UM-Rolla ranks last in male-to-female tenured professor ratio

Tenure is awarded to faculty members after teaching for six years.

By Jaryd Wilson

Published Feb. 20, 2007

A campus in the UM system is failing in diversity among its tenured professors.

UM-Rolla has the lowest proportion of female-to-male tenured professors of any higher education institution, according to a study published by the American Association for University Professors.

Tenure is awarded to faculty members after they have taught for six years, according to the UMR Office of the Provost. The study showed only 7.6 percent of tenured professors at UMR are female.

To address this issue, UMR Chancellor John Carney created the Female, Underrepresented and Minority Faculty Recruiting and Retention Task Force and appointed UMR Provost Warren Wray to lead the task force.

Wray said the task force has identified several problems that might be associated with the results.

But Wray said UMR can do little about the fact that more men tend to go into technical fields, and UMR is a technology and engineering school.

"In an ideal world, we'd have as many women going into technical fields as we have men," Wray said. "But I don't see that happening anytime in the near future."

Another problem being addressed by the task force is the problem of retaining female professors.

Wray said possible options to fix this would be to provide on-campus childcare so women don't have to resort to the expensive childcare in the area.

Another problem is that some women leave because there aren't enough women around them.

The task force is also exploring the option of having a tenure forgiveness plan.

"For women who want to start families, they would be allowed to take time off without losing standing in their tenure track," Wray said.

Although the issue is not as drastic at MU, nearly three-fourths of the tenured professors here are male.

MU recently received a $500,000 grant from the National Science Foundation, according to Vice Chancellor for Research James Coleman.

"The grant was given to look at issues concerning female faculty in the sciences," Coleman stated in an e-mail. "The issue was so important to my office that we provided significant matching funds and support to this grant effort."

Coleman said the National Science Foundation provides funding for activities similar to the task force because it is a national issue.

The study done by American Association for University Professors revealed the national average of female-tenured professors at a higher education institution to be 31 percent.

MU falls just below the average with females making up 26.5 percent of tenured professors.

Another issue raised by the UMR task force is salary.

The American Association for University Professors reported females at UMR make 84.9 percent of what men make. But that number is higher than MU, which pays women 83.5 percent of what it pays men.

Tenure is decreasing nationally, according to the American Association for University Professors.

It was reported that between 1995 and 2003, the number of tenured professors at higher-level institutions decreased by more than 2,000 despite a 26 percent increase in faculty members within those institutions.

MU and UMR were two of six Missouri institutions in the study. Others included UM-St. Louis, UM-Kansas City, Washington University in St. Louis and Saint Louis University.