How to avoid putting women faculty in a double bind.

Does your department follow hiring, salary and promotion practices that put women in a double bind? Most people want to be fair, but practices that seem gender-neutral can hurt women because of subtle differences in expectations or disparate impacts.

Enlightened feminists don't automatically shed ingrained stereotypes, based in part on reality. Assuming mothers value their kids as much as their jobs has some basis in fact. Fathers may too, but there's no such cultural assumption. How does it play out when parents occasionally bring the kids to the office? Colleagues praise a mom's choice of work-life balance over career ambition. They rate the dad a responsible good guy who may some day be a college president.

Departments that want to be fair must monitor their treatment of women and men in ways superficially unrelated to gender. Here are some areas to watch.

Evaluating collaboration

Hiring, tenure and promotion decisions rest heavily on the candidate's list of publications and conference papers. As collaborative research moves toward the norm in some fields, women don't share the benefits.

"When men write with others, it can be taken as evidence of desirable collaboration. When women are joint authors, they may be characterized as coasting on the work of others, be they graduate students or senior scholars," wrote the anonymous authors of "Tenure in a Chilly Climate" (American Political Science Association, PS: Political Science and Politics, March 1999), citing Bonnie Fisher et al, "How Many Authors Does It Take to Publish an Article?" (PS, December 1998).

Psychologist Rhea Steinpreis confirmed that result when she and her students sent CV's that were identical except for the name at the top--"Karen Miller" or "Brian Miller"--to psychology faculty nationwide for comment. (WIHE December 2000) "Brian" got higher marks overall, while respondents made notes about "Karen" such as, "I would need to see evidence that she had gotten these grants and publications on her own."