Abstract
This article expands understanding of gender and advancement in academic science by going into a new dimension of inquiry: Focusing on women associate professors in computing, it assesses the relationship between perceived chances for promotion to full professor and indicators of entrepreneurship, as part of key sets of individual and departmental independent variables that are also addressed. Data from a national survey of women in academic computing indicate that time spent in entrepreneurial activity does not predict excellent/good (compared to fair/poor) chances for promotion perceived by these women faculty, nor does the quantity/quality of entrepreneurial activity that they report for their home units. Departmental reward structures reported as favoring entrepreneurial activity negatively predict perceived chances for promotion. Other key individual and departmental characteristics also predict chances for promotion: faculty members’ age, collaboration, family characteristics, departmental climate, and US (compared to Canadian) location. Findings from interviews with a small subset of respondents to the survey illuminate the survey findings on the role of entrepreneurial factors in perceived chances for advancement.
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Notes
As a field, “computing” is used interchangeably with “computer science.”
Fairweather (1993) finds reward structures favoring research across types of academic settings. He reports that teaching is either a neutral or negative factor in rewards of salary across institutions, independent of professed “institutional missions.”
The dependent variable is coded in this way because, conceptually, the interest is relatively positive (excellent or moderate) compared relatively negative (fair or poor) reported chances among women associate professors in computing.
We code teaching and research interests as dichotomous variables in these ways because, conceptually, the concern is with interests that are great compared to almost none, slight, or moderate; and because of the way in which the responses distribute with very few cases with levels of interest that are almost none or slight. Likewise, other dichotomous independent variables are classified into two categories for analogous reasons. It is important to note that results in logistic models are sensitive to the binary coding of variables. This applies for the independent variables of teaching interest, research interest, frequency of speaking with faculty about research, work-family interference, quality of departmental members’ entrepreneurial activity, and reported importance of entrepreneurial activity in the departmental reward structure (and the dependent variable addressed in the prior note).
Unweighted scales are used for two reasons. First, factor loadings relating to each construct observed did not show wide variations among themselves. Second, unweighted factor-based scores are not only simple in construction, but they also emphasize the grouping of variables that load on a particular factor rather than minor distraction among underlying variables.
Levels of significance that are attained (and attainable) in the logistic regression are influenced, in part, by the moderate the number of cases (N = 100). Thus, variables that are “marginally significant” (that is, at levels somewhat higher than p = 0.05) may still be notable. At the same time, variables that reach levels of significance of p ≤ 0.05 are especially strong predictors in a model with this number of cases.
An interesting area for continuing exploration in computer science is the potential influence on faculty members of the entrepreneurial activity of their chair or dean (as found for medical school faculty [Bercovitz and Feldman 2008]).
However, the survey results indicated that collaboration with faculty, rather than publication productivity in the prior 3 years, predicted perceived chances of promotion to full professor.
In actuality, some data point to the complementarity of publishing and commercial activity among faculty (Breschi et al. 2007, 2008; Powell and Owen-Smith 1998). Explanations given for this positive relationship are that the industrial connections of commercialization provide resources, and that faculty who are active in both publishing and commercialization are exemplary.
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Acknowledgments
The research reported here was supported in part by grants from the National Science Foundation (CNS 0413538) and from the Kauffman Foundation—Georgia Research Alliance. For their helpful reading and comments on this article, we thank John P. Walsh and an anonymous JTT reviewer.
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Fox, M.F., Xiao, W. Perceived chances for promotion among women associate professors in computing: individual, departmental, and entrepreneurial factors. J Technol Transf 38, 135–152 (2013). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-012-9250-2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10961-012-9250-2