There has been considerable discussion at various places online over the past day or two about a brief article that is quite critical of the three campuses of Brigham Young University in Utah, Idaho, and Hawaii:
I’ll assume that the numbers supplied in the article are accurate. I might quibble a bit with the author’s interpretation of them, but what I really object to is the suggestion that there is some sort of effort, whether deliberate or even unconscious, on the part of Brigham Young University to marginalize women and to keep them in poorly-paying, lower status roles.
I can only speak from my own experience, but I just haven’t seen it.
To the extent that I’ve been involved in hiring decisions by my own Department of Asian and Near Eastern Languages, we’ve always been happy to consider applications from women — and we’ve hired several (including a new member, specifically, of our Arabic faculty who just joined us full-time about three weeks ago, and about whom we’re absolutely thrilled). The same is true for our interdepartmental Middle East Studies faculty (which, until fairly recently, was led by a woman from Political Science and which, last year, was joined by a female Ottomanist in the Department of History).
I chaired my department’s rank and status review committee last year, and I was very happy to be involved in the process by which a female Korean specialist gained Continuing Faculty Status (CFS), BYU’s equivalent of tenure. There was never the slightest trace of a whiff of a hint of a suggestion of a nudge that she ought not be treated equally, or that she shouldn’t be in a CFS-track position. Another professor, with whose application for advancement to CFS I was somewhat involved a few years ago, has just had a baby within the past few days. She’s a very valued member of her (Chinese) section and of the department as a whole.
The fact is, though, that we can’t grant Continuing Faculty Status to women who don’t work for us, and that we can’t hire women who don’t apply. And the pool from which we hire simply isn’t all that big — neither absolutely nor in terms of women.
I’m told that Mormon- but not Church-owned Southern Virginia University has a faculty that is much closer than the BYUs, in its gender balance, to the national norm. I haven’t verified that but, again, I’ll assume it to be true. How would I explain it? I can’t. I would like to know more.
But the fact remains that, in my experience at least, BYU hires far more men than women because far more men than women seek to be hired at BYU.
This almost certainly reflects a general cultural situation in Mormondom. There simply aren’t as many qualified Mormon women on the academic job market as, proportionately, there are in many other groups. Why? I can only speculate. Here’s one possible reason: A not insignificant number of people in academia — including men, but, rightly or wrongly, mostly women — have sacrificed marriage and family (either altogether or simply in terms of time and attention) to get to where they are. And Latter-day Saint women are strongly encouraged to marry, to have (relatively large numbers of) children, and to devote themselves very largely to those children. That’s inevitably going to lower the number of women who go on to graduate school and, thereafter, to full-time employment outside the home.
Some, obviously, will see that as very bad. As a problem that needs to be fixed. And it’s presumably true that, all else being equal, it would be better to have more female professors of sociology, molecular biology, accounting, and chemical engineering at BYU. But all else wouldn’t be equal: It’s not obvious that having fewer full time mothers in Mormon homes would be an improvement, but that would be, by definition, the inevitable result of having more women on the faculties in Provo, Rexburg, and Laie.
In any case, it seems that many LDS women have made the decision not to pursue academic careers. And, perhaps it might be argued, BYU has somehow helped to socialized them into that decision. But I’m personally aware of no effort by BYU to block them from having such careers.
A couple of personal experiences that are more or less germane:
I served for a number of years as the chairman of the board of the Foundation for Ancient Research and Mormon Studies, or FARMS, out of which today’s Neal A . Maxwell Institute for Religious Scholarship eventually developed. I looked around our board very early and decided that it needed to include one or more women — not merely for appearance’s sake (though I knew that an all-male board would draw negative comment in some quarters) but for other reasons. And so, throughout my tenure as chairman, I sought to recruit women for the board. Without any success whatever. I had determined that there would be no token appointments, that anybody I nominated would need to be genuinely committed to the kind of scholarship, research, and publication that we existed to foster. So, again, the candidate pool was very small. But there were three women whom I invited to join the board. And all three turned me down.
Why would they turn me down? In each case, they told me that it was a matter of time. You see, since women are, indisputably, in short supply on the BYU faculty, and since every faculty committee (just like the FARMS board) wants some women to serve on it, BYU faculty women are in high demand. Whereas a dime-a-dozen male professor might serve on one or two committees, a female professor might belong to three or four or even more. And such committees can gobble up a professor’s time. They cut into research and limit writing. And if that professor is also trying to be a wife and a mother, that takes a real toll.
Although I expended considerable effort in an attempt to include women on the FARMS board, I failed. And yet I read quite often online and elsewhere about the misogynistic “FARMSboys” and their sexist “boys club” and, in particular, about the contempt for women that I was personally demonstrating as chairman of that all-male FARMS board.
The second experience: Two or three years ago, my wife and I and certain members of her extended family created a little prize in honor of my late mother-in-law. We chose to focus it on encouraging women to submit articles to Interpreter: A Journal of Mormon Scripture. Now, perhaps it’s not big enough — we’re not rich — but the fact is that our effort has had no discernible effect (so far as I can tell) on the number of manuscripts submitted to Interpreter by women. (We’re currently considering whether or not we’ll continue funding the prize and, if we do, whether we’ll change its focus; perhaps, if we do continue with it, we’ll alter it to aim at young scholars rather than at women.)
Interpreter and I have been the target of a fair amount of predictable online criticism because Interpreter‘s authors have overwhelmingly been males. But we can’t publish articles by people who haven’t written articles. We can’t discriminate in the article selection process against people who haven’t submitted articles to us in the first place.
Which is just a way of illustrating my point that the perceived gender imbalance on the BYU faculty may or may not be a result of BYU policies that discourage the hiring of female faculty. But I’m aware of no such policies. If anything, in my experience BYU seeks more women for its teaching positions. However, it can’t hire women who aren’t available for hiring.
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