Faculty promotion evaluation and gender equity in business schools

Abstract

This article aims to address the fairness of promotion evaluation (appointments to the rank of full professor) process in Canadian business schools as perceived by tenured business female faculty. Our analysis is underscored by two studies with two different data collection methods (survey data analysis, policy content analysis) and driven by procedural justice as the main theoretical lens. The first study addresses the perspective of our survey participants ( N=198) by revealing that they believe the process of promotion evaluations is fair. Intrigued by this result, we undertook a second study to review the language of faculty collective agreements in these schools to explain partially why our participants believe in the fairness of promotion evaluations. The language of these faculty collective agreements suggests that the above result makes sense considering that they regulate promotion evaluations and decisions. However, this does not mean that the process of faculty promotions is free of gender discrimination as these faculty collective agreements have not addressed all the antecedents and predictors of gender inequity per se. The findings of this article are relevant because the issue of the underrepresentation of female faculty as related to promotion in senior academic ranks in Canadian business schools is under-researched. The existing studies on faculty promotion evaluations are too general and have not specifically addressed the fairness of business schools’ faculty promotion evaluation systems from the perspective of tenured business female faculty. Plus, the relevance of the findings of this article lies in the fact that contrary to most general studies on female faculty experience with promotion evaluations at Canadian universities and internationally, these findings suggest that such experience in Canadian business schools is not always associated with gender discrimination and negative perspectives among female faculty.