Deciding Together as Faculty: Narratives of Unanticipated Consequences in Gendered and Racialized Departmental Service, Promotion, and Voting

2.1 An Intersectional Lens on Decoupling and Unanticipated Consequences

Central to an intersectional approach to organizations is understanding how race and gender create concrete obstacles for women of color, including their experiences confronting systemic gendered racism (Melaku 2022; Wingfield 2019), that creates a system of oppression reflecting multiple, “intersecting” forms of discrimination (Collins 1990; Crenshaw 1990). For example, Black women working in white organizations must perform additional labor that is unrecognized and uncompensated (Abad 2019; Hirshfield and Joseph 2012; Melaku 2022). While racism has become more subtle through colorblind racist ideology (Bonilla-Silva 1997), organizations remain racialized in their structures, hierarchies, and processes to privilege whites over marginalized racial groups (Ray 2019; Wingfield and Alston 2014; Wooten and Couloute 2017). Organizations also rest on assumptions of gender difference to favor men while marginalizing women, with practices, processes, and meanings reproducing “inequality regimes” of gender, race, and class (Acker 1990, 2006). Organizations are not neutral, and even those publicly affirming commitments to diversity utilize routine organizational practices that maintain racial-gender hierarchies advantaging white men over people of color and white women (Berrey 2015; Melaku 2022; Wooten and Couloute 2017).

Although decoupling might sometimes unfold in ways that moderate the harmful effects of intersecting inequalities (e.g. Mueller 2017; Turco 2012), most scholarship points to how decoupling is racialized (Ray 2019) and gendered (Acker 1990) in ways that disadvantage minoritized organizational members. “Objective” rules might be enforced in ways that perpetuate white advantage (Ray 2019), and anti-discrimination policies often lack effective enforcement mechanisms (Kalev, Dobbin, and Kelly 2006; Roscigno, Garcia, Bobbit-Zeher 2007). Bias can infiltrate formal institutional procedures to disadvantage women such as in hiring or pay decisions, when informal reliance on personal connections reproduces gender inequalities in networks (Nielsen 2016; Roth 2006). In the most extreme cases of “bureaucratic harassment,” formal rules may be purposefully manipulated by individuals with institutional power to undermine colleagues’ careers and cause harm to those with less power, including women of all races (Bonnes 2017). Decoupling leads to many “unanticipated consequences” that are both gendered and racialized, such as when anti-discrimination policies provide cover for the very discriminatory practices they create (Byron and Roscigno 2014; Castilla and Benard 2010), or when organizations shift responsibility for improving diversity onto a few Black professionals, rather than devoting appropriate resources (Wingfield 2019). Given the entrenched, overlapping systems of racial and gender inequality, decoupling and these unanticipated consequences may create the strongest barriers for women of color in organizations.

While the development of theories of gendered and racialized organizations have been an enormous step forward in our understanding of workplace inequalities, what still needs further development in this literature is an intersectional lens that focuses on organizational members who are aware of inequalities. How do introspective organizational actors understand decoupling and unanticipated consequences? This study centers the perceptions of such people in a higher education context, and how their narratives characterize both the process (decoupling of decision-making practices from bylaws) and the outcomes (unanticipated consequences of faculty governance) as gendered and racialized. Thus, our conceptualization of unanticipated consequences in this study focuses on perception; how critically conscious faculty collectively perceive the outcomes of faculty governance. We define unanticipated consequences narratives as intersubjective understanding of how formal policies and goals of written guidelines (i.e. the anticipated consequences) are subverted in gendered and racialized ways. What we find surprising and concerning from our analysis is how these very narratives—about routine decoupling from formal written rules and unanticipated consequences—may reinforce the white, masculine status quo. We analyze narratives about routine faculty governance in three common types of work that came up in our data: shared decisions about service work, hiring/promotion, and voting guidelines.

2.2 Inequalities in University Service, Promotion, and Voting

We draw on literatures about inequalities in higher education to show how white privilege has many “unanticipated consequences” for faculty and students of color. Most U.S. universities are white institutional spaces (Smith 2016; Wooten and Couloute 2017), defined by the historical and continuous absence of Black women (Berrey 2015; Melaku and Beeman 2023; Wooten 2015) and guided by white, masculine ideals (Hart 2016; Hirshfield and Joseph 2012). Universities are also decentralized, with disjuncture between university, college, and department levels, and between formally stated and informally reinforced expectations. This “incongruous” bureaucratic structure of universities allows stubborn racial and gender inequalities to persist, with faculty members of color and white women faculty more likely to experience ambiguities as they navigate organizations (Bird 2011; Lisnic, Anna, and Morimoto 2019; Matthew 2016; Moore et al. 2010; Wooten and Couloute 2017). In this section, we briefly outline the literature on the intersectional inequalities in three types of faculty decision-making: service, promotion, and voting.

3.1 The Setting: Faculty Shared Decision-Making

We conducted this research at a research-intensive, public university in the northeastern United States with a total student enrollment of approximately 30,000, and approximately 1500 faculty, about 75 % of whom are in the tenure system. At the time of study, the university consisted of 60 departments across nine schools/colleges. The university serves a majority white student population, and the faculty has been slow to diversify, with approximately 50 % of the faculty identifying as women and 26 % as African American, Latino, Asian, and Native American (ALANA), with Asian faculty the largest underrepresented minority group. Across the landscape of US higher education, the formal organization of faculty governance is a Weberian archetype of written rules and documentation. In our focal university, each department is required to have their unique set of written bylaws publicly on file with the provost’s office after review by the administration and faculty union (to ensure bylaws do not contradict university level rules or contracts). Informal practice varies widely, with 48 of 60 departments making their bylaws publicly available. Among our sample of 45 faculty members, 8 % of individuals had never heard of bylaws; 40 % know bylaws exist but do not use them; 45 % both had heard of and use bylaws; and the remaining 7 % did not comment on their familiarity. Regardless of their familiarity with departmental bylaws, all respondents engaged in shared decision-making and departmental governance.

3.2 Data and Methods

We conducted 10 focus group interviews with a total of 45 faculty members from January 2021 to January 2022. The COVID-19 pandemic necessarily drove a shift to online focus groups, but we discovered value in this method. Online focus group interviews proved convenient as well as a comfortable space to share experiences (Morgan and Spanish 1985; Smithson 2007). Faculty participants voiced freely their experiences with decision-making in their department and perceptions on how inclusive the practices are for white women and faculty of color.

Groups ranged from four to six participants. Faculty members were invited to participate via email, with an eye toward including participants of diverse rank, discipline, gender, and race. Sampling was purposive, and initial recruitment focused on individuals involved in university service focused on faculty equity, to include faculty members with some level of critical consciousness. Once they agreed to participate, respondents were sent an email explaining the research project and to schedule an interview date. Participants were assured that all names and identifying information would be altered to protect confidentiality, and faculty members from the same department were never placed in the same group. The sample represents 37 different departments from all schools/colleges at the university.

Sampling aimed to maximize faculty engagement over shared identities and experiences; out of the 10 groups, seven included participants with similar backgrounds by gender, race, or rank. We oversampled for women faculty, faculty of color, and non-tenure-track faculty. Designing focus groups by shared identities is a common sampling approach (Kitzinger 1994). Voices of minoritized participants can be muted in groups including white men. We matched the focus group facilitator to participants by gender, race, or rank (to the extent possible). Groups designed around differences can also provide insights into diverging experiences (Myers 1998), and the remaining three group interviews included participants who varied by gender, race, and rank. Women comprised 25 of the 45 respondents. The racial composition of respondents was 25 white, seven Black, eight Asian, two Latinx, and three identifying as multiracial. Eight faculty in the sample were non-tenure track lecturers, eight were chairs/heads or associate deans, with the remaining faculty at various ranks along the tenure track (see Table 1).

Questions covered topics of departmental bylaws and governance, transparency, and barriers to decision-making. Interviews each lasted approximately 1 h, held on Zoom, and recorded with permission (including automatic transcriptions). In the one interview not recorded, the research team conducted extensive field notes.

We analyzed focus group interview data using inductive, semi-open coding techniques with NVivo software. We coded discussions of various departmental decisions, and experiences with governance and voting, including challenges, discovering mismatches between faculty experiences and formal processes outlined in bylaws. Focused coding further identified unanticipated consequences. All authors collaborated on coding, and calibration revealed an inter-coder reliability score of over 90 %. Throughout our analysis, we also attend to how group composition may have influenced the narratives.

To supplement focus group data, we analyzed the formal written department bylaws of 56 departments at the university, as well as 14 additional documents departments wrote about their fields’ “cultural standards” for promotion, service expectations, and hiring. We accessed documents from the provost office website or requests to department leaders. Bylaws ranged from two to 26 pages, with most on average 10 pages. The provost’s office recommends bylaw contents, lending to a general uniformity of document structure and content, including standing committees and leadership, and procedures for faculty meetings, hiring, reappointment, tenure and promotion, and bylaw amendments. There is a great deal of administrative oversight, with departments instructed to avoid subjects primarily within the purview of chairs/heads (e.g. budget, teaching schedules, and space allocation), existing university policies, or the collective bargaining agreement with the faculty union.

Bylaws were analyzed using semi-open coding techniques in Nvivo software, focusing on personnel decisions and voting processes. Most departmental variation appears in terms of voting and committee eligibility. Given our focus on faculty equity, we coded for discussions of diversity, mentorship, transparency, or workloads. Thirty-nine of the 56 bylaws explicitly mention diversity. Intercoder reliability scores indicated over 90 % consistency among researchers. Data analysis of bylaws shaped the focus group design, including the interview guide, and we presented summary findings to participants for discussion. In addition to bylaws, we reviewed many institutional documents including data on faculty representation by race and gender in different colleges, and gender and race patterns in receipt of internal grants, administrative memos, etc.

4.1 Decoupling Decisions from Bylaws

Faculty across departments had a standard narrative about bylaws often being ignored in actual decision-making processes. When we asked about the use of bylaws in the focus groups, there was widespread agreement about the gaps between bylaws and actual governance. Most of the time, faculty saw these gaps as problematic in ways that were gendered and racialized. The language that faculty used to describe these gaps between the formal documents and the process of shared decision-making ranged from “informal networks” to “monkey ass bullshit.” Table 2 displays these decoupling descriptions that were collected across all 10 focus groups.

We were reminded of Goffman’s (1961) concept of the backstage in listening to the standard faculty narrative of decoupling shared decision-making from the formal departmental rules, particularly when we heard one faculty member refer to it as “a theater of the absurd, pretending to be very transparent.”

We also heard frequently how the backstage was gendered and racialized. One type of decoupling narrative comes from a discussion of how the written tenure and promotion guidelines are interpreted in gendered and racialized ways. Most department bylaws referred to the university rules in setting out guidelines for evaluating the merit of faculty work. Implicit was the expectation of objective shared decision-making based on standard criteria. One department’s bylaws, for example, noted that the faculty review committee’s first duty is: “Be responsible for reviewing and evaluating faculty performance of instruction, research, and service. Committee decisions will be based primarily upon Standards and Criteria for Personnel Reviews, Recommendations, and Decisions.”

Yet we commonly heard in focus groups stories of gender and race biases shaping the interpretation of criteria in tenure and promotion reviews, and standards being applied differently for men and women, or for white faculty and faculty of color. These disparities in interpreting rules appear to be a kind of decoupling. Selena, a white woman full Professor, gave a particular example of the messages that women and Black faculty receive in being told to “wait” to go up for promotion to full professor. She discusses personally being held back from promotion, and how she worried for colleagues struggling with the implicit racism and sexism in both hiring and promotion. In a different focus group, another white woman full Professor, Doris, identified the gendered and racialized processes embedded in decisions that some types of scholarship are more valuable than others. Her department was one of those that had additional, written guidelines for standards for tenure and promotion.

I think there’s so many unintentional ways that things get inequitable, and they’re not planful or thoughtful. They just happen in part [because] in our department more senior people are white and more senior people are male, and they do a certain kind of science. Our new people coming in are doing very different kinds of science or [particular kind of method]. And the discussion, the last time I was on the [review committee] of the science—which also gets connected to the person and the gender—was, I don’t know what the right word is, (pauses) frustrating. And so, we end up having these disciplinary arguments and then a whole group of people are seen as not doing as good of science. But that group of people happens to be our younger women of color group. And it turned into a challenging discussion.

While Doris was speaking, Holly, a tenured Black woman Professor, nodded her head in agreement. The senior white women faculty like Selena and Doris may be speaking from a place of relative privilege to articulate these inequalities in ways that untenured or faculty of color may not have. It is also important to note that Doris was not blaming the written standards themselves, but rather the interpretation, the ways that written standards were used differently for different groups of people. We see this as a narrative about choices made as part of a gendered and racialized process of decoupling the formal and informal organization.

4.2 Unanticipated Consequences Narratives About Gendered and Racialized Outcomes

We organize our discussion of common narratives about unanticipated consequences around three major departmental functions addressed in all bylaws documents: (1) committee service decisions; (2) hiring and promotion decisions; and (3) voting practices. We summarize the findings on unanticipated consequences narratives in Table 3, and we elaborate and provide data analysis in the following sections.

5.1 Limitations

This study has several limitations. We originally designed a study to observe faculty shared decision-making at regular faculty meetings, but this plan, like many others, was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic. Rather than observing decision-making in action, we instead heard about decision-making practices after they happened, in focus groups. While faculty narratives about the unanticipated consequences of decision-making reveal how fatalism, finger-pointing, and lack of intersectional reflection operate in discourse, we are missing direct observation of how these narratives prevent faculty from equity work. Future research could investigate whether these narratives arose around faculty meeting decision points about service, promotion, and voting practices. Ethnographic observation of faculty decision-making in meetings is needed.

Another limitation is our focus on one organization; while we saw large variation among departments in faculty governance, data collection occurred all within one US public university. This study also looks at inequalities among relatively privileged, highly educated professionals. We focus our analysis on the intersection of gendered and racialized inequalities, but as intersectionality theory (e.g. Collins 2019) reminds us, many inseparable systems of oppression operate in people’s lives. We inevitably miss other important dimensions of inequality. More research is needed to see where class (perhaps especially for NTT faculty), ableism, sexual identity and gender expression marginalization, nationality exclusion, and other stratification mechanisms operate in universities to oppress even relatively privileged faculty.

5.2 Next Steps

Our findings leave little room for hope. If even awareness of inequity can contribute to durable inequalities, where do we go from here? It makes developing governance interventions more difficult to target with slippery, evolving inequality processes; the findings imply a need for organizationally adept solutions. While the ‘smoking gun’ of evidence linking savvy faculty’s unanticipated consequences narratives to lack of change in their departments lies beyond the scope of this paper, in this section we point to some promising directions for studying and disrupting durable inequalities related to these narratives.

If fatalism characterizes unanticipated consequences narratives about gendered and racialized committee service burdens, one promising direction may come in the form of a “small wins” approach to organizational change (Correll 2017). Quasi-experimental research by Kerry Ann O’Meara and colleagues (2018), indicates in departments where faculty encounter some success in implementing service equity plans, the attitude toward change is more sanguine. Further research over time—including qualitative data collection—could examine how both narratives and service assignments may reflect either long term change (or revert to gendered and racialized status quo and fatalism narratives).

If finger pointing characterizes unanticipated consequences narratives about gendered and racialized outcomes of hiring and promotion decisions, one promising direction may come from collaboration between faculty and administration. In interviews with feminist sociologists seeking institutional change toward intersectional gender equity, Laube (2021) identified (despite Lorde’s [1979] warning) working with the “master’s tools,” compromise, and pragmatism, as effective approaches to working in the space between administration and faculty interests. Further research observing change behavior and narratives of savvy organizational actors is needed to better understand when collaboration works and when it does not.

If failure to see intersectional inequalities characterizes unanticipated consequences narratives about non-tenure track inequalities in voting and faculty governance, one promising direction may come from fostering critical consciousness in white men allies. Mosely and colleagues’ (2021) model of critical consciousness of anti-Black racism, developed from interviews with Black activists, identifies witnessing racism/sexism (rather than general awareness of bias) as a first step toward cognitively processing and acting collectively toward change. Further research on how these social psychological processes might operate for allies, and could connect to change at the organizational level, is needed to understand better how to overcome resistance toward intersectional equity.

Organizational problems need organizational solutions. Awareness of inequality sounds like progress, but we need policies and stronger collective governance to ensure deciding together is truly inclusive, democratic, and strengthens our higher education organizations. Departmental governance is a crucial site of work life for faculty, yet faculty experience it in different – and unequal – ways. When faculty shared decision-making processes support equitable resource distribution (time and funding for scholarship), relationships (access to mentors and information), and recognition (attention to scholarship and service contributions), the power and autonomy of faculty are reinforced. Creating stronger, more equitable faculty governance will promote democratic processes in higher education despite external pressures.