Equal but Inequitable: Who Benefits from Gender-Neutral Tenure Clock Stopping Policies with Kelly Bedard

In many highly educated professions, we see a pattern in which the number of female workers drops off over time, as does the share of women in the top earners cohort. Many of these professional tracks have an “up-or-out” quality, like making partner at a law firm or earning tenure at a university. This phenomenon is consistent with women entering lower-income fields or leaving them altogether: what mechanism might explain this effect, and what other implications might this pattern have? The final WAPPP seminar of the semester featured Kelly Bedard, Department Chair and Professor of Economics at the University of California, Santa Barbara, describing the results of a study on tenure clock-stopping policies in major university economics departments.

Over the last few decades, many universities have instituted “clock-stopping policies” for tenure. If a young academic has a child before receiving tenure, they may have an extra year before their tenure evaluation – rather than the usual six years to tenure, a new parent could have seven years of work evaluated, with their tenure clock stopped for one year.  Having children is a productivity shock that, though these policies, is taken into account in gauging lifetime productivity.

These clock-stopping policies come in two-flavors: in early iterations, only women were eligible for clock-stopping; more recent policies are gender neutral, such that anyone who has a child can stop their clock. Some universities started with a female-only policy and then switched to gender-neutral. Professor Bedard’s research asks: what are the distributional consequences of these policies? How might these policies change the way people think about publishing and fertility strategies?

The simple story would be to consider two individuals, Person A and Person B, going up for tenure. Person A, a woman, has a child, stops her clock, and does no research for a year. Person B, a man, has a child, stops his clock, but does not change anything about his productivity during that year. Under a gender-neutral clock-stopping policy, Person A was not hurt in her tenure evaluation—her productivity was the same in the other years, even with a year of no research. This is precisely what the policy was designed to do, to ensure that faculty who take parental leave are not harmed in their tenure evaluations by their decision to do so. Person B, however, benefited from the policy, with an additional year to write papers that might factor into his tenure decision. Other faculty who did not have children and did not stop their clocks would be just as unaffected as Person A. This benefit to Person B, while the policy is net neutral for everyone else, is something of an odd result – this is not what the policy was designed to do.

If tenure decisions are imperfect – that is, not made strictly on the basis of the six-year timeline, excluding any time in which the clock was stopped – Person B is now pushing up the bar for tenure with his additional year of productivity. Person B will still be able to achieve tenure, but Person A and anyone who has not had a child will have a more difficult time getting over that threshold. This gender-neutral clock-stopping policy therefore has the possibility for some odd distributional consequences, which may be compounded by the additional productivity costs of being pregnant or departmental variation in teaching relief or other parental leave policies.

In addition to tenure decisions, these policies may also affect publishing decisions. Economists tend to focus on the top five journals, which each have a long lag in time to publication. These journals have a low likelihood of acceptance, but a high return if one’s article is published. Lower-ranked journals have a higher likelihood, but a lower return. Clock stopping adds an additional time period to this publishing game – with only one time period, a researcher might decide to send a manuscript to a lower-ranked journal for the added likelihood of publication. Without a top-five journal article, they may not receive tenure at their current institution, but likely will somewhere else. With two time periods, faculty are incentivized to send manuscripts first to the top-ranked journals; if the manuscript is rejected, it could always be sent to a lower-ranked journal in the second time period. If this strategy works, there will be obvious gains to those who stop their clocks versus those who don’t.

There are multiple avenues through which this effect could be occurring: clock-stopping could change an individual’s number of papers and where they are published and could affect tenure decisions and ultimately fertility decisions, which themselves may have publishing or productivity effects.

To test these possibilities, Professor Bedard assembled two unique datasets, one of the clock-stopping policies for each of the top 50 economics departments, as well as an exhaustive list of all assistant professors from 1980-2010. Using course catalogs, online CVs, and LinkedIn, she assembled a dataset of 1600 assistant professors who started their careers at a top 50 economics department who published at least two papers in eight years, along with their complete job histories and publication records.

The first considered metric was probability that an individual would get tenure at the school at which they started their career. In general, tenuring rates are fairly flat for both men and women, though the average rates are higher for men. What happens with the introduction of clock-stopping policies? Accounting for a series of controls, including flexible gender-specific time dummies and gender-specific university fixed effects, female-only clock-stopping policies have almost no effect on tenuring rates. However, gender-neutral clock-stopping policies have an enormous effect: with a gender-neutral clock-stopping policy, male tenure rates rise by 18 percentage points, and female tenure rates fall by 19 percentage points.

What is the mechanism for this effect? Fortunately, these clock-stopping policies do not impact the likelihood of getting tenure somewhere; instead, women seem to be moving and getting tenure at schools other than where they start. Using the complete job histories, Professor Bedard suggests that, conditional on getting tenure somewhere, once clock-stopping policies enter into place, fewer female faculty move to lower-ranked departments. While there is very little upward movement, this means that female faculty are more likely to move laterally, receiving tenure at a school ranked similarly to the one at which they started.

What are the effects of these policies on publishing? Over the first seven years of their careers, 40-50% of female faculty are not publishing in the top five journals, and those that do publish on average one article. Male faculty are somewhat more likely to publish in the top five journals, but still not to a significant degree. Comparing schools with clock-stopping policies (of either flavor) versus those without, over time female faculty at schools with clock-stopping experience, on average, a drop in publishing. By contrast, men experience a consistent increase in publishing success, such that men have, on average, half a publication more in a top 5 journal. Given that most people only publish one article in a top five journal, clock-stopping has a big effect for men with major impacts for publishing success.

The first version of Professor Bedard’s paper did not contain any analysis on fertility, but so many people wanted to know that she added an additional section. One major difficulty of studying effects on fertility is acquiring the data: most of the collected data is administrative, and few faculty report whether they have children on their CVs. Instead, Professor Bedard sent emails to each of the faculty members for which she had emails – around 85-90% of the dataset – asking whether the individual had children and, if so, in what year the children were born. The response rate (around 65%) was surprisingly high, but of course was entirely non-random; those who had left the profession were unlikely to respond, while those at higher-ranked schools were far more likely to respond. At schools with a gender-neutral clock-stopping policy, about 56% of pre-tenure faculty have a child, compared to 46% of those without a gender-neutral clock-stopping policy. Based on these data, it appears that clock-stopping does not change total fertility, but may change the timing of fertility.

These results for tenure, publishing, and fertility illuminate the side effects of clock-stopping policies and how they might eliminate burdens for women but confer additional benefits on men.

Gender Inequality: A Comparative View of the Challenges Ahead

The WAPPP Seminar this week was very special. Professor Mary C. Brinton, Department Chair of the Department of Sociology at Harvard and Professor Claudia Goldin, Henry Lee Professor of Economics also at Harvard, introduced the new Weatherhead Initiative on Comparative Gender Inequality (WIGI) at the University to "study comparative gender inequality in OECD countries and outline some of the major scholarly and policy challenges relating to the structure of work and its articulation with the family". This is an exciting three-year interdisciplinary, cross-Harvard project, that will work closely with WAPPP at HKS, but whose creation is motivated by a set of very specific questions that are increasingly important for post-industrial economies:

• Why are some industrialized countries moving rapidly towards gender equality while others are not?
• Why are changes in gender roles producing more household disruption in some rich societies than in others?
• How will US households share care duties for seniors?
• How do changes in the welfare state differently affect the wellbeing of men and women?
• How can public policy facilitate the dual earner/dual caregiver model?
• How can employers level playing field for all genders?
• What are the economic and productivity implications of not fully integrating high human capital women into the workforce?  

  Professor Claudia Goldin presents the Weatherhead Initiative on Gender Inequality

To answer these difficult questions, WIGI's first task is to build a community of students and scholars that are committed to studying these topics. There will be a strong focus on bringing in undergraduates, in fact, two of the first three events in Spring of 2016 will involve undergraduate seniors and juniors who will present their senior thesis research or will begin working on one. Graduate students are also welcome and expected to play a significant role.

WIGI will work on the intersections of different thematic areas each year. In the first year, the focus will be the intersection of labor markets and household decisions related to gender. The second year will address issues at the intersection of household decisions and public policy, and the third will feature activities involving labor markets and public policy.

 

  Professor Mary C. Brinton

 

Professor Brinton went further into detail about the topic of discussion for WIGI's first year. She started by showing the situation of workers in a place with which everybody in the audience was very familiar: Harvard University. Using the 2013 Faculty Climate Survey, she showed the number of hours per day that faculty allotted to work and to domestic and care duties, and found that although male and female faculty work the same amount of hours, the women at all levels of seniority engage in significantly more hours of housework than their male counterparts. This difference is much larger for Junior Faculty. On average, female tenured faculty members put in ten more hours of work in the home than male tenured faculty. Untenured female professors put in twenty more hours than male untenured professors. "This is very, very local," the Professor warned, "this is us".

Female faculty at Harvard spend 10-20 more hrs. 

on domestic work than male faculty

She also spoke about higher relative stress levels for female faculty, with some of the most common cited reasons being childcare and children's education. She explained that on the one hand, women have become increasingly educated, and their college graduation levels now surpass the men's in developed economies, but that on the other hand, not much has changed in the domestic arena, where women are expected to work more. This tension, she believes, is a driving force behind lower fertility rates and the aging populations in rich countries: "It's really, really hard to work full time and be mothers".

She then discussed the case of Japan, where she conducts a good amount of her research, and where this phenomenon is producing difficult consequences. Fertility rates in Japan have been under population replacement level, that is, under 2 children per woman, for over thirty years. The country is running out of a labor force, but the model has not yet become friendly to a dual earner-dual caregiver family model. Instead, many highly skilled women are pushed out of the labor force when they become mothers by a context that requires long working hours of both genders and does not provide incentives for males to take part in caregiving duties.

Professor Goldin continued this discussion by touching the topic of occupations, to see what makes some more friendly for the dual family model than others. She mentioned how sometimes the gender wage gap is explained by stating the fact that women tend to go into lower-paying, care-related occupations, and used data evidencing within-occupation pay gaps to show how that explanation is incomplete. For example, women in finance can earn up to 35% less than men in finance, while women in tech are earning 10% less than males in that sector.

But why is there a gap between occupations? She explained this by pointing out an important difference in the wage structures of each field. Using O*NET data from the Department of Labor, she showed that the gender gap is larger in occupations like finance, where there is a linear relationship between earnings and hours worked, than in tech, where people are remunerated more based on output. The latter structure favors women because, as was mentioned, they face higher demand for their time outside the workplace. In industries where there is temporal flexibility, women thrive (although it remains noteworthy that even in these fields there is still a gap, albeit smaller).

She suggested that a possible way to make any workplace more time-flexible would be to make employees more interchangeable. If in each workplace there are two workers who can easily substitute for each other at any point, they will have much more freedom to step in and out at times that work for them. This model can free men and women to take on more roles in the home. You can "fix the men", you can "fix the women", but until you actually "fix the firms and the occupations", modify the whole model, inequality will persist, she argued. 

Want to stay updated about activities related to this promising new initiative? Email jbarnard@wcfia.harvard.edu to subscribe to the mailing list!

Feminism in the Free Market

In this week’s WAPPP seminar, “Feminism Triumphed and Tamed: The Politics of Knowledge in Gender and Development,” Elisabeth M. Prügl, a Professor of International Relations and Political Science at the Graduate Institute of Geneva explored a critique of what some have come to call “free market feminism.”

While there have been many gains in the fight for gender equality in recent years, there is concern among some feminists that feminism itself has been co-opted by major institutions and by the forces of global capitalism. These scholars worry that feminism is no longer critiquing but rather supporting the existing power structures that have long disadvantaged women.

To analyze this deeper, Professor Prügl narrowed in on the largest global development institution, the World Bank. After conducting a close reading of World Bank documents from 2001 to the present, she argued that there are three dimensions of what happens to feminist ideas when they enter the neoliberal discourse: (1) integrations and instrumentalizations, (2) slippages, and (3) silences.

Firstly, feminism has been integrated into many institutions and into the idea of capitalism itself. To demonstrate this, Prügl used what she refers to as “the business case,” or the argument made by institutions that have a core mission apart from gender equality that more equality creates better economic outcomes. The narrative is not unique to the World Bank; it has become increasingly common in global institutions and on far-reaching development campaigns. 

Prügl posits that by focusing on the business case, we narrow the political imagination of what policies will actually improve women’s lives. We may ignore reproduction and childcare policies or oversimplify issues by making heteronormative assumptions and commitments.

Prügl argues that the problem definition is hugely important, as definitions are very tightly linked to solutions, and might even be defined after the solution has been found. She says that this is especially true in the case of neoliberalism, where it has already been decided that the market can solve everything.

Preferences also become an issue when discussing integration in the push for equal economic opportunity. Under conditions of equal opportunity, inequality results from preferences. Yet Prügl argues that it’s also possible that the outcomes an individual has experienced for her entire life shape her idea of what is and is not possible for her – and therefore actually change her preferences.

Prügl argued that slippages of feminist ideas occur in neoliberal institutions, with direct effects on markets, such as business registration and labor law. The idea of agency can also move away from its feminist definition in these circumstances. While those in the economic development sphere often define agency as the power and opportunity to take risks or seize opportunities, gender experts discuss it as the capacity to make decisions about one’s own life free of violence, retribution or fear – factors not always considered by economists.

Silence on feminist issues in the realm of global capitalism is also a concern for some. Prügl argued that gender expertise largely remains at the level of microeconomics, while the macroeconomics of equality are not discussed, and modernization, growth and globalization are taken as unquestioned goods. 

Prügl concluded by stating that gender mainstreaming has been both a failure and a success in recent years. She argued that the world changes due to the impetus from the knowledge and power we as individuals participate in validating, stressing the importance of a feminist critique of the current state of affairs. 

Why (and how) we shouldn't have it all

Debates over whether women should lean in, lean out, have it all or just some have been raging over the last few years, with few clear answers. Should women emulate men? Adjust what they’re doing to gain power? Opt out entirely?

At this week’s WAPPP Seminar on “Different Ways of Not Having It All: Work, Care, and Gender Change in the New Economy,” NYU Sociologist Kathleen Gerson suggests that the answers can’t, and shouldn’t be that simple.

While women have made tremendous strides in the workplace and at home, we’re entering a whole new economic era, where the boundaries between work and home, local and global job markets, and part and full-time work are all blurring---to say nothing of changing gender norms in most vocations.

Meanwhile, even household norms are changing, with more women working outside the home even through a child’s life, work tensions affecting marital relationships, and greater expectations of parental involvement throughout a child’s life.

As a result, both economics and home life are changing and becoming even less secure: careers aren't quite the linear, predictable paths they used to be, nor are household expectations of, and demands on both partners.

There are three main ways that people are thinking about these changes:

• “Neotraditional” arrangements, in which both partners work and are committed to one another, but one partner “specializes” in care, while the other “specializes” in breadwinning
• “Self-Reliance,” where, even in committed relationships, both partners work to provide money and care in equal doses---without counting on the other.
• and “Gender flexibility,” in which there is an egalitarian sharing of earning and caretaking, but a vague meaning of equality: care and breadwinning are responsibilities assigned not by gender, just what needs to be done

Both men and women would prefer gender-flexibility as an ideal arrangement. But in practice, women tend to fall back to more self-reliant positions, while men reflexively tend toward neotraditional arrangements. This is partly because men are still under the subtle yet profound pressure of the male breadwinner ideal: a man who can’t support his family is unmarriageable and “isn’t a man.” Even equality is seen as chivalrous: “equality means the woman has a choice; but I don’t.”

In practice, a third of people are “neotraditionalists,” with fathers left managing time-demanding jobs. About a third of people are “on their own,” and are left to rear children by themselves or without a committed partner. One of six couples have reversed traditional roles, with women providing more financially, but this leading to resentment in the relationship. And another sixth are “equal, but exhausted.”

At the end of the day, these choices are not about gender, but universal hopes to have a balanced life with predictable work and secure relationships---all permutations of which will require trade-offs. The erosion of job and relationship security are permanent conditions with which we must all contend; to do so we may have to redefine the responsibilities of being a man and a woman in the modern world.




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Under Pressure!

Papers, finals, job search, the holidays – the pressure of it all! I was hoping to learn in this seminar that being a woman would somehow improve my performance. What I did learn was not quite so straightforward, but still fascinating. Some experimental studies in recent years had found that in a mixed-sex environment, the pressure of competition improved men’s performance, but not women’s, and that women often opted out of competitive environments. Olga Shruchkov, Assistant Professor of Economics at Wellesley College, noticed something about those experiments. The “tasks” which subjects performed under competitive pressure were invariably math-oriented, like addition problems and mazes, and there was no range of performance quality, only right or wrong answers.

Shruchkov designed an experiment that would fill these gaps – a Boggle-like verbal task, a comparable math task and a difference between competitive pressure and time pressure. This experimental design was not only creative, but also rigorous, with relevant controls, task-consistency mechanisms and a whole range of variables to measure. The experiments replicated previous findings that under time pressure on math tasks men attained higher scores and had a higher propensity to select into tournaments.

The innovative experimental design also yielded important new insights. On verbal tasks under time pressure, women performed as well as men and had a similar propensity to enter competitions. In a verbal competition under time pressure, women did slightly better than men. Things really took off once the time pressure was lowered – women outperformed men on the verbal tasks under competition. On the math task with low time pressure, women and men performed similarly both with and without competition. Interestingly, giving more time for the math task doubled the number of women who elected to compete. So it’s not the pressure of the competition or inherent math abilities that were hurting the performance of women in earlier experiments – it was time!

Why did time help women so much more than the men? Making the competition about total points, not speed, allowed for a measurement of the quality dimension. A look at the kinds of words women were finding when given the time reveals an emphasis on quality – they made longer words and made fewer mistakes. The men, on the other hand, went for quantity of words and in the process lost points for misspellings and typos. Perhaps more women participated in the math tournament when they had more time, because it allowed them to check their calculations more thoroughly.

Professor Shruchkov was careful with drawing policy implications out of experimental results, but she suggested that take-home exams in math and science might help more girls excel in those subjects early on, which could get more of them interested in pursuing those careers. Personally, I am tempted to use the results to ask for a final paper extension right now! I wonder what Shruchkov tells her students when they try to do that. 

Anya Malkov is an MPP candidate at the Harvard Kennedy School, a WAPPP Cultural Bridge Fellow, and an alumna of From Harvard Square to the Oval Office.