How Outside Letter Writers’ Gender Affects Faculty Promotion Odds

A new study finds that whether outside review letters were written by women or men was associated … [+] with differences in college faculty promotion and tenure decisions.

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Whether a man or a woman writes an external evaluation letter for a faculty member’s promotion and tenure dossier is linked to both the contents of the letter and the candidate’s chances for a favorable decision.

That’s one of the main takeaways from a newly published study in the journal Research Policy entitled, “Women advocates and men critics: How referees’ gender influences candidates’ likelihood of receiving a promotion.” It’s authored by Theodore Masters-Waage, Juan M. Madera, Ally St. Aubin, Joshua Ash, Ebenezer Edema-Sillo, and Christiane Spitzmueller.

The study is the latest in a series of investigations by the Center for Excellence in Faculty Advancement (CEFA) team, which has received funding from the National Science Foundation and the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to study the fairness and transparency of the faculty promotion and tenure process in higher education.

Promotion and tenure decisions are among the most critical personnel actions that any college or university will take. Cumulatively, they determine an academic department’s faculty structure and stature, and they ultimately advance (or hinder) an institution’s scholarly reputation.

At most institutions, the promotion and tenure process is meticulously delineated, but the influences of the individual elements in the process are not well understood. External review letters, written by experts in a candidate’s field, are often considered a dossier’s most critical, “make-or-break” determinant of whether a candidate is promoted or not. Although the validity of these all-important external review letters has been called into question, the letters themselves have rarely been scrutinized by rigorous research.

In contrast to other employment settings where direct supervisors determine promotions and career advancement, academic promotions are heavily influenced by the external review letters, which various university committees and administrators read before making their decisions. In these letters, typically solicited by a department chair, the evaluators provide a confidential assessment of the candidate’s trajectory, potential, and overall contribution as a scholar and educator.

The CEFA team was interested in learning how the gender of individuals writing the external review letters for promotion and tenure candidates might influence the contents of those letters as well as whether the gender of the letter writer was related to the ultimate outcomes for the candidates under evaluation.

Relying on social role theory, the authors hypothesized that the language in the external letters written by men and women would differ. According to this theory, traditional notions of masculinity are associated with the pursuit of goals, competition and personal achievement, while femininity is associated with affiliative goals, social orientation, and a desire for connection.

Based on that theoretical background, they predicted that letters written by women (vs. men) would be less likely to use pronouns referring to themselves and more likely to use pronouns referring to the candidates. They also expected that the overall tone of letters written by women — regardless of the gender of the candidate — would be more positive than letters written by men.

The authors also anticipated that women letter writers would use less of what they called “doubt language” — the kind of lukewarm, “damning with faint praise” characterizations that are notorious when evaluators are skeptical of a candidate’s merits, but don’t want to appear too overtly critical.

Finally, in terms of the bottom line, “up or out” question, they predicted that candidates who had a larger proportion of women (rather than men) letter writers would fare better in terms of a final P&T decision.

Method

The CEFA team scrutinized 10,056 external review letters submitted for P&T decisions at six research-intensive universities. The sample consisted of 1748 candidates (64% men) seeking promotion to Associate (n = 920; 62% men) or Full Professor (n = 828; 66% men) between 2015 and 2022.

The majority (72%) of the letter writers were men at the full professor rank (90%). The mean number of external letters per candidate was 6.25. On average, the letters were 1083 words in length.

The letters were analyzed using a computerized text analysis technique developed by James Pennebaker, a psychologist at the University of Texas. Called Linguistic Inquiry and Word Count (LIWC), Pennebaker’s tool allows a fine-grained analysis of different kinds of texts — letters, speeches, books, diaries — by detecting features such as emotional tone, confidence, and sincerity, as well as the analytical quality of writing.

Results

The authors found that the language in the evaluation letters confirmed most of their hypotheses. Women used personal pronouns (e.g., “I”, “me”, “myself”) significantly less often than men, while they were significantly more likely to use pronouns referring to others like “he/she.” The overall tone of letters written by women was more positive than those written by men, and the letters written by women (vs. men) contained significantly less doubt language.

But what about the money shot — were the actual votes for or against advancement associated with the proportion of women writing external review letters?

After controlling for candidate discipline, institution, the rank being promoted to, candidate demographics (such as minority status and gender), and scholarly productivity, the investigators found that while there were no differences in departmental votes, an increased proportion of women letter writers was associated with a lower negative vote percentage at the next stage in the process — the college level.

Most strikingly, at the provost level, typically the most critical step in the P&T process, a higher proportion of women letter writers was associated with a greater likelihood the candidate received a positive vote from the provost.

Regardless of whether these results are interpreted as suggesting that women lean toward advocacy in their evaluations of P&T candidates, or men trend toward being critics, they do highlight the subjective — even potentially biased — nature of the high-stakes promotion and tenure process.

And the results raise several questions. Imagine a situation with two equally credentialed candidates, one whose outside letters are all written by men, and the other where all the letters are authored by women. How different might the letters be? Might the final decision be affected by the gender mix?

Are there policy changes that should be made regarding the role of external reference letters in P&T decisions? Should department chairs be advised to seek gender balance in their solicitation of outside letters or at least avoid a pronounced tilt in one direction or the other?

I asked Christiane Spitzmueller, the corresponding author on the new study, about the implications of these new findings. She told me, “for a long time, psychologists have known about gender differences in language use but they have focused on how men and women write about themselves. Here, we show that these differences persist even when men and women evaluate other people, and the extreme consequences this can have on people’s careers. In academia, which relies heavily on external evaluations in promotion – and notably peer-review – these gender differences threaten the integrity of these processes.”

And she added this: “So while tenure is integral in protecting academic freedom on university campuses, the processes that determine who achieves tenure are in need of reform.”

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