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In the United States, women are less likely than men to reach term of office.

Women in the US in 2018 held 49.7% of all tenure track positions (assistant professor, associate professor), but only 39.3% of tenure positions (full professor). If you break that down further, women made up 52.9% of assistant professors and 46.4% of associate professors in science, but made up only 34.3% of professorial positions in the same year.

A national problem, underrepresentation of women in tenure, is also widespread at Oregon State University. In autumn 2019, women represented 55.2% of the trainer positions at OSU, but only 37% of the tenure track and tenure positions.

Associate Professor in the Department of Fisheries, Wildlife and Wildlife Specialists, Dana Sanchez, said, “No matter who you are or how you identify yourself, as one of my mentors put it, it’s just a really difficult business.”

Those who go through the tenure track process are constantly learning new concepts, training, preparing and teaching courses, doing research and searching for them as they prepare for their mid-term and final exams.

“It’s a compressed time of very hard work, a lot of deep learning,” said Sanchez.

Although the tenure track process is difficult for everyone, there are additional burdens and challenges that can arise depending on how people identify with it.

Sanchez pointed out that caring and parenting are some of the main reasons that lead to fewer women getting employment.

“In general, in American society, there is still a huge difference in who does care,” said Sanchez.

This statement is reflected in the statistics. According to a report According to the American Association of Retired Persons, women represented 61% of caregivers as of May 2020.

ONE report by YaleGlobal in 2018 showed that in every region surveyed, including the United States, women spent more than twice as much time on housework and family care as men.

Because women tend to have more of this responsibility, women have less time to focus on their tenure goals and emotional work. This can increase their stress levels and make them more exhausted than those who are not expected to provide care or are parents to others.

According to Sanchez, COVID-19 has exacerbated the difficulty between work-life balance.

“Parents are expected to teach at home and / or oversee school-led curricula for their children at potentially different ages and educational levels as they give lectures, attend required meetings, write their articles and write their scholarships,” said Sanchezsaid.

Different identities contribute to different levels of difficulty on the tenure track ladder.

“The complexity of overlapping identities can make advancing this term so much more difficult,” said Sanchez. “It is not at all uncommon – in fact, it is quite common – for people of underrepresented races, ethnicities, cultures, orientations, LGBTQ + status, communities, even differences in skills that are visible and invisible. When there are very few in the church in any of these complex and overlapping identities, they tend to deliberately represent large numbers of people. ”

Often times, these individuals are asked to mentor and represent the larger group that represents their identity, which takes time and takes an emotional and mental toll.

“It’s just a difficult process, and whatever pressure is going to fall increasingly on those who have multiple responsibilities in addition to their jobs,” Sanchez said.

Tiffany Garcia, a professor in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife, agreed that while the tenure track process is difficult for everyone, different identities can affect a person’s experience.

“Tenure is incredibly challenging,” she said. “It’s a tough time in an academic career, and that’s true for pretty much anyone who has ever done this. It’s a lot of intrinsic and extrinsic pressures. It’s do or die, make or break. If you don’t get a tenure, you’re out. ”

Garcia explained that the term of office was originally created in a male-dominated world where women helped at home. This gave the person trying to reach a term more time and mental and emotional ability to achieve their goal. But that dynamic has changed since then.

“It is not currently the case with either gender,” said Garcia.

Though everyone is under pressure to balance work and life, Garcia said, “What I think women are disproportionate to a very painful reality is that the term of office occurs at the same time that we use our reproductive skills break up. ”

According to Garcia, the tenure process and timing of women’s key reproductive skills essentially overlap directly.

In the past, women were faced with a decision that was forced to choose between having children or a career. According to Garcia, women have become more creative in science by avoiding these choices: for example, many will have children during graduate school or postdoctoral studies, or some universities will allow them to pause the tenure clock to have children.

In Garcia’s opinion, the two biggest problems the OSU faces with women on the tenure track are the lack of childcare and maternity leave.

According to a report Oregon, from the OSU College of Public Health and Human Sciences, is home to only three counties that are not considered childcare deserts for children under five. A childcare desert “is defined as a district with more than three small children per childcare place.”

In Benton County, less than 25% of childcare places are publicly funded, which means many of the options are privately funded and expensive.

“This is a problem that the university has been looking at, and I know several people who have made it their life’s work to do better,” said Garcia, “but it doesn’t go fast enough.”

Garcia said that OSU’s paid parental leave is also sparse. Parental leave remains an issue in the US.

The Family Medical Leave Act (FMLA) grants 12 weeks of unpaid federal work leave, however 40% of women do not qualify for it. Oregon passed a Paid Family and Sick Leave Act in 2019 requiring state employers to grant up to 12 weeks of paid family and sick leave.

The US remains one of the few high-income countries that does not offer paid parental leave at the federal level. Countries like Finland and Denmark make more time available seven months or four and a half months for this form of leave.

“It’s cruel on every level and sets the US apart from pretty much every other place in the world,” said Garcia. “And academics who you would think would be better here than in the corporate and private sectors, for example, which is actually just not true, and it’s almost worse. And it comes down to the university, rather than a larger system, to decide if that’s going to happen. “

Both Sanchez and Garcia said that despite the challenges the process brings, they have hope for the future of women in the tenure.

“I think it’s good that the OSU, like some other institutions, is at least stepping up and saying,” Yes, we have to meet this need, “said Sanchez.

Garcia has pondered solutions and suggested, “We may need to think about more progressive ways to achieve a term that doesn’t put everything in your life aside for five years.”

Garcia continued, “It’s really a cultural thing. The culture has to change. It has to be more inclusive; it has to be more acceptable. ”

Garcia said she’s starting to see how things change within the tenure track process.

Garcia said she’s more “noticing people who care about the other parts of their life” and creating a culture of change.

“I love my job and I don’t want people to be afraid of this culture of overwork because we can be the change,” she said. “We just have to be the change we want to see.”