PRESS-NEWS.org - Press Release Distribution
PRESS RELEASES DISTRIBUTION

Family-friendly tenure policies result in salary penalty for professors

2013-04-30
(Press-News.org) CHAMPAIGN, Ill. —Well-intentioned policies to make achieving tenure more family-friendly actually have negative consequences for the salaries of college faculty members, a study co-written by a University of Illinois labor and employment relations professor shows.

Whether it's for the birth or adoption of a child, or a family situation that involves extended caregiving, both male and female faculty members who "stop the tenure clock" for family reasons earn a salary that's 3.1 to 4.3 percent lower the following year – even when there is no significant drop-off in the number or quality of their research output, according to new research co-written by Amit Kramer.

"The findings of the paper indicate that use of a tenure rollback policy incurs a salary penalty that cannot be explained away by a change in the quantity or quality of publications," Kramer said.

Kramer, who co-wrote the study with Colleen Flaherty Manchester and Lisa M. Leslie, both of the University of Minnesota, says although the paper's general findings are encouraging, any evidence that tenure rollback policies can be used to make inferences about a faculty member's commitment should be a cause for concern.

"Tenure clock rollback policies are achieving their main goal in that tenure-track faculty who decide to hit the pause button for family reasons have similar levels of research productivity as their colleagues," he said.

But the salary penalty is consistent with a commitment hypothesis – evaluators treat the use of rollback policies for family reasons as a "negative signal" about a faculty member's underlying commitment to academic work, suggesting that salary decisions are affected by subjective factors, Kramer says.

"The norm in academia is that success requires the focused pursuit of academic work at the expense of other responsibilities, including family," he said. "That suggests that the use of these policies may be detrimental to the career outcomes of tenure-track faculty members. In particular, evaluators may perceive stopping the clock for family reasons as an indicator that the faculty member lacks the commitment to his or her academic role. And that, in turn, may constrain their career prospects."

Tenure rollback policies allow tenure-track faculty members to delay their tenure review, typically in increments of one year, if they experience events that are likely to negatively affect their research productivity.

The goal of rollback policies is to level the playing field for faculty members who experience productivity shocks, thereby allowing them to demonstrate their scholarly capabilities by the time of their tenure decision, according to the paper.

Furthermore, the researchers found evidence that tenure rollback policy use has a persistent effect on salary decisions for male faculty members, but not for female faculty members. The finding is consistent with the possibility that men are penalized for using rollback policies for family reasons to a greater extent than women are because use violates traditional gender roles, Kramer says.

"There is no overall gender effect – male and female faculty are similarly penalized a year following the use of the rollback," Kramer says. "The salary penalty lasts for approximately three years, but it differs by gender: While women seem to suffer a single penalty one year after stopping their clock, men are penalized twice, a year after they stop their clock and again, two years after they stop the clock."

For organizations, including major research institutions, the implications are clear, Kramer says.

"If you offer family and life-friendly policies to your employees, make sure usage of these policies does not result in negative outcomes for employees," he said. "Otherwise, your star employees, those you would like to keep, will not take advantage of that benefit and might consider moving to a more supportive organization."

For tenure-track professors, Kramer suggests thinking carefully about the implications of using family- and life-related policies in organizations that formally have these policies but may informally discourage their use.

"For major research institutions, I would say that they need to encourage faculty members to roll back their clock when they really need it. But at the same time, they also need to educate senior faculty on the benefits of tenure clock rollback as well as the tendency to unjustly penalize the wages of faculty who have used the benefit."

Tenure clock rollback is just one example of family- and life-supportive policies that organizations offer their employees to help them deal with stressful and time-consuming non-work situations, Kramer says.

"Many organizations can and do offer other family- and life-supportive policies such as flexible work arrangements, telecommuting options, job share and compressed workweeks, to name just a few," he said. "But many employees are not even aware of the range of policies that are offered by organizations. And even if they are aware of the available policies, sometime they are reluctant to use them, even in times of need, because they are worried about the negative impression it would send to their employer, in addition to the impact it might have on their career prospects."

The study was published in the journal Industrial and Labor Relations Review.



INFORMATION:

Editor's notes: To contact Amit Kramer, call 217-333-3118; email kram@illinois.edu.

The article, "Is the Clock Still Ticking? An Evaluation of the Consequences of Stopping the Tenure Clock," is available online.



ELSE PRESS RELEASES FROM THIS DATE:

Pregnant women with high celiac disease antibodies are at risk for low birth weight babies

2013-04-30
Bethesda, MD (April 29, 2013) — Pregnant women with mid to high levels of antibodies common in patients with celiac disease are at risk for having babies with reduced fetal weight and birth weight, according to a new study in Gastroenterology, the official journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. The antibody tissue transglutaminase (anti-tTG) is most commonly found in patients with celiac disease. "While several observational studies have suggested that celiac disease is associated with different pregnancy outcomes, this research takes into account the ...

New methods to explore astrocyte effects on brain function

2013-04-30
A study in The Journal of General Physiology presents new methods to evaluate how astrocytes contribute to brain function, paving the way for future exploration of these important brain cells at unprecedented levels of detail. Astrocytes—the most abundant cell type in the human brain—play crucial roles in brain physiology, which may include modulating synaptic activity and regulating local blood flow. Existing research tools can be used to monitor calcium signals associated with interactions between astrocytes and neurons or blood vessels. Until now, however, astrocytic ...

Retirement expert: Medicare already means-tested

2013-04-30
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — The Obama administration's controversial proposal to "means-test" Medicare recipients is ostensibly aimed at generating more cash for the government from those who can afford it – or squeezing more money out of upper-income seniors, depending upon one's point of view. But according to a University of Illinois expert on retirement benefits, the Medicare program is already means-tested. Law professor Richard L. Kaplan says whenever the issue of cutting Medicare emerges, one of the first ideas to "fix" the program is to make its upper-income beneficiaries ...

Research: Common component strategy could improve profits

2013-04-30
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — When designing product lines, one important decision marketing and manufacturing managers must consider is whether to use common or product-specific components. While the use of common components can reduce manufacturing costs, firms have traditionally shied away from that strategy over concerns of intensifying what scholars call "product cannibalization." But according to research from two University of Illinois business professors, commonality can actually reduce product line cannibalization, a finding that could allow firms to redesign their product ...

Personalized leadership key for keeping globally distributed teams on task

2013-04-30
CHAMPAIGN, Ill. — For companies with employees around the globe, the challenges of distance, diversity and technology may threaten team cohesiveness among their long-distance workers. But according to a new study by a University of Illinois business professor, out of sight doesn't necessarily have to mean out of mind for virtual teams. Ravi S. Gajendran, a professor of business administration at Illinois, says leaders of globally distributed teams can mitigate the isolation of virtual employees by taking a relationship-based approach in the form of a "leader-member exchange" ...

Reading wordless storybooks to toddlers may expose them to richer language

2013-04-30
WATERLOO, Ont. (Monday, April 29, 2013) – Researchers at the University of Waterloo have found that children hear more complex language from parents when they read a storybook with only pictures compared to a picture-vocabulary book. The findings appear in the latest issue of the journal First Language. "Too often, parents dismiss picture storybooks, especially when they are wordless, as not real reading or just for fun," said the study's author, Professor Daniela O'Neill. "But these findings show that reading picture storybooks with kids exposes them to the kind of talk ...

Frequently used biologic agents might cause acute liver injury

2013-04-30
Bethesda, MD (April 29, 2013) — A commonly used class of biologic response modifying drugs can cause acute liver injury with elevated liver enzymes, according to a new study in Clinical Gastroenterology and Hepatology, the official clinical practice journal of the American Gastroenterological Association. Patients with inflammatory diseases such as Chron's disease or ulcerative colitis often are prescribed tumor necrosis factor-alpha (TNF-α) antagonists, which modify the body's response to infection. Patients with inflammatory arthropathies and selected dermatological ...

What happened to dinosaurs' predecessors after Earth's largest extinction 252 million years ago?

2013-04-30
Predecessors to dinosaurs missed the race to fill habitats emptied when nine out of 10 species disappeared during Earth's largest mass extinction 252 million years ago. Or did they? That thinking was based on fossil records from sites in South Africa and southwest Russia. It turns out, however, that scientists may have been looking in the wrong places. Newly discovered fossils from 10 million years after the mass extinction reveal a lineage of animals thought to have led to dinosaurs in Tanzania and Zambia. That's still millions of years before dinosaur relatives ...

How we decode 'noisy' language in daily life

2013-04-30
CAMBRIDGE, MA -- Suppose you hear someone say, "The man gave the ice cream the child." Does that sentence seem plausible? Or do you assume it is missing a word? Such as: "The man gave the ice cream to the child." A new study by MIT researchers indicates that when we process language, we often make these kinds of mental edits. Moreover, it suggests that we seem to use specific strategies for making sense of confusing information — the "noise" interfering with the signal conveyed in language, as researchers think of it. "Even at the sentence level of language, there is ...

Silicone liquid crystal stiffens with repeated compression

2013-04-30
HOUSTON – (April 29, 2013) – Squeeze a piece of silicone and it quickly returns to its original shape, as squishy as ever. But scientists at Rice University have discovered that the liquid crystal phase of silicone becomes 90 percent stiffer when silicone is gently and repeatedly compressed. Their research could lead to new strategies for self-healing materials or biocompatible materials that mimic human tissues. A paper on the research appeared this month in Nature's online journal Nature Communications. Silicone in its liquid crystal phase is somewhere between a solid ...

LAST 30 PRESS RELEASES:

Study tracks chromium chemistry in irradiated molten salts

Scientists: the beautiful game is a silver bullet for global health

Being physically active, even just a couple of days a week, may be key to better health

High-fat diet promote breast cancer metastasis in animal models

A router for photons

Nurses and AI collaborate to save lives, reduce hospital stays

Multi-resistance in bacteria predicted by AI model

Tinker Tots: A citizen science project to explore ethical dilemmas in embryo selection

Sensing sickness

Cost to build multifamily housing in California more than twice as high as in Texas

Program takes aim at drinking, unsafe sex, and sexual assault on college campuses

Inability to pay for healthcare reaches record high in U.S.

Science ‘storytelling’ urgently needed amid climate and biodiversity crisis

KAIST Develops Retinal Therapy to Restore Lost Vision​

Adipocyte-hepatocyte signaling mechanism uncovered in endoplasmic reticulum stress response

Mammals were adapting from life in the trees to living on the ground before dinosaur-killing asteroid

Low LDL cholesterol levels linked to reduced risk of dementia

Thickening of the eye’s retina associated with greater risk and severity of postoperative delirium in older patients

Almost one in ten people surveyed report having been harmed by the NHS in the last three years

Enhancing light control with complex frequency excitations

New research finds novel drug target for acute myeloid leukemia, bringing hope for cancer patients

New insight into factors associated with a common disease among dogs and humans

Illuminating single atoms for sustainable propylene production

New study finds Rocky Mountain snow contamination

Study examines lactation in critically ill patients

UVA Engineering Dean Jennifer West earns AIMBE’s 2025 Pierre Galletti Award

Doubling down on metasurfaces

New Cedars-Sinai study shows how specialized diet can improve gut disorders

Making moves and hitting the breaks: Owl journeys surprise researchers in western Montana

PKU Scientists simulate the origin and evolution of the North Atlantic Oscillation

[Press-News.org] Family-friendly tenure policies result in salary penalty for professors