Bias and ‘professionalism’
Kerry F. Crawford and Leah C. Windsor
The term ‘professionalism’, broadly speaking, refers to the behaviours, practices, and skills we consider acceptable for individuals in a particular field. On the surface, this is fairly innocuous. Dig a little more deeply and you’ll find that we all have implicit assumptions about professionalism. Who comes to mind when you consider the term ‘professional’? What are they wearing? What do they sound like when they speak? What is their demeanor? Our shared understandings of professionalism are rooted in our society’s expectations for who counts as a professional.
Picture a professional
In the 1960s and 1970s, school children who were asked to draw a scientist were more likely to draw a picture of a man (99%). In later waves from the mid-1980s through the mid-2010s, only 72% drew a man. Others have shown that when asked to draw a leader, children overwhelmingly draw men. Leadership stereotypes are highly gendered: men are rewarded for decisiveness — even cruelty and brutality in executing decisions — whereas women are penalized for being too aggressive. Men are praised for notable instances of compassion or showing their humanity, while women are punished for being unprofessional. During the work-from-home arrangements forced by the COVID-19 pandemic, women have struggled professionally — and personally — to maintain balance between their work, educating and caring for children and keeping up with (or sharing, or delegating) housework activities.
The stereotypical image of the tweed-clad gentleman scholar locked away with his thoughts in a quiet office may accurately depict some of our colleagues, but it is not a reflection of the 21st century academy as a whole. First generation scholars, BIPOC scholars, women scholars, LGBTQ+ scholars, parent scholars, and scholars who identify as members of more than one of these groups make up a sizable portion of the professoriate. Scholars face demands on their time that reach beyond campus, as well as competing demands within it. It’s time to update our image of the scholar and of professionalism.
So much about our understanding of professionalism stems not only from societal norms surrounding etiquette and manners, but from bias and expectations related to gender, race, parental status, socio-economic status, and the workplace. The tricky thing about implicit bias is that we usually don’t know we have it, so it is nearly impossible to erase and its effects can be difficult to mitigate. An essential first step is to recognize when we hold biased perspectives and to consider ways to circumvent them. When our assumptions about professionalism associate an image of a particular type of person with the traits we prize most in our field, they are damaging to our students, colleagues, and job candidates who don’t fit the mold.
The impacts of exclusion
There are different standards for professionalism based on gender and this is highly problematic. Take, for example, research that demonstrates students’ tendency to rate women+ and POC instructors lower than white men+ instructors on teaching evaluations. In positive and negative evaluations alike, students often offer commentary on their women+ instructors’ attire, tone of voice, parental status, physical appearance, and ‘likeability’. Evaluations of POC instructors are often indicative of societal racism and ethnic prejudice. These damaging evaluations affect prospects for employment, tenure, promotion and salary increases when departments and campuses take the data at face value and fail to interrogate the biases underlying the results.
Use of parental leave and family-friendly accommodations offers another illustration. In our research on the academic chutes and ladders we found that access and ability to negotiate parental leave and accommodations varies widely across and within institutions. It is also clear that use of parental leave can vary along gender lines, with some men+ parents using parental leave to boost research productivity or go on the job market to secure a better position. For someone who has given birth, there is little to no room for professional advancement during the postpartum recovery period. Nevertheless, many respondents indicated that they lacked parental leave and returned to the classroom shortly after giving birth. What do these variations in circumstance tell us about professional expectations in the academy? We call for a more humane approach to the profession, one that recognizes and supports scholars as people with lives and obligations outside of campus, as well as promise and strengths within it.
Women+ graduate students on the academic job market are often advised to remove their wedding bands, avoid referencing partners or children, and give the impression that they are not weighed down by familial and personal commitments that could detract from the ‘life of the mind’. To the extent that job candidates adhere to this advice, they are forced to present a false version of themselves in an effort to fit in with a narrow perception of what constitutes professionalism in the academy. In other words, we ask all prospective faculty to act as if they are unencumbered men. We have little hope of diversifying the professoriate and making the academic profession more inclusive and accessible if we ask job candidates to hide important aspects of their lives and identities.
COVID-19 and professionalism
The COVID-19 pandemic is reshaping traditional notions of the professional workplace. ‘Work-life balance’ has always been a myth; everything is life, much of it is work, and there is no such thing as consistent balance. Any semblance of division between the different aspects of our lives dissolved in March 2020. As we’ve shifted into virtual ways of teaching, researching, and meeting, we’ve invited (begrudgingly, perhaps) our students and colleagues into our homes, erasing any remnants of work-life separation. Academic parents, especially mothers and those with very young children at home and out of their school routines, have lost hours of research time each day.
The past year has taught us that the personal is professional. It has shown that our notions of professionalism are deeply flawed. Women+ in the academy confront bias on multiple fronts. What does professionalism really look like? What does the academy value among its work force? Our profession needed to confront these questions before the COVID-19 pandemic, and the need to do so is more urgent as we approach the anniversary of the abrupt transition to working virtually often in the presence of our pets and young children.
Kerry F. Crawford is an Associate Professor of Political Science at James Madison University in Virginia. Her research and teaching focuses on International Relations, human security, gender in war and peace, and parenthood in the academy.
Leah Windsor is a Research Assistant Professor in the Institute for Intelligent Systems at The University of Memphis and runs the Languages Across Cultures lab. She studies linguistic aspects of political communication in international relations, and gender and bias in family formation in academia.
Together they co-authored the forthcoming book, The PhD Parenthood Trap: Gender, Bias, and the Elusive Work-Family Balance in Academia, published by Georgetown University Press.
This blogpost is part of the ‘Women, Gender and Representation in IR’ series International Affairs is curating as part of the 50:50 initiative. If you are interested in engaging with this initiative or want to write a blogpost for this series, please email International Affairs’ Editorial Assistant Joseph Hills at jhills@chathamhouse.org.
All views expressed are individual not institutional.
