Chutes and Ladders: Gendered Systems of Privilege and Marginalization in University Science Teaching

Abstract

This article reports on how gender shapes the work of university science faculty. Theories of gender as a social system are used to disentangle how individuals, social interactions, and institutions (re)produce inequality by sustaining occupational gender segregation in higher education science. The study uses qualitative data from an ethnography of six teaching faculty at a large research-intensive public university in the United States. These teaching faculty, largely women in a department in which the majority are men, are ineligible for tenure and institutionally positioned as having lower status. The disadvantages are experienced in different ways across all the women on the teaching faculty. In contrast, men on the teaching faculty are recognizable as scientists and are by default treated with respect. As such, they are elevated regardless of their skill as teachers. This study offers a theoretical contribution to the current understanding of gendered occupations by suggesting that the experiences of the science teaching faculty can be conceptualized as chutes and ladders. Ladders are mechanisms reserved for the elevation of men. Chutes are reserved for women because regardless of how women approach their work, the gender system is constructed to hold them back.

Since the 1980s, after decades of virtual exclusion, women have increasingly studied and forged careers in the physical sciences.¹ Yet, at every stage in the life course, from secondary school through higher education and into the workforce, women’s participation in these fields diminishes (Gayles & Ampaw, 2016; Riegle-Crumb et al., 2012; Xie & Shauman, 2003). In higher education settings, scientists who are women are likely to be doing different types of work than men. This work, such as teaching, is often marginalized because it is considered to be less prestigious than work more typically done by men, such as research (Britton, 2017; Coate & Howson, 2016; Thiry et al., 2007). These differences in prestige are manifested through gendered occupational stratification (Charles & Bradley, 2002).

Horizontal segregation clusters men in disciplines with greater economic potential, such as engineering, and women into disciplines with less economic potential, such as biology (Ecklund et al., 2012). In the United States, women earn about 30% of PhDs in the physical sciences and engineering and over 50% of PhDs in biology (National Science Foundation [NSF], 2021). In academia, vertical segregation leaves women underrepresented at the upper levels, which are research-intensive, and clusters them in positions that are not tenure eligible and are teaching-intensive (Rosser, 2012). For example, 24% of women faculty in the physical sciences are full professors and 13% are non–tenure line; whereas, 38% of men physical science faculty are full professors and just 7% are non–tenure line (NSF, 2021). Moreover, gender theories make it clear that even when doing the same job, such as teaching, men enjoy a higher social status (Budig, 2002; Risman, 2004; C. L. Williams, 1995).

The purpose of this study was to interrogate how occupational gender segregation produces inequality in academic science. It was accomplished through an ethnography of non–tenure-line teaching faculty in physical science, a group of women and men with PhDs² who worked at a large public university with high research activity in the United States. In accordance with previous research, I found that inequalities manifest as glass obstacles for women (e.g., De Welde & Laursen, 2011; Rosser, 2004) and glass escalators for men (C. L. Williams, 1992). Glass obstacles are invisible yet pernicious barriers that appear with little warning or may even reappear after being overcome but that serve to systematically disadvantage women (De Welde & Laursen, 2011). Glass escalators are invisible yet palpable structural advantages that enhance the careers of men in occupations dominated by women, such as nursing (C. L. Williams, 1992). I extend and combine these metaphors to propose that the teaching faculty’s work is more like a game of gendered chutes and ladders, wherein women are disadvantaged by chutes and men are advantaged by ladders. Chutes are slides represented by social forces that pull women back despite their best efforts to succeed. I support my analysis with theories of gender as a social system (Ridgeway & Correll, 2004; Risman, 2004), analytically disentangling how individuals, interactions, and institutions sustain occupational gender segregation.

LITERATURE REVIEW

This literature review presents two main themes: gender in STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) and gender in higher education. The section “Gender in STEM” reviews how a masculine culture marginalizes women at all levels of participation with a range of mechanisms. The “Gender in Higher Education” section reviews how neoliberalism has produced and perpetuated the non–tenure line as a caste of academics and how women are disproportionately placed in this lower-status role. I tie these together to indicate the need to closely examine non–tenure-line faculty in the sciences, since the discipline and status hierarchies work together to disadvantage women.

Gender in STEM

While inadequate representation of women in the STEM pipeline superficially accounts for their underrepresentation (Xie & Shauman, 2003), STEM also has a pervasively masculine culture (Keller, 1985). Eurowestern scientific practice relies on Cartesian dualities: objectivity/subjectivity, rational/irrational, self/other, and the modern political economy of capitalism was integral to the formation of science disciplines (Harding, 1991). A masculine culture implicitly norms women in STEM as the other throughout their schooling (Nguyen et al., 2022; Parson & Ozaki, 2018) and in the workplace (Bevan & Gatrell, 2017; Doerr et al., 2021).

Gender scholars explain marginalization in STEM with the concepts of gender essentialism and self-expressive value systems (Charles & Bradley, 2009; Diekman et al., 2010; Ridgeway, 2009). Gender essentialism is a system of cultural beliefs that regards differences in women and men’s interests and personalities as innate and fundamental (Ridgeway, 2009). Gender essentialism supports goal-congruity theory, arguing that because women are generally socialized into a strong communal orientation, they subsequently favor roles that involve helping others. At the same time, men are socialized to favor individual agency and achievement. Because physical sciences and engineering are culturally constructed as competitive fields that are not consistent with communal goals, it follows that women will be less interested than men in pursuing those areas (goal congruity; Diekman et al., 2010). Moreover, self-expressive value systems reinforce goal congruity because women’s underrepresentation in the sciences can be understood as due to the individual choices that men and women make based on their personal preferences and aspirations, despite its patterning by gender (Charles & Bradley, 2009). Some women do, however, study physical science and even persist to earn PhDs with the expectation of joining the workforce. Their experiences are rarely ideal.

In academic science, there is extensive documentation of sexism and marginalization (e.g., Graves et al., 2022; National Academies of Sciences & Medicine, 2018; J. C. Williams, 2014). For example, the knowledge and authority of physical science PhD students who are women may be ignored or dismissed, while male peers’ expertise is assumed (Hirshfield, 2014, 2017; Smith-Doerr et al., 2016). Women’s choice of research group is constrained by the reputation for sexism in the lab (Wofford & Blaney, 2021). Furthermore, the “specter of motherhood” produces fear because of its construction as the opposite of professional legitimacy (Thébaud & Taylor, 2021). These factors all contribute to vertical and horizontal gender segregation in academic science (Britton, 2017; Ecklund et al., 2012). Thus, there is ample empirical evidence that women in STEM encounter discrimination. Further, as I explain in the next section, higher education increasingly marginalizes women through vertical segregation between tenure-line and non–tenure line-faculty.

Gender in Higher Education

Historically, a social charter between higher education and the public was foregrounded by commitments to service and developing democracy. In the past 40 years, this charter has been eroded as neoliberalism has reshaped higher education with marketized logics that prioritize private self-interest over public good (Lester & Sallee, 2017). As higher education institutions increasingly behave as profit-seeking organizations, they also support assumptions of an ideal worker, which norms the abstract worker as a man’s body “whose life centers on his full-time, life-long job, while his wife or another woman takes care of his personal needs and his children” (Acker, 1990, p. 149). Although men in academia increasingly take on care work responsibilities, ideal worker norms continue to disproportionately disadvantage women in academia (Sallee et al., 2016). These norms contribute to vertical segregation, whereby men are more likely to be successful in forging a path in research through social networks and mobility whereas women faculty take on more teaching (Angervall et al., 2015) and academic housekeeping tasks not valued for promotion (Babcock et al., 2017). Vertical segregation also harms women’s academic career security. Those who “opt out” of institutional structures such as 24/7 work and geographic mobility suffer contractual precarity and are overrepresented in part-time and fixed-term positions. Those who accept institutional structures, in turn, may experience affective precarity as they tend to peripheralize their relational lives (Ivancheva et al., 2019). In other words, women who accept the system may feel pushed to sideline their social lives, and this leads to a less stable emotional life.

A manifestation of vertical segregation in higher education in the United States is the increase in dual tracks of tenure-line and non–tenure-line faculty.³ This category has been growing steadily since the Equal Employment Act and Title IX of 1972, paradoxically as part of a “quest for mechanisms that would expand opportunities for women” (Glazer-Raymo, 1999, p. 57). Following neoliberalism’s tendency toward market models, dual tracks became an acceptable hiring strategy, with non–tenure-line faculty providing labor at significantly lower costs and with greater flexibility than tenure-line faculty. The American Association of University Professors reports that 61.5% of faculty are on non–tenure-line appointments. At doctoral institutions, like the one where this research study was conducted, half of the faculty are non–tenure line, and 22.5% are full-time but non–tenure line (Colby, 2022). Despite these trends, related research is “largely atheoretical and provides little in the way of non-tenure track faculty voices” (Haviland et al., 2017, p. 506). One exception is an interview study examining non–tenure-track-faculty expectations for collegiality. It indicated that while these faculty signaled acceptance of the tenure-normative system, they did expect to be shown respect, to enjoy social inclusion, and to have a voice in departmental matters. Yet, their access to even these basic rights was “varied, idiosyncratic and conditional” (Alleman & Haviland, 2017, p. 522).

The tenure system is also gendered, with women overrepresented in non–tenure-track positions; 35.7% of full-time faculty women are non–tenure track, compared with 23.3% of full-time faculty men (Colby, 2022). Taking a feminist perspective, Hart (2011) analyzed interviews and focus groups with non–tenure-line women in the United States and classified their experiences as frequently resembling a revolving door, whereby women might be hired but were not supported in advancing their careers. Informants experienced some opportunity, such as access to resources and job security but often were limited by low salaries or isolation relative to tenure-track peers. However, research specifically employing feminist theory to compare the experiences of men and women on the non–tenure track remains limited (Sallee et al., 2016), particularly with participants who work in the same department.

Intersecting the research reviewed thus far with STEM, wherein sexism and women’s marginalization is well documented, opens another perspective into how patriarchal institutions produce gendered patterns in social interactions and individual experiences. This study fills a gap in the literature by using a feminist lens to examine the experiences of men and women who are non–tenure-line teaching faculty in the physical sciences.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK: GENDER AS A SOCIAL SYSTEM

Feminist scholars have constructed an explanatory framework that conceptualizes gender as a social system that dynamically reproduces inequality on multiple levels. Building on the idea that gender is produced and maintained through social processes that include socialization, the actions of social institutions, and interactions among people (West & Zimmerman, 1987), Risman (1998) theorized how institutional cultures “create action indirectly by shaping actors’ perceptions of their interests and directly by constraining choice” (p. 27). Thus, gender might be conceptualized as a multitiered social structure. The tiers, from macro to micro, are institutional, interactional, and individual. The gendered social processes at each of the tiers contribute to inequitable outcomes that are both material and cultural. For example, identity work is shaped by culture and it manifests though the material body (Risman, 2018).

At the macro level, institutional culture produces ideology that affects the distribution of material resources and rules (Risman, 2004). At the interactional level, status and competence expectations, biased by cultural gender beliefs, accumulate and result in substantially different material paths and outcomes for women and men who otherwise have similar social backgrounds (Ridgeway & Correll, 2004). At the individual level, identity work and socialization are two ways gender is “done” on the material body through typically masculine or feminine activities because our intelligibility in most cultural contexts depends on it (West & Zimmerman, 1987). Taken together, the levels contribute powerful forces that generally disadvantage women and advantage men. Identity and beliefs shape how individuals are socialized, while stereotypes and bias influence interactions and access to social networks (Risman, 2004).

The gender system can also be thought of as a set of default social and cultural rules. While the content of gender beliefs is not universal, it most closely matches the experiences of White, middle-class, heterosexual men and, thus, produces culturally dominating gender stereotypes. These stereotypes are institutionalized in media, in laws, in public policy, and in organizational practices (Ridgeway, 2009). Thus, gender (re)produces inequality because it structures social patterns and compels people to operate in particular ways that make it very difficult to take action outside of this order. However, a deeper understanding of the gender system also shows us how it might be disrupted to promote gender equality. Therefore, this study is guided by the following research question:

How does the gender system influence non–tenure-line teaching faculty in a physical science department at a research-intensive university in the United States?

METHODOLOGY

This ethnographic research (Carspecken, 1996; Davis & Craven, 2016; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007) examined the non–tenure-line teaching faculty in a physical science department at a flagship public university in the southern United States. In educational research using ethnographic methodology, the object of study is determined by the researcher’s positionality and social issues that manifest at the intersection of politics, economics, and culture (Carspecken, 1996). My own social ontology (Hammersley, 1989) orients me to problems or situations I deem interesting, and research goals grow out of these problems. Thus, the object of study is a particular area of social life, with some foregrounded concerns but with an exploratory orientation (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). For example, I am interested in the physical science disciplines, in teaching, and in gender equity. Therefore, the site where ethnographic work was done featured these factors. Within the site, narrowing down the objects of study was facilitated by attending to situations relevant for the topic and the various settings within the site (Ravitch & Carl, 2015). The site was a physical science department with a dramatic level of gender segregation: the tenure line comprised mostly men and the teaching-intensive non–tenure line comprised mostly women. Within the non–tenure track, the bulk of teaching was introductory, service courses, and these were taught mostly by women and a few men. Narrowing the focus to non–tenure-line faculty who taught this course allowed for attention to be paid to relevant situations related to gender within a more defined setting.

However, settings are “not naturally occurring phenomena, they are constituted and maintained through cultural definitions and social strategies” (Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007, p. 32). A setting’s boundaries are continually shifting through processes of redefinition and negotiation, which means that ethnographic research, though conducted in a particular site, will necessarily include exposure to and analyses of a wider social structure. My social-justice orientation guided my inquiry toward the intersection of gender and science teaching. Also, my aim was for my research to be used in social criticism. I hold fundamental the notion that certain groups in my setting were privileged over others, that oppression is reproduced more egregiously when subordinates accept their social status as natural or inevitable, and that all forms of oppression should be analyzed and challenged (Carspecken, 1996). In short, I aimed to take a situation familiar to many in higher education—the prevalence of non–tenure-line faculty in the physical sciences—and use ethnography to problematize it.

Context

To protect participants’ confidentiality, the precise discipline, location, and job title have been changed. The university enrolls approximately 50,000 students, and about 80% are undergraduates. The university is categorized as a Research-1 for its very high research activity. The department has approximately 100 employees, inclusive of support staff for research and teaching laboratories, administrative assistants, and faculty. The faculty, all with PhDs, exist within two tiers: tenure line and non-tenure line. Those on the tenure line have higher status and conduct scientific research. Their teaching responsibilities are one or two sections per year, usually at the upper-level undergraduate or graduate level. In contrast, the teaching faculty are non–tenure line and do not have research labs. Teaching faculty are responsible for the introductory courses, with two sections of approximately 400 students each semester. These courses are required not only for physical science majors but also to major in engineering or to pursue medical school. These courses are colloquially known as “weedout” courses and the teaching faculty as “gatekeepers” (Doerr, 2021). About 10,000 students are enrolled each year.

I first became aware of the teaching faculty while I was the research assistant for an undergraduate science curriculum committee. I became friendly with a woman on the teaching faculty, Dr. Welles (a pseudonym). With her help, I developed a reading and discussion series on issues of equity in science teaching. We invited everyone who taught in her department, but only teaching faculty and a few graduate students participated. I was struck to learn that, in a department and discipline that comprised 75% men, the teaching faculty was the opposite: about 75% women. I developed preliminary research questions for this study around this disparity and decided they were best answered with ethnographic methodology.

Participants

Following institutional review board approval, I began the study by observing the faculty responsible for teaching Introductory Physical Science (IPS). To protect participants’ confidentiality, each participant has an honorific that reflects both their level of education (Dr.) and their gender identity (participants’ pseudonyms begin with W for the women and M for the men). I engaged with my participants in a reflexive snowball fashion. Spending time with one participant meant that I met their colleagues in a naturalistic fashion—they shared offices and had meetings together. Recruiting them, in general, was a matter of asking them to participate verbally and then following up with an informed consent document via e-mail. My initial focus was on recruiting participants who were non–tenure line and who taught IPS (two other teaching faculty were responsible for a second-year undergraduate course taken by physical science majors and premeds, and another taught a third-year course taken by physical science majors). I spent about a year observing these faculty and also became aware of others who were not strictly within the study criteria but worked at the boundaries. Thus, I also observed Associate Dean Mosely, a tenure-line professor who taught IPS periodically, and the two coordinators for the complementary laboratory course.

Ultimately, seven women and four men participated. Because ethnography is preoccupied with the everyday, in participant observation I was looking for patterns through the participants’ routines. As time went by, I could also notice what was out of the ordinary. Because I utilized a feminist perspective, my observations were most closely attuned to gendered patterns. In this study, I concentrate my analysis on six participants who taught IPS and worked closely together on teaching teams, because these data could be used for a comparative analysis between women and men. An overview of the participants is presented in Table 1.

TABLE 1 Overview of Participant Characteristics

Name/race	Age	Years as teaching faculty	Teaching assignment (in one semester)	Self-reported salary (US$)	University System Teaching Award?	Partnered?	Number of Children
Dr. Welles/ White	50	20	2 sections IPS, 800 students	~70 000	Y	Y	3
Dr. Mason/ White	55	25	2 sections IPS, 800 students	~70 000	N	Y	1
Dr. Wheelock/ White	45	15	2 sections IPS, 400 students	~40 000	Y	Y	2
Dr. Winsor/ White	30	3	2 sections IPS, 800 students	~60 000	N	Y	0
Dr. Westover/ White	45	15	1 section IPS, 400 students and 2 sections Learning Peers, 60 students	~50 000	N	Y	2
Dr. Macintosh/ White	35	2	2 sections IPS, 800 students	~45 000	N	Y	1, born 2019
Dean Mosley/ White	50	20	1 section IPS, 400 students	~200 000	Y	Y	2

Note. Participants pseudonymized with M self-identify as men and those with W, as women. All self-identified as White.

As shown in Table 1, participants ranged in age from their early 30s to mid 50s. All self-identified as White, heterosexual, married, women and men, and they used she/he pronouns. They all completed their PhDs in the same department, except for Dr. Welles. She had completed her PhD and 2 years of postdoctoral work in another U.S. state. Some of the participants, such as Dr. Wheelock and Dr. Mason, had returned to the department after working in the private sector for a few years. Dr. Winsor and Dr. Westover had PhD advisors who were aging and needed them to be teaching assistants throughout graduate school, so they developed a strong teaching identity. A common thread was that they all had partners in the same city by the time they finished graduate school; the men’s partners did not have doctorates but had “good jobs” and the women’s partners were also PhD scientists and/or also had “good jobs.” The most obvious defining characteristic of these “good jobs” were that they earned over US$100,000 and were considered professional jobs.

Data Collection

I was engaged in ethnographic fieldwork for 22 months. I spent full workdays with participants, while they were teaching, preparing lectures in their offices, walking around campus, having lunch, and meeting with colleagues, committees, and students. I spent at least 6 weeks observing each participant’s classes; at minimum, for each participant, I observed 12 classes with a duration of 90 minutes or 18 classes with a duration of 60 minutes (summarized in Table 2). My focus was on the teaching and gendered patterns across the participants. Often I observed their classes back-to-back at which the same topic was taught, which made similarities and differences between their teaching styles more evident. After class, I would ask the participant about my observations of patterns, although the participants also usually had quite a bit of commentary, as well as questions for me, about how the class went.

TABLE 2 Overview of Two Years of Ethnographic Fieldwork

Name/race	Fall 2017				Spring 2018				Fall 2018				Spring 2019
Dr. Welles/White				I				I	I
Dr. Mason/White				I					I
Dr. Wheelock/White				I								I
Dr. Winsor/White				I								I			I
Dr. Westover/White
Dr. Macintosh/White								I				I
Dean Mosley/White															I

Note. Blocks that are shaded indicate months spent in participant observation, and Is indicate when a formal interview, all approximately one hour, took place.

Because of my background, I helped out during office hours to answer students’ questions—there were usually about 20 students who attended any given office hour. Because I spent so much time with the participants at work, I was able to gather life history data during participant observation in my fieldnotes. As they became accustomed to having me around, they would ask my opinion about pedagogy and assessment. Depending on the context, I typed or jotted notes that I formed into fieldnotes in the evenings.

After 3 months, as indicated with I in Table 1, I began to interweave participant observation with audio-recorded interviews that were usually conducted in participants’ offices. During interviews, lines of questioning were unstructured. They varied by participant and over time because they were shaped by my interpretation of fieldnotes alongside reading of theory (Carspecken, 1996; Davis & Craven, 2016). I asked participants to explain aspects of my observations, reflect upon events in their classes or meetings, and give their opinion about institutional policies. General questions included how they felt about their salaries, what their future plans were, what they liked the most about their jobs, and how they felt about their colleagues. Dr. Mason, Dr. Macintosh, Dr. Welles, and Dr. Winsor were interviewed several times, to check and develop emergent themes (Ravitch & Carl, 2015). For example, after I developed an initial theme, I discussed it with Dr. Mason and Dr. Welles in separate interviews and their interpretations allowed for development of subthemes. I transcribed all interviews. A timeline of my time spent doing fieldwork and reflexive data collection is presented as Table 2.

Analysis

Analysis in critical ethnography is reflexive and iterative (Carspecken, 1996; Davis & Craven, 2016; Parson & Ozaki, 2018). Thus, analysis began when participant observation began, with low-level coding of fieldnotes at the end of each week. Codes indicated, for example, active learning, lecturing, hurrying, busy, time, science, dress, and so forth. Periodically, I grouped low-level codes into higher-level codes for inquiry through interviewing, which pointed to new avenues to explore in further participant observation (Carspecken, 1996). Examples of higher-level codes were family, scheduling, job satisfaction, femininity/masculinity, and teaching philosophy. Throughout rounds of participant observation and interviewing, codes were consolidated through analytic memos into themes about how gender shaped faculty members’ identities and interactions, which are detailed in the findings (Davis & Craven, 2016).

Researcher Positionality

My positionality in this study is as an insider-outsider. I am a White, middle-class person who identifies as genderqueer. I studied physical science as an undergraduate and began my PhD work in physical science. I dropped out due to a sense of not belonging in research, which I now attribute to the gender system. At the time, however, I thought there was something wrong with me. Instead, I became a high school physics and chemistry teacher. My personal politics are progressive, and my return to academia was precipitated by concerns about equity and access in science education. Our shared science background was a point of departure in my interactions with participants and my expertise in education was often solicited during ethnographic fieldwork.

Trustworthiness and Limitations

The study’s trustworthiness was ensured through design complexity, a form of validity that involves an iterative and recursive process and attention to the triangulation of data (Ravitch & Carl, 2015). Prolonged engagement in the field produced rich data that are characteristic of ethnography (Carspecken, 1996; Hammersley & Atkinson, 2007). I also engaged in consistency checking to clarify discrepancies between observations and interviews across participants (Carspecken, 1996). Checks were made to clarify how teaching assignments were created, how the format of examinations was decided upon, how offices were designated, and so forth. As Haraway (1988) theorized, researcher positionality cannot be disentangled from study design, rather “objectivity turns out to be about a particular and specific embodiment, and definitely not about the false vision promising transcendence … The moral is simple, only partial perspective promises objective vision” (p. 190).

Still, limitations characteristic of ethnography remained. Participants had varying free time and degrees of interest in my study. This meant that some perspectives are more developed and nuanced than others. For example, Dr. Westover did not have time to sit for a formal interview, so I could only check emergent themes with her during the time we got to talk during participant observation. Dr. Welles and Dr. Winsor, who both described themselves to me as feminists, took a particular interest in my findings and were very eager talk through developing themes. The men also agreed to several interviews and had ample time to elaborate on their perspectives during participant observation.

FINDINGS

This section connects the different, and inequitable, experiences for the women and the men on the teaching faculty to gender as a social system. I illustrate the analysis with excerpts from my fieldnotes and from interviews focusing on the three key themes shaping these experiences. They are effort at work, respect, and pay. The subsections contrast the experiences of women and men. Importantly, the women on the teaching faculty had varied approaches to teaching and their personal lives. Yet overall, the gender system had a disadvantaging influence on their occupational experiences. In contrast, their men peers experienced advantage due to gender.

A Woman’s Work Never Ends

Most women on the teaching faculty were the primary caregivers for children and households. When they were at work, they had very little downtime between teaching, holding office hours, and planning lectures and exams with their colleagues. They spent afternoons driving children to activities, doing errands, and cooking dinner for their families—a common topic of our small talk was trading ideas for meals that were healthy and quick. In the evenings, they caught up on e-mails and lesson planning. While they were not always at the university during working hours, it seemed they were usually doing work, in one form or another. For example, Dr. Wheelock was already at her desk when I arrived at 7:55 a.m. to spend the day with her in participant-observation. She remarked:

I always do a brain dump prior to my 9 a.m. class to remember all the things students might really need or get confused about. I’m getting so used to teaching and I worry about forgetting the little things. The TAs and I were up really late last night doing the test grades, so I want to make sure I don’t make mistakes due to lack of sleep. (Fieldnotes, fall 2017)

Dr. Wheelock had years of experience teaching IPS and had won a teaching award. Rather than being complacent, she was extremely conscientious. She came in early to prepare for her lecture despite also having worked late the night before grading that day’s test, so that students could have their results immediately. On top of that, she had two children and always went home to meet them after school. Another day, I ran into her around 5 p.m. and she said: “Oh hi! I got to stay late today because my husband was home sick and he could be there for the kids when they got off the bus!” (fieldnotes, spring 2018).

Dr. Wheelock’s peer, Dr. Westover had such a packed schedule that she literally had no time to sit for a formal interview with me. When she agreed to be part of the study, Dr. Westover welcomed me to do as much participant observation as I wanted, but she simply had no extra time to sit and talk for an interview. I could ask her questions, however, while we walked around campus together from class to meetings to office hours to her minivan.

Dr. Winsor, who had completed her PhD in the department a few years before, did not yet have children. She considered taking a job in the private sector after graduation, but decided to become teaching faculty to stay in the city for her husband’s work. She recalled: “About a month or two after I began this job I went to them. I said: I’m so bored I need another project. This cannot be my only job, I have all this extra time! So they gave me demonstrations⁴” (interview, fall 2017). Fresh out of graduate school, she did not know what to do with her free time. Rather than pursue hobbies or just have fun, Dr. Winsor requested extra work.

Men Can Say “I’m Done”

In contrast to the women, the men on the teaching faculty displayed a relaxed attitude toward work. Both were married to women who earned more than they did. Dr. Macintosh’s first child was born during the study, and Dr. Mason’s was in high school. Dr. Macintosh was among the newest teaching faculty and received quite a lot of support from his teaching teammates, Dr. Welles and Dr. Westover. The team taught on the same days of the week that semester. Despite his lack of experience, Dr. Macintosh’s attitude toward his work contrasted with Dr. Winsor’s. He said: “If you don’t want it to be, it’s not that hard of a job. But, I think a lot of the teachers have trouble not taking it home with them, but I’m just like whatever, I’m done” (interview, winter 2019). Similarly, Dr. Mason remarked:

I have ample free time. Even though I’m not a rich medical doctor, I have three friends who are rich medical doctors, so I go on their boats and get invited to their functions and play in golf tournaments with them. And they bitch about their horrible schedules and they ask me, “So when do you work?” And I say, “This semester Tuesdays and Thursdays,” and they say, “Well what do you do Monday, Wednesday, and Friday?” and I say, I stay at home and do whatever I want. (Interview, winter 2017)

Like Dr. Winsor, Dr. Mason had extra time. Rather than asking for more work, he pursued hobbies, such as playing golf and fishing.

Many of the women on the teaching faculty had higher-earning partners, and the unpaid care work they provided constituted a “second shift” (Hochschild & Machung, 2012). While the men also had higher-earning partners, they neither felt pressure to rush home and catch up on paid work in the evening nor were overwhelmed by care work.

Women Must Struggle for Respect

Despite her accomplishments, which included winning a teaching award and contributing to curriculum development projects, Dr. Welles felt disrespected:

I’m at the point in my life where I have really good ideas and I have the skills to follow through and implement them. But, I also have no authority and really get no respect from some people. I’m not heard and it’s frustrating. (Interview, winter 2018)

Dr. Welles was confident in her abilities and skills, but felt they were unacknowledged. In addition, she sensed her lower authority, meaning “some people,” those with institutional power, did not respect her.

A series of events during the second semester of my fieldwork gives nuance to the lack of respect women experienced from the institution. Dr. Westover had a slightly different teaching assignment than most of her colleagues’ two large sections of IPS. Dr. Westover taught one section of IPS and two sections of Learning Peers. Learning Peers had about 30 undergraduates per section and was the course to support their activities as junior teaching assistants for IPS. During their class meetings, Dr. Westover taught pedagogical content knowledge, basically reviewing the science content and practicing how to teach it. Then they attended her colleagues’ classes and helped IPS students. While it kept her very busy, Dr. Westover derived enjoyment from leading Learning Peers and took pride in the work. From my perspective as an educational researcher, the program was a highlight of the department. I even observed a phone meeting that Dr. Westover held with faculty at another institution interested in creating a similar program.

In the middle of the semester, Dr. Westover mentioned that she needed to save Learning Peers’ budget from being cut. To do this, Dr. Westover had to convince the department chair that the program was necessary, which made her very uncomfortable. The day of the meeting with the chair, she styled her hair and was dressed up more than her usual jeans and ponytail. I sat with her to practice her presentation. As she went through the slides, her voice quivered. She lamented that she had to squeeze this meeting in during her limited time on campus, which leaves less time to get her “real work” of interacting with students done (fieldnotes, spring 2018). Having to argue for her program to a powerful man forced Dr. Westover to perform a role she did not feel comfortable in. Her anxiety contrasted with the confidence and happiness she projected while teaching, even hundreds of students at once.

Dr. Winsor also perceived how other women on the teaching faculty were not respected and tried to prevent that from happening to her:

I really believe that you are going to be judged by the way you present yourself, especially as a woman … A lot of my colleagues will roll in wearing jeans and a t-shirt with, like, a scrunchie in their hair—no judgment on that whatsoever, except for the fact that you dress for the job that you want and you walk in a certain way. I walked in from the first day basically demanding respect. (Interview, winter 2017)

Dr. Winsor explained that women are judged on their appearance, and she thus tried especially hard to gain respect both by dressing and behaving in another way. She differentiated herself from other women on the teaching faculty by dressing nearly every day in high heels and a pencil skirt. Yet, this required putting a great deal of effort into her appearance.

For Men, Respect Comes Easy

Men on the teaching faculty dressed in jeans, but they did not have to demand respect. Dr. Mason, who was the longest-serving member of the teaching faculty with 25 years, remarked:

There are certain tenured faculty who know me and have worked with me. They realize I actually know a lot about how to teach … For the most part, the right people respect me and those are the ones in a position to keep me here. (Interview, winter 2017)

In Dr. Mason’s view, he knew the people who hold power. He focused on his central responsibility, teaching, instead of external factors like the women. Dr. Macintosh also remarked on his connection to men on the research faculty:

As a teaching faculty, I feel like I don’t have much political power in the first place. But, my PhD advisor was [Professor Internationally Famous], and so that helps a little bit … Like, it forces the research faculty to be a little bit nice to me. (Interview, winter 2019)

While Dr. Macintosh felt his lowered status as a teaching faculty, he was boosted by his relationship with his PhD advisor. The men on the teaching faculty sensed they gained respect due to recognition from more-powerful men.

Women Are in a Salary Double Bind

Teaching faculty’s salaries were not reflective of their commitment or experiences but seemed to follow gendered patterns. Drs. Wheelock, Westover, and Winthrop had all been faculty members for around 15 years and were making less than $50,000 annually. This was slightly higher than $45,000, which Associate Dean Mosely reported new hires were making. Moreover, it was low pay relative to their level of education and sector. For example, the average annual salary of tenure-line assistant professors at doctoral institutions in that region was $93,740 (Colby, 2022). I asked Associate Dean Mosely about women’s compensation in an interview, and he remarked:

Frankly, the teaching faculty get taken advantage of because they just contribute … coming up with all this new inventive stuff, serving on this committee, and volunteering for that, and so on. But what has never caught up is any kind of compensation. (Interview, spring 2019)

Dr. Winsor was aware of women’s reputation for not negotiating their salaries, and aware that men, in contrast, are known for negotiating. To challenge this expectation, she negotiated and succeeded in getting more pay; in the 3 years since she started, she had raised her salary from $45,000 to about $60,000.

The process of negotiation, however, meant that Dr. Winsor had “to push really hard and it burns bridges. I tell all of them too, like straight to their face: I am going to negotiate like a man” (interview, winter 2018). But “burning bridges” meant there were negative consequences on her relationships, such as the department becoming “less and less happy” with her and subjecting her to “bullshit and politics” (interview, winter 2018). For example, her suggestion to reconfigure her teaching schedule so she could travel more for her science demonstrations was accommodated by giving her the 8 a.m. section on Tuesdays/Thursdays (fieldnotes, spring 2019). This time was unpopular with students, so it meant her classes were no longer the first to fill. For participants in this study, these salary data illustrate how women are subject to a double bind: No negotiation leads to economic exploitation, and negotiation leads to other negative consequences.

Men Are Too Cheap to Fire and Getting “Overload”

The salary double bind did not extend to men. Dr. Mason had been on the teaching faculty much longer than Dr. Macintosh. He was paid $70,000 per year and felt that was a bargain price:

I see how dependent they are on the teaching faculty because they need the manpower [sic] and we’re too cheap to fire. It costs them a lot of money to have a professor teaching IPS and it costs them way less, three times less, to have me teach it. (Interview, winter 2017)

A characterization of majority-women teaching faculty as “manpower,” coupled with Dr. Mason’s perception that he is “too cheap to fire” is ironic. This irony is due to Dr. Mason’s being paid quite a bit more than most of the women on the teaching faculty, despite his laissez-faire attitude toward the work.

Dr. Macintosh, the newest hire, was paid $45,000, not much less than several of his more-experienced women colleagues. Moreover, his salary increased when he was preferentially given an overloaded teaching schedule. As I recorded in my fieldnotes, toward the end of a teaching team meeting to plan the final exam, Dr. Westover, Dr. Welles, and Dr. Macintosh were chatting about wrapping up the semester and the coming summer. Dr. Macintosh mentioned that he had gotten an “overload,” then explained, mostly for my benefit, that the work involved running an online course for high school students that could be prepared in advance during the summer, with minimal work during the busier fall semester. That was great for him, because his baby was due in early September. The “overload” came with additional pay. Later, I walked with Dr. Welles back to her office, and she was angry. She remarked that the opportunity was not offered to all teaching faculty even though she could think of several others, such as Dr. Westover and Dr. Wheelock, who may have been interested in it (fieldnotes, spring 2018).

Overload was desirable to other teaching faculty, but it was given to Dr. Macintosh when he was about to become a father. When I asked Associate Dean Mosely what the criteria were for assigning overload, he said that “we have teaching faculty who would like to teach more but we don’t let them and they’re like, I would be happy to teach another class if you paid me more.” I followed up by asking about how he made decisions about overload and he obfuscated with “right, you have to, uh, … there’s a whole piece of, um … that’s a complicated question” (interview, spring 2019). Dr. Macintosh needed extensive support from his colleagues to teach his normal load, and was also going to have more significant domestic responsibilities with a new baby at home. Yet, he was given additional work that would make it more challenging to become proficient at teaching and to do care work at home.

Pay, Respect, and Effort: Gendered (Dis)advantage

The themes explored separately above are also entangled. When they came together, the men received even greater advantage and women were further disadvantaged. I illustrate how this happens with two examples.

Iced Out as a Woman and Feeling Like Less Than a Person

Dr. Welles had become excited for an opportunity to develop and teach a new course that was not central to the department but would have an external source of state funding. She felt qualified and wanted a challenge. She expressed her desire to lead it to Associate Dean Mosley. Toward the end of the second semester, the course was assigned to a man on the research faculty who had “given up” his research group and served a term as a university-level dean. She described this as being “iced out ” after she wanted to work on a new project or initiative, had contributed to early phases, and then was told she would not be the leader or be involved anymore. She told me that similar things had happened in the past, Yet, it still left her confused, because she considered Associate Dean Mosely a “friend.” She recalled that she complained to him, and he told her that she should worry less about work—she had a husband to “make the big bucks.” I asked her how that remark made her feel. She was silent for a moment, then said. “It made me feel like less than a person” (fieldnotes, spring 2018).

Crossing the line between friend and colleague, Associate Dean Mosely jokingly remarked that she can just rely on her husband’s income. This weaponized their social tie and positioned her more as an upper-class wife who volunteers and less as someone who belongs in paid work, thereby diminishing her personhood.

Included as a Man and Feeling Lifted

In contrast to Dr. Welles, Dr. Macintosh was not told that his wife should “make the big bucks.” On the contrary, he was given more work while his domestic obligations were increasing. He described sensing social forces lifting him above the non–tenure track:

When I meet with Dr. Welles, Dr. Westover, and Dr. Winsor, I realize I’m the only man there. It’s true women are doing most of the teaching at the university and then all the research faculty are men. I wouldn’t say there’s an outward message that I should be doing more, but sometimes I wonder if there is. (Interview, winter 2019)

Recognizing he is a gender minority among the teaching faculty, Dr. Macintosh also mischaracterizes the research faculty as comprising men entirely. At the time, there were five women on the research faculty and 25 men. These disproportions give Dr. Macintosh a feeling that he does not really belong on the teaching faculty. The message that he should be doing something with higher prestige is vague but perceptible.

This analysis suggests that men and women on the physical science teaching faculty have opposite experiences in several ways. The women put in appreciable effort and achieve notable results in their teaching. Yet, they are relatively disadvantaged, lacking respect and recognition. At the same time, their men peers are respected and recognized. The men’s privilege does not appear tied to superior job performance.

DISCUSSION

The findings demonstrate how the gender system (Ridgeway & Correll, 2004; Risman, 2004) influences the non–tenure-line teaching faculty by producing relative disadvantage for women and advantage for men. These faculty, both men and women, are working in a hierarchy wherein their status, by definition, is lower than those on the research faculty. The predominance of women in non–tenure-line positions should be sufficient cause for social-justice concerns. But the inequality produced by the gender system goes further.

Gender System Disadvantages Women on the Teaching Faculty

The gender system disadvantages women on the teaching faculty by denying basic facets of an equitable work environment. When they seek higher pay, more respect, or a challenging new responsibility, they are pushed back. Some women were understated, not drawing attention to themselves. Others spoke up and leaned in (Riegle-Crumb et al., 2022). Despite different approaches, these women, whose adept teaching and professional manner I observed repeatedly during nearly 2 years of fieldwork, were disadvantaged. The conceptual metaphor glass obstacle course (De Welde & Laursen, 2011) is apt because the barriers women faced were usually unpredictable, unanticipated, and invisible.

Women on the teaching faculty are doing feminized work in a masculine-dominated field. Women are expected to be teachers but are not as readily recognized as scientists (Acker, 1990; C. L. Williams, 1995). Teaching has lower status, and therefore the disadvantage as women is magnified. They are marginalized into the role of teachers and caregivers. As teachers, they interact mainly with young people, and their responsibility is to socialize them into ways of knowing and being in science. Precisely because the role is constructed as flexible work, they are expected to be responsible for domestic labor at home (Doerr, 2022). Thus, their marginalization manifests at all levels of the gender system.

Individually, their identities as educators evolve while their science identities atrophy; interactionally, stereotypes about women desiring flexibility and having husbands to support them are perpetuated while expectations that they should have fulfilling careers are stunted. Institutionally, rules and norms preserve the gendered division of labor. For example, Dr. Welles had the expertise to develop and teach a new course, as evidenced by the appropriation of her curriculum, but she was not given the opportunity. The institutional response to her dissatisfaction was a patronizing message that she should not be financially independent because she has a husband to rely on. Stereotypes about domesticity are a cultural aspect of gendered interactions that reifies ideal worker norms and power hierarchies (Lester et al., 2017; Thébaud & Taylor, 2021). Career inertia strengthens the cultural belief that women belong in these lower-status positions, and this acts as rules for coordinating public behavior (Ridgeway, 2009).

Gender System Advantages Men on the Teaching Faculty

If I had conducted a study of only women on the teaching faculty, I might not have been able to challenge this cultural belief; since teaching has low status, and women appear to like doing it, their lower status is incidental. But the men on the teaching faculty have a very different experience. In the context of feminized work in a masculine discipline, they construct themselves as sort of anti-ideal workers (Thébaud & Pedulla, 2016), iconoclasts whose status is not threatened by a cavalier attitude to their work. They appear to be on a glass escalator, a metaphor capturing how social forces come together to advantage men in feminized professions such as teaching (C. L. Williams, 1992). The glass escalator works to fulfil the gender system’s cultural expectations for men to be elevated out of feminized work.

Men on the teaching faculty are more recognizable as physical scientists, less so as teachers (Britton, 2017; Hirshfield, 2017). Science affords high status, so their privilege was magnified. Men’s advantages also satisfy the gender system. Individually, their identities as research scientists are maintained due to the men’s overrepresentation as research faculty; interactionally, their access to the social network of powerful men feeds an expectation that they should not be considered ordinary teachers; and institutionally resources are distributed in their favor based on cultural logics around men’s privileged position in paid work, such as the fatherhood earnings advantage (Hodges & Budig, 2010).

For instance, men cite their social ties to other men (Pifer, 2018) to explain how they are respected and advantaged by the gender system that simultaneously disadvantages women. Insofar as Dr. Mason thought that his teaching experience had earned him respect from the right people, Dr. Welles shares this attribute yet was disrespected. Insofar as Dr. Macintosh thought his recent time as a PhD student and special relationship with a well-known person entitled him to some respect, Dr. Winsor had been a PhD student in the department even more recently, yet she had to demand respect. Despite the men on the teaching faculty thinking that their professional proficiency earned them respect, the women in this study had a different experience: Men’s knowledge or connections garner respect, but this does not happen for the women.

Chutes and Ladders

Considering that the gender system’s advantaging of men and disadvantaging of women is intertwined, I suggest thinking of the non–tenure line faculty in this study as operating as in a game of Chutes and Ladders. In its simple format as a children’s counting game, it is just a game of chance. Land on a ladder, skip to a higher level. Land on a chute and slide back. The teaching faculty’s work could be conceptualized as Chutes and Ladders—but rigged in favor of men and against women. The faculty may all be starting at the same place, but only men are allowed to climb the ladders. A woman must plod along, getting no special boost just due to identity—in this case, the luck of being a man. When they land on chutes, it is the reverse. Women do not have a choice, they have to slide back down. Some may progress a little further or encounter a shorter chute, but over time the women have all slid down chutes and this has impeded their progress. It does not matter how long they play or even if now and then they break the rules and jump on a ladder – due to their gender, the chutes bring them down relative to the men.

I suggest that being on the teaching faculty is like playing Chutes and Ladders because of the gendering of teaching, the gendering of science, and the ways that difference or belonging are magnified where they intersect. These teaching faculty are all White, which reflects the institutional racism found in primarily White universities in the United States (Breeden, 2021; Rideau, 2021). Their shared White privilege operates as a baseline so that inequality due to gender is especially evident. Using the same metaphor, Cardel et al. (2020) conceptualize chutes as the structures that drive women out of academia, such as recruitment bias, lack of mentoring, and chilly climates. They suggest that disadvantage due to chutes may be mitigated by ladders, which are policy solutions such as scripted interviews, mentor networks, and family-friendly cultures. My study alters the metaphor by including men in the game. I use empirical evidence to explain how and why women are more frequently disadvantaged by chutes. I also modify the concept by gendering the ladders; if they are overlaid onto existing institutional hierarchies, they likely will preferentially advantage men.

In addition, this study adds to the literature on non–tenure-line faculty because it suggests that their experiences are indeed gendered. Alleman and Haviland (2017) showed that these faculty also were given limited respect, but it was undifferentiated by gender. Hart (2011) argued that non–tenure-line faculty experienced gendered disadvantage due to the disproportion of women in these positions, but respondents did not specifically call out gender as a reason for their marginalization with closed or revolving doors. I have examined only the experiences of science faculty, in a discipline that has been shown to have a masculine culture (Hirshfield, 2017). Ethnography examined their everyday experiences over time and provided empirical evidence that both women and men explained marginalization as due to gender.

IMPLICATIONS AND RECOMMENDATIONS

Although these findings tie to specific instances of interaction, there are implications for how those with power in academic science conceptualize their agency. White men at all levels should better acknowledge that service works fall disproportionately to women and other underrepresented social categories in physical science and find ways to share it as well as give formal credit for academic housekeeping tasks (Herzig & Subramaniam, 2021). Administrators must recognize their culpability in making decisions based on implicit bias in university structure. Offering equitable pay and advancement opportunities to all teaching faculty and facilitating conversations between faculty levels will establish the importance of teaching faculty’s work (Utoft, 2020). Institutions should reconsider employment tracking; if tracks do exist, institutions should reconsider how to value teaching and research as mutually constitutive. Such multileveled interventions are needed to disrupt the chutes that marginalize women and combat structural gender inequity (Peter et al., 2020).

By conceptualizing gender as a social system, I have tried to “disentangle the ‘how’ questions without presuming that there is one right answer, for all places, times, and contexts” (Risman, 2004, p. 441). This study closely examined the experiences of non–tenure-line teaching faculty in one science department, and there are attendant limitations. These faculty all benefit from racial privilege. There were no underrepresented racial or ethnic minorities among the entire teaching faculty. Of course, while their Whiteness is unmarked, it is not absent. Rather, the teaching faculty are operating as relatively privileged members of a wider university community that relies on the even more exploited labor of support staff, who are often racially minoritized (Russo-Tait, 2022; Vaccaro, 2011). Even within the teaching faculty, the absence of non-White men limits the extent to which I can claim that men are privileged, and the absence of non-White women limits the extent of marginalization I have witnessed and theorized about. Additional research will nuance my analysis and explore its transferability to other contexts.

For instance, a less in-depth, but broader, qualitative interview study of science teaching faculty would allow for purposive sampling of faculty of color; although they could be tokens in their own departments, looking across departments might afford a comparison of their experiences. Relatedly, other research might examine the chutes and ladders among teaching faculty in other disciplines, which will help us to better understand to what extent this marginalization is due to gender in organizations and how much is due to gender in science. Furthermore, the student body is more diverse than the faculty. It is important to carry out research on how students perceive the effects of women’s marginalization in their disciplines. This line of inquiry can improve understanding of how the gender system reproduces its effects across generations of academics. In conclusion, this study explored how the gender system influenced the careers of non–tenure-line teaching faculty and found that it marginalizes women and privileges men. Through ethnography in a physical science department at a research-intensive public university in the United States, I show how gender does matter, which nuances previous studies of non–tenure-line faculty that lack clarity on how the gender system shapes their experiences. This is a strength of the methodology. The gendered experience of non–tenure-line science faculty is like a game of chutes and ladders: Women are hampered by chutes while men are lifted by ladders. There are few, if any, studies, that document these phenomena in a similar sample of non–tenure-line faculty, and I suggest that it is the setting in science that brings it out so clearly.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

¹ I use the term physical science in this article to blur the specific discipline and protect participants’ confidentiality. The U.S. National Science Foundation classifies physical science as chemistry, physics, astronomy, and material science.

² I recognize gender as a fluid social construct. For the purposes of this study, however, gender might be understood as binary, as all participants identified as women or men.

³ The term non–tenure line is used interchangeably with non–tenure track in this article, aligning with terminology in the cited literature.

⁴ Demonstrations of science, such as chemical reactions. These are provided to show how the science explained in lecture or a book happens in real life.