‘We need a woman, we need a black woman’: gender, race, and identity taxation in the academy

Abstract

In 1994, Amado Padilla used the phrase ‘cultural taxation’ to describe the extra burden of service responsibilities placed upon minority faculty members because of their racial or ethnic background. In this paper, we expand upon Padilla's work and introduce the concept of ‘identity taxation’ to encompass how other marginalised social identities (such as gender, race and gender, and sexual orientation) may result in additional non-academic service commitments for certain faculty. Using qualitative interviews with faculty members at a large, public university in the Midwest, we examine identity taxation involving gender and the intersection of gender and race to demonstrate how women faculty (in general) and women of colour (specifically) feel their gender and racial group memberships influence their experiences in academia.

Keywords:

• cultural taxation
• academia
• gender
• race
• intersectionality

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank Drs. Mark Chesler and Alford Young Jr., team members and participants of the Faculty Members and Diversity Classrooms Project, and anonymous reviewers for their supportive feedback and suggestions on a previous draft of this paper.

Notes

The distribution of women in the fields of nursing, education, and social work are as follows: nursing (graduate students 64%, professors 96.7%), education (graduate students 65%, professors 66%), and social work (graduate students 74%, professors 55.8%).

Although Padilla does not explicitly define his use of the term ‘ethnic’ in his article, we interpret ‘ethnic’ as referring to graduate students and faculty of colour in our work.

This number drops to about 41.6% if you remove two-year colleges.

While most of the data in this paper are taken from the subsample of female faculty members, there were also several male faculty members who commented on issues related to identity taxation for their female colleagues. Their views are included in our findings.

Thus, respondents were not consistently asked about the effects of social identities other than their race.

In those cases, extensive fieldnotes were taken during and after the interviews.

Notably, white faculty members in the humanities and social sciences, even those who were asked specifically to reflect upon the influence of gender on their relationship with faculty peers and departmental relationships, did not describe experiences of gendered identity taxation. Faculty members of colour in the humanities and social sciences who spoke of gendered taxation also spoke simultaneously about the influence of race. These findings will be discussed in the next section. Thus, the quotes from this section come from interviewees in the natural sciences, as they identified gendered taxation as an issue in their departments.