The Female Precariat: Gender and Contingency in the Professional Work Force

By Margie Burns, Rachelann Lopp Copland and Tamara Ionkova Hammond

This volume addresses gender disparities in pay, professional support, and job security in both the higher education work force and in the newer digital economy. Its purpose is to explain the higher education precariat and the digital precariat at large, and to document how they disproportionately involve women.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Universitas Press
• Release date: Feb 18, 2019
• ISBN: 9781988963525

Book preview

Introduction

How things are:

The number of adjunct faculty and other contingent faculty in higher education in the United States is now greater than it has ever been, and data from the National Center for Education Statistics (https://nces.ed.gov/) show the use of adjunct faculty steadily increasing every decade, and almost every year, since 1970. Adjuncts and other contingent faculty now do most of the undergraduate teaching in U.S. colleges and universities.[1] Meanwhile, graduate programs continue to turn out new doctoral graduates, year by year, who in most disciplines and in most years outnumber the total of tenure-track jobs available. The authors of this book are considering adjunct faculty as the new precariat—a work force that, while highly educated, has been generally unable to secure professional status, a living income, a stable job, and the protections of employment benefits such as health coverage and retirement options. The same situation also characterizes the newer Internet economy, where an underpaid digital work force deals with similar conditions and similar lack of protections.

While the enormous number of adjunct faculty and other contingent faculty in postsecondary education includes many men, the adjunct phenomenon overlaps with gender issues, as discussed by Professors Burns and Lopp Copland. Women are disproportionately represented in the lowest-paid ranks in higher education. And in the digital work force, as Professor Ionkova Hammond writes, unpaid or lower-paid work in the Internet economy—in new media and in business—is also performed disproportionately by women.

Thus this thematic volume will address gender disparities in stable jobs, pay, and professional support in both the higher education work force and the work force in the newer digital economy.

The broad issues of underpaid adjuncts, underpaid women, and underpaid digital workers are familiar to many, in an ‘Everybody-knows . . .’ way. However, they tend to be acknowledged either informally, as in social media, or ultra-formally, as in government entities and institutional self-study. The overlap between gender disparities and the use of adjuncts in higher education has not broken out into the national public discourse. To date, it has also not adequately been part of the discourse in higher education. The nexus of gender and the precariat in the digital work force has also not become part of the public discourse. Among employers, candid discussion and accurate analysis may be inhibited by institutional and industry unwillingness to address the situation, or by fear of action through collective bargaining, litigation, or state and federal agencies. Among the employed (or among the under-employed, or the unemployed), discourse may be inhibited by economic duress including fear of retaliation.

What the authors want to do:

We propose to lay out the situation of academic and digital precariat and to discuss causes, consequences and, where possible, solutions. (Once you start applying solutions, you may discover some of the causes. Or on the other hand, once you apply solutions, you may address some of the challenges. Intellectually, it’s a win-win.)

The purpose of our project is to explain the U.S. higher education precariat and the digital precariat to the world at large, and to document with overwhelming evidence that the precariat in higher education and in the Internet economy disproportionately involves women. We hope that our discussion will help. This book is a labor of love. In the long run, we hope that our work will encourage more people to devote attention to conditions that ultimately affect not just women but everyone. Meanwhile, the book is part of the history of our time, written while we’re still in it.

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[1] The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) categorizes as contingent faculty adjuncts, postdocs, TAs, non-tenure-track faculty, clinical faculty, part-timers, lecturers, instructors, or nonsenate faculty. At https://www.aaup.org/issues/contingency.

Margie Burns - Then and Now: The Adjunct Phenomenon from the 1970s to Now, Updated

1. Overview: The Phenomenon of Adjunct Faculty

The use of adjunct faculty has now become as entrenched in the U.S. as it is widespread. A major reliable source for data is the National Center for Education Statistics (NCES):

From fall 1999 to fall 2016, the number of faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions increased by 51 percent (from 1.0 to 1.5 million). The number of full-time faculty increased by 38 percent over this period, while the number of part-time faculty increased by 74 percent between 1999 and 2011, and then decreased by 4 percent between 2011 and 2016.

(Last Updated: May 2018)[1]

The statistical evidence is overwhelming: in postsecondary education, the hiring of adjunct faculty and other contingent faculty, rather than of tenure-track professors, has increased every decade from the 1970s to now. It continues to increase today. The majority of undergraduate classes are now taught by adjuncts, by other contingent faculty including non-tenure-track full-timers, and by graduate students teaching as a condition of financial assistance.

The net result is that college teaching in the United States has undergone an occupation-wide downsizing. This conclusion may look surprising, given the populations and the growth in U.S. colleges and universities over-all; from some perspectives, higher education seems to be booming. But from 1970 to 2018, full-time instructional faculty in colleges and universities have shrunk to half of all faculty.[2] The downsizing has gone almost unnoticed in the mass media, partly for the very reason that it was able to occur in the first place: full-time faculty have been replaced by contingent faculty. The classes are still being taught—except where their programs have dwindled to the point where they’re not—but they are not being taught by tenured or tenure-track college professors. The use of contingent faculty is so extensive as to be a fundamental in higher education in the U.S. Any analysis of universities and colleges must take it into account to be accurate and viable. Currently, more than 740,000 higher-education faculty in the U.S. are categorized as part-time.[3]

I am the oldest of the three authors of this book. My field of specialization in graduate school and in my first teaching years was Early Modern/Renaissance literature, with a focus on Shakespeare.[4] Entering graduate school, obtaining the Ph.D., and being promoted to Associate Professor, I pretty much assumed that my professional writing and publishing would happen in my discipline—literature—with some sidesteps into creative writing, mostly poetry.[5]

At some point—that point coming in the early 1990s—I began to do research that overlapped with the social sciences, although it felt a natural fit: along with other writing, I began to look into the data on the use of poorly paid adjunct faculty to teach college courses. My own research on ‘part-timers’ emphasized gender. After all, I could see by looking around that the squads of composition teachers, including the one in which I taught in the 1980s, were mostly women. Yet somehow—despite advances of women in the job market and in white-collar professions including medicine and law, despite well-publicized movements of women in national politics—this openly apparent and tacitly accepted fact did not seem part of the national discourse about universities. National news media did not highlight the fact that even while women were getting an increasing number and proportion of the advanced degrees granted by universities every decade and almost every year, women also regularly formed most of the cohort of lower-tier college and university faculty known, all of a sudden, as adjuncts.

GLORIA ALLRED, WHERE ARE YOU?

At the time I began to try to do research on the use of poorly paid adjunct faculty, it was a more explosive topic and a less explicitly accepted practice than now. Adjunct faculty were not included in employment and demographics questionnaires for institutions until 1987.[6] Anecdotally I heard about a young woman assistant professor who was tasked with dealing with and representing adjunct faculty at her institution; the assignment effectively sabotaged her department tenure. Thus perhaps it was naive to be surprised, or puzzled, when this big picture seemed to be seldom faced head-on. But so it was, even in writing about the profession by scholars within the profession. Amid some intellectual fervor in the 1980s and in the 1990s over postmodernism, critical theory in general, particular theories, diversity and the construction of canons, and the humanities themselves, less attention went to the salient, nationwide, across-the-board characteristic of the newish or newly burgeoning ‘writing programs’—that they were staffed mostly by women, and that almost all of the faculty who staffed them were grotesquely underpaid, considering that this is college teaching we’re talking about. Many thousands of undergraduates were being taught by these people, the contingent faculty—adjuncts or grad-student T.A.s—for the first two years of their college life, especially in large public universities. You’d think this picture would be hard to overlook. It’s like the old Jerry Seinfeld stand-up joke about seeing women read articles on ‘where to meet men.’ "That’s why we get frustrated when we see women reading articles about where to meet men. —We’re here. —We’re everywhere."[7]

GAIL COLLINS, WHERE ARE YOU?

In programs staffed by adjuncts, of course, it was women who were all over the place, and often here in the sense that for a combination of work-life reasons they were often not at liberty to relocate. I published several peer-reviewed articles on ‘part-timers’ and the status of women in higher education faculty.[8] Comparing the picture then, in previous publications, and now, from further experience and observation, I find continuities and changes.

Before going into some of the changes, two continuities are paramount. One is that this is still college teaching we’re talking about, and most of the people who entered graduate school did so, in the first place, for reasons having at least something to do with education. (The period when male graduate students had an additional motivation, of not being drafted for Vietnam, is long past.) Most faculty teaching as adjuncts or part-timers do so out of dedication to teaching, specifically to teaching in colleges and universities. The other continuity is the ongoing use of adjuncts.

The continuities have generated the changes. Let’s boil this down. In college teaching in the United States today, there are three macros: compared to 1970, to 1985, or to 2000, there are a) more part-timers, b) more women, and c) flatter pay. All three of these patterns have developed over my adult lifetime. They all represent a noticeable change between the time I started college as a freshman, in fall 1966, and publication of this book in fall 2018.

A picture may be worth a thousand words. Three tables sum up and illustrate the three points mentioned—adjunct faculty (Fig. 1, pp. 4-5), gender in college teaching (Figs. 1 and 2, pp. 4-7), and flattening pay (Fig. 3, pp. 8-15).

a) Adjuncts

When I entered college as a thrilled-with-anticipation freshman, it was a proud boast at my alma mater that undergraduate courses at all levels, including first-year, were taught by professors. And they were. (The fact that Rice University made that statement suggests that other institutions did otherwise, and some did, especially after the influence of the Dartmouth Seminar of 1966 seeped through the universities.)[9] My own freshman and sophomore classes were not taught exclusively or primarily by grad student T.A.s, adjuncts, and other contingent faculty. While we were familiar with TAs during my school years, I do not recall ever hearing the word adjunct used to mean contingent faculty. (More likely, it would have been used along the lines of ‘The main dish is just an adjunct to the guacamole’.) Medical schools used practicing physicians as adjunct faculty extensively, well before the twentieth century, as did other professional schools. (Thorstein Veblen in 1918 described the medical and other professional schools themselves as adjuncts to the larger institution.)[10] University music departments hired adjunct faculty from the local symphony if they could. But my university did not have a med school or a law school attached, or a large music program. More importantly, the practice of substituting adjunct faculty for tenure-track faculty had simply not set in yet. My classes in the first two years were not relegated to implicitly second-tier status, at least not in my major field.

It is ironic in hindsight that that was partly because my major was English. A broader claim that ‘professors did the teaching’ in other fields would have to be qualified. In the humanities and in the social sciences, back then as now large lecture classes typically broke up into small-group tutorials—discussion sections—that met once a week, usually conducted by doctoral students, although the lectures were conducted by the professor. In the sciences, similarly, the laboratory hours were handled by ‘labbies,’ also usually graduate students, while the big lecture-format class meetings were led by the professor. But my freshman English class, like my freshman math class, was taught by a full-time tenured or tenure-track member of the department. The same was true of the Spanish class I took that year. Some language classes were taught by graduate students, but I happened to have a woman professor (one of two women professors I had as a freshman, outside of P.E., and an exception at the time). She went on to become one of the deans of the university.

The difference, or one difference, was that lower-division English, mathematics, and language classes were small to begin with. Then as now, they were generally not large lecture courses. More to the point—looking at differences between then and now—the practice of treating all freshman English classes as though they were subsections of one big class had not begun. In my own undergraduate experience, the professors teaching first-year English classes were expected to teach as they deemed appropriate—they were the professors in the classroom, after all—using texts of their choice. The texts were original books, not only textbooks; in the very good class I took, we read at a minimum poems, novellas, and novels, the latter including Pride and Prejudice and Light in August. There was time for discussion of the reading in class—this practice has now been re-named a ‘flipped classroom’—and time for writing papers connected to the reading, because the course ran a full academic year. A second full year of sophomore English was also required, and was also taught by the professoriate.

b) Gender

On the down side, I went through college and then through graduate school, getting the B.A. and then the Ph.D. in my chosen discipline of English literature, without ever having one woman professor. (My excellent high school English teacher was a woman, the wonderful, spirited, and encouraging Callie Law of Houston, who died in 2007 and whom I still miss.) Then, in about 1973 or 1974, the campus was visited by an ‘HEW enforcer,’ according to grad-student scuttlebutt—an official from the then-federal agency called the Department of Health, Education, and Welfare. For the first time in decades, the department hired a woman, one—count ’em, one—woman, as an Assistant Professor. (I was in graduate school but had finished course work, so I never had her as a teacher.) Among department grad students, one of the more senior profs was quoted at the time as joking, "Thank God we don’t have to do that for another twenty years!"

In courses outside my major, I did have a few female professors, during my four undergraduate years of six courses per semester. They were each excellent, in different teaching styles and in different course formats, and most of the particular women professors from whom I took classes were later promoted to become deans. But remarkably, as an English major, I never had one undergraduate or graduate English course taught by a woman. In the department where, and when, I went to school, there weren’t any.[11]

When I was in high school, we were told that the Ivy League schools were not open to women at the undergraduate level. Some had ‘sister schools’ for women undergraduates—Radcliffe for Harvard, Barnard for Columbia. Although the seven Ivy League institutions did have women in some graduate programs, some from early on, Yale and Princeton began to admit women as undergraduates only in 1969, Brown went co-ed in 1971, Dartmouth in 1972, and Harvard (fully) in 1977. Each move had impassioned support but was also met with hostility.[12] Columbia was the last of the Ivies to go co-ed, in 1981—nineteen years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964, or from another perspective forty-six years after Dorothy L. Sayers published her spectacular mystery novel set in a fictional women’s college at Oxford, Gaudy Night. (Women were included in the Civil Rights Act, in the first place, as a joke.[13] This intriguing historical fact later featured in the cartoon strip Ripley’s Believe It or Not.)

Needless to say, this picture has changed. Among the social and economic gains by women since the 1960s is the enormous demographic shift that more women began entering college rather than marrying right out of high school. (Women began entering college in significantly larger numbers especially in the years after the marriage deferment for military conscription ended, abruptly, on August 26, 1965.)[14] Bachelor’s degrees obtained by women more than doubled from 1960 to 1970. Now, women are the majority at the undergraduate level, and have been since 1982.[15] (At my own school, during the years I was an undergraduate, the undergraduate gender ratio was four-to-one male. I have never heard that the ratio was by design.) Five years later, women began obtaining the majority of master’s degrees, as the data in the table just cited also show. Women have gotten more master’s degrees than have men since 1987. Almost 60 percent of master’s degrees in the U.S. are obtained by women (up from 26 percent in 1910, to 39 percent in 1970, to 49 percent in 1985). Ten years later, women began obtaining the majority of doctor’s degrees. Now, about 52 percent of doctor’s degrees are obtained by women (up from 10 percent in 1970, to 34 percent in 1985, to 45 percent in 2000).

Since 1970, women have obtained