'Disparate effect' on women could end the tenure system.

Most research on tenure and gender explores why this career goal eludes women--why they disproportionately fail to make the grade. Elizabeth Mooney O'Callaghan expands the discussion by examining the tenure system through the lens of law, suggesting its disparate impact on women may make it illegal.

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She's a research assistant and PhD student in educational leadership and policy analysis at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. At the University of Nebraska's Women in Educational Leadership conference in Lincoln in October, she spoke on "Unintended Consequences: Considering Sex-based Discrimination in the Tenure Process."

Tenure holds a mystique for those on or aspiring to the tenure track. It holds out the promise of job security and freedom. Without it, whether on the tenure track or an adjunct, teachers risk being dumped at any time. They must to be careful what they say and to whom. Voicing unconventional ideas may cost them their jobs.

Her fellow graduate students see tenure as a personal career goal, achieved by individuals through a combination of effort and luck. "To think of tenure ethically, I had to start thinking about it differently," she told WIHE.

She decided to look at it from an institutional perspective. What does tenure look like as an employment practice? How does it compare to retention and promotion practices in other fields of employment? Stripped of its mystique and without the protective assumption that higher education is somehow different, how would tenure and its effects stand up under the law?

How tenure works--or doesn't