Turnover. ILR Review, 48(3), 562-579. https://doi.org/10.1177/001979399504800313
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