Ask A Senior Woman Philosopher: Advice for New Faculty Leaders

I’m a new administrator and I’m interested in developing and advocating for inclusive policies to better support junior women in the discipline of Philosophy. How can I mentor and support strong women in leadership positions, both at the department and college levels? How can I contribute to a healthy, non-toxic intellectual environment? How might I ensure that work is equitably distributed, and women are able to contribute in meaningful ways?

Many faculty members have excellent ideas about how to improve the quality of academic life in their respective units, colleges, or universities. Unfortunately, they often find themselves isolated—either by department or college—with very little contact at the administrative level with colleagues across the campus. My role as director of Women’s and Gender Studies allowed me to see how the experience of being jointly appointed differs greatly depending on the support one receives from the “other” unit. My current position as Associate Dean of Faculties provides me with a unique opportunity to hear how department heads and other college administrators across the university devise and implement policies, procedures, and programs to ensure that faculty are (and feel) supported. Many universities, including my own are aware that specific steps need to be taken to recruit for DEI.  But fewer institutions understand the challenges related to retaining women and historically underrepresented minorities. What happens once these faculty members have been hired? What steps can be taken to ensure that these new hires are retained? How might a department/institution implement policies and create a climate such that women are not only retained, but also flourish in your institution? Below are some recommendations for addressing these questions depending on the administrative role one holds, beginning with a summary of the issues that administrators in each role are likely to face.

Associate deans

One of the most important jobs of an associate dean is to be aware of the climate of the departments, of the college, and of the university. This awareness depends on consulting widely with colleagues across disciplinary boundaries, fielding complaints about departments, reviewing the processes for faculty evaluation, paying attention to how faculty members in departments are nominated for promotions and awards, and how departments recognize and promote diversity (including intellectual diversity). For example, associate deans can contribute to gender equity efforts by guiding departments to consider how to become more family-friendly. Training department leadership in diversity, equity, and inclusion efforts, establishing reasonable, equitable norms, cultivating strong leaders who identify as women, and finding places to relocate faculty should be central focal points for associate deans.

My specific advice to associate deans:

1. Although this piece of advice is institution specific, I generally advise against putting associate professors in the position of chair or head (Here is an alternative view). Nonetheless, deans and associate deans should encourage departments to have a plan for succession, train associate chairs, and promote faculty with an eye toward developing them for future leadership positions.
   • For some institutions, it is natural and normal for an associate professor to assume this leadership position. For these institutions, the faculty member in this position might not be placed at a professional or personal disadvantage. In these cases, my advice to the associate deans is to be mindful nonetheless of the time involved in being a chair, and to consider what support systems could be put in place for especially women who assume these leadership positions. Have a plan for supporting the faculty member to successfully be promoted to full professor.
   • For other institutions, I believe that the department and the person in the role of chair are placed at a disadvantage if the chair is an associate professor. Here are my reasons for this view. First, the faculty member’s goal should be working toward the next promotion and a chair/head position will significantly impede that progress. Second, one role as head/chair is to mentor faculty toward their next promotion and to mentor faculty who are full professors. This role will be difficult if they have not moved through the second promotion. Finally, they are placed in a vulnerable and potentially compromised position. Since the faculty member needs the support of the faculty and the dean for the next promotion, they may find themselves unable to speak up and/or make difficult decisions.
2. Create a culture of recognition in the college. Provide guidance and support for departments to generate their own culture of awards. Where possible promote recognition for women, especially those who are working in non-traditional areas of their disciplines. Awards do not have to include large monetary allowances. For institutions where resources are scarce, the recognition (e.g., Liberal Arts Professor or a college-level teaching award) can often be sufficient.
3. Provide guidance for annual evaluations and criteria for promotion and tenure that recognizes and values non-traditional scholarly activity.
4. Establish procedures for moving faculty positions, either because of intellectual growth and/or a hostile environment in the department. Be proactive and help facilitate the move, offering an incentive and a good faith promise to the receiving unit that this will not count as their new hire.
5. Develop avenues for women faculty to move into leadership positions.
6. Provide good leadership training for new department chairs and heads around areas of equity, inclusion, and diversity efforts. Do not put them in their jobs and then ignore them.
7. Assign a mentor to new department heads; e.g., an effective department head from another unit—and ideally from another college, or at smaller institutions, another division. New approaches are often helpful.
8. Be mindful when constructing the college promotion/tenure/merit committees, if these committees are appointed and not elected. Consider the diversity of the committee. Provide DEI training for anyone reading and evaluating these dossiers, but especially for the college level committee members.
9. Be mindful of the college service roles that junior faculty are being asked to fulfill. Is there a senior faculty member who can step in? Are there resources to compensate women faculty (junior or senior) who are asked to serve on multiple committees e.g., a course reduction or a travel/research bursary?
10. If you have jointly appointed faculty, have clear and reasonable guidelines and processes for evaluation—from annual evaluation to promotion and/or tenure. Ensure that jointly appointed faculty have an optional exit from the joint appointment.
11. Take steps to remediate problems that emerge in department chair leadership.

Department Chairs/Heads

Other feminist philosophers make the case on this blog for how philosophers can make a positive impact as chairs. I have four general areas in which I think chairs can support women in the field: department structure, faculty recognition, faculty evaluation, and mentoring.

Department structure

Chairs should evaluate the family-friendliness of their departments (e.g., times/days for faculty meetings and department colloquia). Department chairs should consider how service is assigned to faculty, both in terms of whether faculty have choice and whether service roles rotate to encourage sharing both the sought-after work and the drudgery across the faculty. Department chairs can foreground the effort to achieve diverse representation on committees that make decisions about merit and awards as well as diversity in the curriculum. They should be mindful of workload, especially the “invisible” workload. There should be a transparent distribution of workload (including a reasonable threshold for advising students). Finally, chairs should attend to the social dynamics of the department, including whether there are informal avenues for conducting department business that exclude women. Practice robust shared governance. If you have an elected executive committee that is intended to represent respective constituencies in the department, do not assume the members of the EC are consulting with the faculty. When possible, engage the larger faculty, not only the EC, in discussions and decision-making.

Faculty recognition

Department chairs/heads should determine if there is already an ethos of recognition and awards. Internal and external awards can be significant for both individual faculty members and the department generally. If there is not already an awards culture in the department, work on developing one. If there is, review the processes and procedures for nominations and the composition of the awards committee; e.g., whether the committee has diverse representation, in terms of gender and other historically marginalized groups, including different intellectual traditions in philosophy. The chair might foster conversations among committee members about how it avoids engaging in favoritism, which places women faculty who are not friends with or otherwise connected to committee members at a disadvantage. Awards committees might also consider whether and how to recognize and promote/frame non-traditional scholarly activity; e.g., public-facing work, interdisciplinary work, and so forth, that is often not published in traditional venues.

Faculty evaluation

Faculty evaluation is a key site in departments where implicit bias and structural discrimination emerges. Department chairs/heads should reflect on the process of faculty evaluation, both the tenure process and annual reviews. Department chairs should foster conversations about how non-“mainstream” journals count and whether and why mainstream journals are given heavier weight, as well as whether the department has a “journal fetish” wherein journal articles count more than book chapters, even if the chapters are peer-reviewed. Similarly, ways of evaluating teaching beyond student course evaluations, which are often biased against women, should be included. Finally, chairs should be asking the department to consider how evaluating service will include the often-invisible service of women and other members of historically marginalized groups. Chairs also need to be vigilant that these faculty are not over-serviced. Departments might consider whether they have different criteria for evaluating faculty at different stages of their career.

Mentoring

Finally, chairs/heads should ensure that their departments have a mentoring program with a thoughtful process for assigning mentors to faculty members. In some departments, faculty members have more than one mentor. It should be clear what the purpose for each mentor is (scholarship, teaching), and that the mentor is clearly aware of their specific role, which they should have some training to fulfill. If mentors do not speak for the department in a formal way, faculty members should know when they need to listen to the mentor as a directive and when the advice might be ignored, especially if the mentoring advice runs contrary to department guidelines.  Be mindful that associate professors also often need mentoring and support in order to move to the next promotion.

My specific advice to department/unit heads and chairs:

1. Establish a robust but meaningful mentoring program for all faculty, not only the assistant professors. Be intentional. Communicate the aim of the program to the mentors and the mentees. For internal mentors, communicate the mentor’s and mentee’s responsibilities to everyone involved. Be clear if the mentor is speaking for the department. If you have the available funds, develop a program that connects an external senior scholar to a junior woman who works in the same or related subfield (in person or remotely).  
2. Allow junior women to select committee service that is meaningful to them. Do not assume they should be on the climate, inclusion, diversity committee.
3. Review the criteria for awards at your institution. Consider how you can help support female faculty who might work at the margins of “traditional” scholarship.
4. If able, encourage course/peer observations to supplement course evaluations. Keep these on file to strengthen a faculty member’s nomination for a teaching award.
5. Ask faculty to indicate on their annual reviews for what awards they’d like to be nominated: teaching awards, research awards, internal awards, external awards; consider having faculty write draft nomination letters for the awards for which they wish to be nominated. These drafts help the dept. evaluate if the faculty member is competitive for the award and it provides the narrative, since faculty know their own work and impact often better than their colleagues do.
6. Working with members of the department, develop and communicate clear guidelines for evaluation at all levels: annual review, midterm review, promotion and/or tenure review. Acknowledge how the different levels of evaluation are connected. If a faculty member has five positive annual evaluations and then does not receive tenure, there is a communication/evaluation problem somewhere. Do the guidelines evaluate interdisciplinary and/or non-traditional scholarly/creative activities? How is teaching evaluated? Service and typically invisible labor?
7. Be mindful of and attentive to the unique position of women and faculty of color to advise and mentor students. Set reasonable limits for the number of advisees and recognize in the annual/merit evaluation when faculty are exceeding these limits, especially if the demographics of the department necessitate this uneven distribution.
8. At institutions where research plays a primary role in the evaluation, ensure that the expectations are not ridiculous, designed for the 15^th century monk or the stereotypical 1950s white male who could focus all their attention on their research. Seriously. More articles, more books, more whatever is not necessarily better, nor does it mean work has an impact. It most likely means that your faculty members are exhausted and/or sacrificing large parts of their life. Neither is healthy for anyone.
9. Acknowledge the different stages of a career, especially since women often decide to have/adopt children after receiving tenure. Evaluate different stages differently, recognizing that both research and service changes quantitatively and qualitatively.

Committee Chairs

Committee chairs should be intentionally thinking about issues of diversity and inclusion, including awareness of the demographics of the committee and how the labor for the committee work is distributed. Attention should be paid to the dynamics of the committee. For example, consider if junior women and women of color speak up, offer contributions, and have their contributions taken seriously.

My specific advice to committee chairs is:

1. Send a detailed agenda far enough in advance for committee members to consider the items on the agenda and be prepared to speak.
2. Ensure that whatever assignments are distributed to committee members are distributed equitably.
3. Listen if a faculty member tells you she is uncomfortable with someone on the committee.
4. As much as possible, create an ethos where all committee members, but especially women, feel free to speak up.
5. Send a thank you note to the faculty member and/or the member’s department chair at the end of each academic year. The note should include details about the service—e.g, the kind of work, frequency of meetings, and so forth. These notes are useful for annual reviews, promotion dossiers, and awards nominations.

The Women in Philosophy series is running a mini-series called “Ask a Senior Woman Philosopher.” The first installment was posted in August 2018, the second in December 2018, the third in January 2019, the fourth in July 2019, the fifth in January 2020, and the sixth in March 2021. If you have a question for which you would like advice from a senior woman philosopher but don’t have someone to ask or don’t feel like you can ask the senior women philosophers you know, send your question to the series editor.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott.

Claire Elise Katz

Claire Katz is Professor and Interim Department Head of Teaching, Learning, and Culture in the School of Education and Human Development at Texas A &M University, where she holds the title Presidential Professor for Teaching Excellence. She teaches and conducts research in two primary areas: (1) the intersection of philosophy, gender, education, and religion and (2) K-12 philosophy.