Gender, type of higher education institution, and faculty work-life integration in the United States

ABSTRACT

Although many academics in the United States assume that work-life balance, especially for women, is better at teaching-intensive colleges than at research-intensive universities, there is no systematic data to support this belief. We analyzed survey data from 909 faculty at a research-intensive public university, a masters-level public college, and two private colleges to test this assumption. Consistent with their reputation, faculty at the three teaching-intensive colleges reported family/personal life-friendlier departments. Yet we found no difference in work-life integration between faculty at the research university and those at the colleges. After we introduced having a family/personal life-friendly department as a mediator, the faculty at the research university reported more work-life integration than those at the colleges. The assumption that teaching-intensive colleges offer better work-life balance constitutes one layer in the leaky pipeline that reduces the number of women academics working at research universities, thereby reproducing the gender hierarchy in US higher education.

KEYWORDS:

• Academic career
• gender
• higher education
• work-life integration
• work-family conflict

Acknowledgements

Any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the view of their institutions or the National Science Foundation. The authors also acknowledge additional and ongoing support from their institutions. We thank the anonymous reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their insightful comments and suggestions.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 We used American terminology, including ‘faculty’ for what is elsewhere called ‘academic staff’. US academics on the tenure track face a rigorous review after 4 – 7 years to receive tenure and usually promotion to associate professor. Increasing numbers of faculty are not on the tenure-track; they are typically hired on a contingent basis.

2 In the competitive contemporary environment for academic positions, candidates may not have as much choice as they used to; candidates on the job market rarely had multiple offers (see Fernandes et al., 2019). Even so, candidates targeted applications to one type of institution over another (Mason et al., 2013; Ward & Wolf-Wendel, 2017).

3 We used ‘family-to-work conflict’ throughout as a shorthand to refer to the way that home/personal/family life can impact work life, which is common in the literature on this topic. Following Bailyn (2003) and Philipsen et al. (2017), we intended to be inclusive of varied home lives, including those without partners and/or children.

4 In a sensitivity analysis, we dropped arts and humanities faculty from teaching-intensive college samples (n = 129), resulting in a loss of statistical power, but the substantive interpretation was unchanged.

5 We tested a statistical interaction between gender and institution type for each dependent measure of work-life integration but found no significant effects, so all models included gender and institution type separately.

6 Given the relatively low Cronbach's alpha for the family-to-work conflict index, we considered combining all four work-life conflict items into one index, but a factor analysis showed a two-factor solution based on spillover direction. Regression analyses using the two items as separate measures of family-to-work conflict replicated the results of the 2-item index.

7 While we labeled this variable ‘family-friendly department’, the index items employed an inclusive approach to work-life integration that recognized faculty have personal responsibilities that go beyond family obligations.

8 While we included marital and parental status as control variables in all analyses, the comparison of faculty with or without partners and with or without children was not the focus of this article. Therefore, we did not explore the results in the following sections.

9 Women's mean satisfaction with work-life balance ($\overline{x}$ = 3.59) was lower than men's ($\overline{x}$ = 4.01, F = 20.4; p < .001). Their mean work-to-family conflict ($\overline{x}$ = 3.89; F = 17.6; p < .001) and family-to-work conflict ($\overline{x}$ = 2.96; F = 18.2; p < .001) scores were both higher than men's ($\overline{x}$ = 3.50, 2.64 respectively).

10 University faculty had higher mean work-life balance satisfaction ($\overline{x}$ = 4.03; F = 21.5; p < .001) and lower mean family-to-work conflict ($\overline{x}$ = 2.65; F = 13.2; p < .001) than college faculty ($\overline{x}$ = 3.60, 2.92 respectively).

11 Sobel Tests based on Model 6 (not shown) indicated that only work-to-family conflict (z = 3.10, p < .001) and work-supportive families (z = 2.66, p < .001) significantly mediated gender differences in balance satisfaction (see Sobel, 1982).

Additional information

Funding

This research is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under [grant numbers #0811250, # 0820080, #0820032 and #0930193].

Notes on contributors

Catherine White Berheide

Catherine White Berheide is Professor of Sociology at Skidmore College. A sociologist of work, she studies unpaid work in the home and in the community in addition to paid work. Her publications on faculty work lives include a co-edited volume, Gender Transformation in the Academy.

Megumi Watanabe

Megumi Watanabe is an Associate Professor in the Office of University Strategy at Hiroshima University in Japan. Her research focuses on work environments and diversity issues in academia as well as survey methodology.

Christina Falci

Dr Christina Falci is an associate professor of sociology at the University of Nebraska-Lincoln. Drawing on social psychology, gender theory, and network theory, she studies both the predictors (e.g., how faculty network structure varies by gender) and consequences (e.g. how a faculty member’s network position shapes their perceptions of collegiality, job satisfaction and organizational commitment) of faculty networks.

Elizabeth Borland

Elizabeth Borland is Professor of Sociology at The College of New Jersey. Her scholarly interests include gender in organizations and the law, women’s collective action and applied sociology. In addition to her work on women’s activism in the Southern Cone, she has published articles on faculty gender equity in Polymath and Advances in Gender Research.

Diane C. Bates

Diane C. Bates is a Professor of Sociology at The College of New Jersey. Her primary research interests are in environmental and urban sociology, with a long-standing focus on social inequality and household economies.

Cay Anderson-Hanley

Dr Cay Anderson-Hanley is an associate professor at Union College. Her interests include clinical neuropsychology, cognitive aging, exercise, exergaming, and dementia.