Playing by the Rules and Getting Nowhere: Women of Color Faculty in STEM, and Expectations for Promotion

ABSTRACT

Clarity of promotion criteria and clarity of how promotion criteria are applied are important factors that shape faculty career advancement. Within a gendered and racialized organization, performance evaluation processes, and decision‐making processes regarding tenure are susceptible to gender and race biases that influence faculty's chances of achieving tenure, and their ability of understanding the requirements for achieving tenure. STEM fields are particularly gendered and racialized spaces wherein Women of Color faculty encounter intersectional barriers. This review examines recent research about how Women of Color in academic STEM fields experience the promotion processes and practices that affect their workload, and their chances of achieving tenure, through the lens of neoliberal, gendered and racialized academia frameworks. Hidden and shifting promotion standards, biases in decision‐making, unfair service load that work against Women of Color career progression are some of the main themes reviewed. The emerging epistemic exclusion theme calls for future inquiries to analyze academia not only as a gendered, and racialized institution, but also an ethnicized one. Policy recommendations regarding making promotion processes clearer and fairer, and recommendations for future research in the area are discussed.