BYU Gender Balance Among Professors

I came across this fascinating article on gender balance of professors at the BYU's (Provo, Idaho, Hawaii). After a healthy discussion on my facebook page, I decided to summarize my thoughts on this under-utilized blog.  

Some background to understand the context for this article: 

1. I'm a BYU-Provo grad (2014) and a woman.  
2. All BYU branches are owned and run by The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints (I'll refer to it as the LDS Church because that's a lot faster to type and read).  
3. The LDS Church is still very traditional in it's cultural gender roles.

The article's conclusion may seem extreme to some, but the implications are important enough to consider:

"But the biggest problems with the aggressively unbalanced hiring practices suggested by this data has to do with the spiritual environment that it creates for our children.It tells our daughters that their educational potential is limited. When they go through two, three, or four years of college without ever being taught by other women, they internalize a belief that men are smarter and more capable than they are—and that they do not have the natural ability or cultural support to achieve their highest educational and intellectual aspirations. 

This is unconscionable.But it tells our sons something even worse. When we give them an environment in which virtually all of the people with low status and little institutional power are women, while all of the people with high status and great institutional power are men, we are showing them that there is no reason that they need to take women seriously. They need only see men as experts or as people with authority. We are therefore playing into an entitlement that young men often already feel. We are telling them that women exist to serve their needs.And this is deplorable."

Personally, I had 4 female professors at BYU Provo: Women's Studies, Writing in Psychology, Floral Design, and Joseph Smith History. There's an iffy 5 more if you count Childhood Development taught by a grad student, Humanities College Student Council class led by a non-professor faculty member, and 3 half credit dance classes taught by current dance majors.

It seems many people have a more gender-diverse BYU experience than I did, which I think is fantastic!  I also want to point out that these kinds of issues deserve more nuance than blanket right/wrong declarations.

I find the conclusion thought provoking, and think perhaps the author made it dramatic on purpose to prove her point. Of course, it would be unreasonable to assume that every BYU woman feels limited in her goals/potential because of the lack of female instructors/leaders; or that every BYU man feels superior due to predominantly male instructors/leaders. I am wholly against making blanket statements about groups of people. But I do think these things send subtle messages, that when regularly reinforced by other messages in our culture (both American and Church cultures), can lead to those kinds of biases. Everyone has biases.  They are natural.  But when biases go unnoticed, they can affect our perceptions and decision making in unintentional ways.

This is not a BYU-specific phenomenon. Gender inequality in representation is particularly stark in many church-owned entities, but also across the US particularly in leadership positions, despite roughly equal employment numbers in general. The author points out that the data suggests that BYU hires a similar number of women, but that women tend to fill the more secretarial and administrative roles, which are ironically less flexible in hours/schedule, and thus less family friendly, than professor roles.

I think the root lies with the applicant pool--not as many female professors apply for positions at BYU. And I think the reasons are complex, and include the Church’s focus on women’s role as mothers, and the cultural tradition for women to be stay-at-home mothers and men to work full-time. (And for the record, I love stay-at-home moms, particularly mine) But I think the focus on motherhood as the primary role for women, taught to both men and women in the church since primary, can also contribute to the biases mentioned above.

Experiences vary, and I believe there are positive changes coming, but in my Young Women’s experience, I remember a lot of home skills, motherhood, and marriage classes and activities, and little if any focused on education or career aspirations. Whereas, it seems young men were prodded to think seriously about their education and career choices from an early age. I can see how these kind of cultural messages can lead to some women limiting themselves in their aspirations. I did. And personally, I think we would all be better off if the lesson and activity focuses for YW/YM were more balanced on both sides--both focusing on spiritual preparedness, home skills, parenthood, education, career, etc. So men could be thinking about fatherhood starting at earlier ages, and women could also be thinking about careers from earlier ages. My understanding is that it’s beginning to lean that way and changes are coming. I haven’t been involved with the youth program since I graduated 6 years ago, but I’m hopeful for such changes!