Focus Groups
GEARS Focus Group Report 2023 FINAL
Abstract: This report summarizes the WSU-GEARS data collection via eight focus groups with 29 tenure-track/tenure women faculty members across the ranks of assistant, associate, and full professor in STEM and non-STEM fields at Wayne State University regarding their experiences with the three barriers of hidden and unequal workload, work/family/life strains, and toxic work environment. The focus groups were conducted online between February and March 2022. Findings showed repeated and long-standing issues. Regarding workload, participants pointed to an inequitable distribution of workload regarding the quantity of teaching, the size of classes, time spent on real mentoring of graduate students and advising, and non-promotable or low promotable service tasks on and beyond committees. They noted a lack of tools at the department, college, and university level to efficiently address, monitor, and correct workload inequities. Regarding work/family/life strains, participants spoke of a lack of consistent leave policy implementation for care work, a lack of support for childcare, and a lack of recognizing care work beyond children and parents. In terms of toxic work environment, participants talked consistently about a culture that tolerates and even enables perpetrators of sexism, racism, and other hostile behaviors, and a lack of effective ways to hold perpetrators accountable. Participants pointed to a system that rewards perpetrators by reducing their service workload (e.g., committees) or eliminated student advising/mentoring to avoid problematic colleague’s behaviors, leading to a burdening of other faculty members picking up their work. Moreover, across the three barriers, participants brought up the dependency on chairs and the lack of university-wide policies to guarantee minimum agreements beyond a chairs’ helpful or not helpful attitudes and behaviors to address issues of hidden and unequal workloads, work/family/life strains, and toxic work environment.
The focus group data collected provided valuable insights into the experiences of 29 women faculty members who are on the tenure track or are tenured at Wayne State University. The conversations with them in eight focus groups conducted online via Zoom from February to May 2022 showed repeated and long-standing issues regarding hidden and equal workloads, work/family/life strains, and toxic work environments at WSU. You can read about the experiences of women faculty in the report. Some example quotes are provided below.
Workload:
“It’s also post-promotion [that] the demands on the service outside of the university tend to grow, right…I’m now chairing several professional groups and things like that. That is a huge chunk of time. And it’s also national or international service. So, the domestic service might have stayed at the same level, but the service outside of the university has gone up.” (Associate professor, STEM)
Work/Family/Life Strains:
“I’ve had to find daycare solutions, none of which were ever provided by Wayne. It was always my problem. It’s not that I expected it to be Wayne’s problem; I’m just saying that’s the way that it has worked. Being a parent became much harder when the pandemic hit. I don’t think my unit has had any understanding of how hard the pandemic hit parents.” (Full Professor, STEM)
Toxic Work Environment:
“[H]iring decisions have been opportunities for faculty to say and make decisions that have racist and sexist assumptions under them about whose work is important and why. And I think that it is linked to other forms of control over resources and the department.” (Associate Professor, STEM)