Skip to content

People who do more work get promoted more?

Well, fancy that!

Much of the sector has yet to address the crucial issue of quantity versus quality when it comes to research. At present, those who take parental leave (almost always women) are disadvantaged by a system that places value on the number of publications on a CV. As long as quantity remains the touchstone of achievement in so many institutions, there will never be equality of opportunity.

13 thoughts on “People who do more work get promoted more?”

  1. As we saw with the junior doctors’ contract, full pay & promotion is the new Overton Window on discrimination against women in the workplace.

  2. And so the campaign to enable women top have it all via legislation continues.

    The fact that it would inevitably screw men over is neither here nor there…

  3. If you put in X number of front-line hours you will get promoted. What’s discriminatory about that? Just because some people take 40 years to put in X number of hours and some people take 20 years to put in X number of hours. Why should somebody get promoted after 20 years if they’ve only put in 1/2X hours?

    If you install one cooker I’ll pay you X. If you want more than X, install more than one cooker.

  4. If you pay people by the number of papers, the number of papers go up and we claim to have the most productive academia.

    If you judge quality by citations, it defines the customer as other academics and people game play by swapping citations and we claim to have the highest quality of papers.

    Incentives inaction.

  5. bloke in france

    Intelligent people on appointment committees do stupid things. They measure quantity not quality, the ability to schmooze your chosen peer reviewer, etc. Also names later than L tend to get dropped in future references, so professorships are increasingly biased alphabetically.
    At least women have options when it comes to this last one.

  6. The fact that it would inevitably screw men over is neither here nor there…

    Don’t be too sure it’s not a bug, but a feature

  7. Bloke in North Dorset

    But isn’t peer review the be all and all of quality? That seems to be the answer every time climate change science is questioned.

  8. So Much For Subtlety

    Off Topic, but a feminist publisher attached to the City University of New York is being sued for wrongful termination.

    Their in-coming bisexual (ie cynical exploiter of beta males) executive decided the press was too Lesbian and fired one of their harder core Lesbian employees:

    http://theothermccain.com/2016/05/02/lawsuit-says-feminist-jenniferbedbaum-fired-employee-in-purge-of-lesbians/

    I am with Kissinger. The only downside is that they all can’t lose. But in the shorter term, I guess I am with the lesbian separatist only because I don’t know anything about her.

  9. So Much For Subtlety

    Bloke in North Dorset – “But isn’t peer review the be all and all of quality? That seems to be the answer every time climate change science is questioned.”

    In the sciences perhaps. In the Arts and humanities? There is nothing that is so pathetic that someone won’t publish it.

    As long as it is politically correct. See the Sokal Hoax.

  10. The single women I knew who were promoted in the universities were well worth it. The married women with children … harder to be confident of that. My guess is that the single girls were promoted on roughly the same criteria as men whereas sometimes allowances were made for the mummies. Probably the wrong allowances: allowing for less output might have made sense, but promoting someone who seemed to lack the required standard of output, just because she was a mother, seemed daft to me.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *