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The secret life of Calvin's female professors
By Chinelo Onwualu
Staff Writer
The 2001 Gender Climate Study conducted on the campus revealed that women faculty felt that there were more advantages to being a male faculty member than to being a female. Of the college’s 32 percent female faculty, only 24 percent were tenured compared to nearly 60 percent of the male faculty.A survey conducted in 1999 by the Higher Education Research Institute at UCLA found that men rated their job satisfaction 10 percent higher than women.
Men also rated their opportunities for scholarly advancement nearly 18 percent higher than women. According to the Climate Study, nearly 40 percent of the tenured women faculty who planned on leaving cited their current parting to gender issues as one of their reasons for leaving and among tenure-track women who left, 62 percent blamed the gender atmosphere.
Such figures hardly paint a rosy picture of the college, but for the real women who live beneath the polls, the landscape is not quite so bleak. That is not to say that the life of a female faculty member is completely without its challenges. The premier issue facing women faculty at Calvin College today is balancing vast amounts of demands against a limited amount of time and energy.
The balancing act is especially difficult for female faculty with children.
“The demands of a scholarly career are front-loaded so that you have to do a lot of work in your early years and that is often at the same time that women are having children,” said Claudia Beversluis, dean of instruction and professor of psychology. She pointed out how hard it was to be a “great teacher, great scholar and [a] wonderful advisor” while trying to start a family.
Michelle Loyd-Paige, chairperson of the department of sociology, social work and criminal justice, noted that even among the most egalitarian households, women were still expected to assume childcare and household responsibilities which translated to extra burdens in addition to the classroom.
No one understands this better than Christina Van Dyke, a tenure-track professor in the Philosophy department and mother to a 5-year-old son. For Van Dyke, one of her biggest challenges was to “scale back” her expectations of herself.
“You can’t have it all,” said Van Dyke. “If you are publishing as though you don’t have children, when you do have children, either you’re killing yourself or you’re not spending enough time with your children.”
For others, the greatest demands on time came not from children but from service to the college.
“Lots of people do more than one thing,” said Susan Felch, director of the seminars in Christian scholarship and professor in the English department, “Faculty members are on lots of other committees but these committees take up a lot of time and the challenge is keeping that administrative piece from overwhelming the other parts.”
Both Felch and Loyd-Paige agreed that although the pool of tenured female professors is increasing, there are still a limited number of women in such positions. Thus, committees who wished to balance out their panels with a female member or director must choose from a fairly selective group.
“You’re more likely to do double duty as a female as opposed to a male,” said Loyd-Paige. “If a diverse team is needed, guess what? You’re needed!”
Jennifer Holberg, an Assistant Professor in the English Department agreed with the assessment.
“People want women to be involved in the life of the college and so sometimes we can be asked to do too much,” she said.
Another challenge for women faculty at Calvin College is the issue of respect and authority in the classroom. Many feel that they had to “prove themselves” more often in classroom settings than their male counterparts.
Beversluis believes that the Christian Reformed Church’s “mixed record” towards women in leadership may be another factor. Although the church supports women in leadership classis by classis, it does not support female ministers as a whole. She said the church’s ambivalence easily converts into a suspicion of women in academic positions.
Helen Sterk, director of the gender studies minor and CAS professor, felt that questions of authority manifested themselves in incongruous situations such as the titles students gave female professors: “Mrs.” and “Ms.” as opposed to the title “Dr.” which they more often assigned to men.
Loyd-Paige saw the respect issue manifested more in the ways female professors were perceived. Because women in the faculty were generally felt to be more sympathetic, there was a tendency to treat them more as “moms,” which could lead to their being seen as less professional. Also, the more conversational styles of teaching that women used could be interpreted as less organized than the lecture styles more often employed by male professors.
Despite these challenges, most of the female faculty agreed that Calvin College had made tremendous improvements.
“When I was a student here in ’74,” said Sterk, “it was possible to go through all four years without ever taking a woman.” But today, flexible schedules, reduced course loads and Calvin’s lack of what Beversluis calls a “publish or perish” approach has led to a growing number of female faculty members across the board.
But perhaps the simplest solution to the college’s gender issues may lie with the students, not the faculty.
“There’s nothing magical about female professors,” said Beversluis. “Get to know us. We are just real people who were inspired by somebody and hopefully are inspiring the young women in our classes. We need more people to become professors.”
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