Catholic universities across the United States are perceived as some of the most prestigious institutions of higher learning in the world. As communities of intellect and faith, they have been successful in educating generations of leaders in both the sacred and secular arenas. In the past forty years, they have also been subject to market forces which have forced a re-examination of their fundamental mission of the singular education of young men. Since the late 1960s these same institutions have admitted women undergraduate and graduate students and have seen an increase in the number of their women professors. Utilizing a qualitative research method, this study seeks to better ascertain the current milieu for women faculty members by examining issues of the experience of women scholars; institutional policies and practices which support of hinder the professional life of women faculty members; the role of scholarship, teaching, and service; the reltionship between women faculty members as a whole; and the articulation of the mission as it relates to diversity. Findings indicate that most university policies continue to favor the advancement of male faculty members; that the founding religious community exerts considerable influence over the programming of the university; that women faculty members engage in service but find their most significant intrinsic reward in the activity of teaching; that while most women faculty members cite the absence of a mentor for their own professional development, they find support in their relationships with other women faculty members on campus; and that women faculty members believe in the importance of the notion of diversity as a favorable attribute they rate particular and sincere outreach efforts as being ineffective.

Women faculty members have been reported rating their level of knowledge and experience in using technologies lower than male faculty members. A closer examination revealed that women faculty members were likely to use technologies that fit into their pedagogy, met students' learning styles and needs, and facilitated their interactions with colleagues and students. So women faculty's choices of particular technologies can be assumed to reflect their particular instructional beliefs and perspectives, represented as a connected approach to learning and teaching. Gender alone is inadequate to explain women faculty's use of technology. The purpose of this study was to explore women faculty's understanding of teacher-student, student-student, and student learning-life connections and how technology affects these connections. A theoretical framework called positionality is used, which approaches women not solely from their biological or psychological attributes but also from the contexts in which they are situated. The results of the study suggested that women faculty members exhibited a positional understanding of the teacher-student, student-student, and student learning-life connections. A positional consciousness was reflected in their use of strategies to promote these connections. Technology played a positional role in women faculty's effort to create connections. Women faculty's views and practices of "connection" and "technology" are better understood by the contexts in which they are situated rather than by their gender. Women faculty often assume multiple identities expressed from different positions within different contexts, which is reflected by the variations in their relationships with students, their different perceptions of their student relationship with each other, their different ways of promoting connections, and their different views and use of technology. Limitations of the current study, recommendations for future research, and practical implications are discussed.

In 2008, Women’s Studies in Communication released a special issue entitled “Conversations and Commentary on Redefining the Professor(iate): Valuing Commitments to Care and Career in Academe” where the authors discussed how a lack of support for multiple and competing roles related to care and career responsibilities negatively impacted the careers of women faculty members. Today, women faculty members still experience more challenges associated with advancement, tenure, and promotion compared to their male counterparts and are also more likely to leave academia as leaks in the pipeline. Previous research has demonstrated that these challenges are due to organizational barriers rather than individual choices and abilities (McMurtrie, 2013; Slaughter, 2012). As such, this study employs two theoretical frameworks to explore career challenges in more detail: structuration theory (Giddens 1979; 1984) and feminist intersectional theory (Crenshaw, 1988; 1989/1993; 1991). Coupled together, structuration theory and feminist intersectional theory enable the researcher to understand what structures enable and constrain tenure/promotion and care needs/responsibilities and to be critical of those structures and who they privilege along the way. Semi-structured interviews (n=49), in combination with document collection (n=433) and logging, were used to assess the organizational structure and the movement of participants through the structure. Analysis of the documents and interviews illustrate rules and resources that both enable and constrain tenure, promotion, and care work for female faculty.

The purpose of this study was to determine the job satisfaction levels of full-time women faculty at the 25 universities in Seoul. The findings of this study reveal that (a) women faculty are a diverse group; (b) women faculty are satisfied overall with such components of their jobs as their work, pay, supervision, co-workers, and job in general, but not with opportunities for promotion; and (c) the predictors of job satisfaction for women faculty are private or public institutional type, field of specialization in highest academic degree, origin of academic degrees, and academic rank.

Abstract Much warranted attention over the past few decades has been devoted to the problem of retaining women faculty in academe, particularly in areas where they poorly represented such as in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields. This study uses descriptive statistics and structural equation modeling techniques to test an existing model of general faculty departure intentions (Zhou & Volkwein, 2004) on three samples of faculty (a) women faculty, (b) women faculty in STEM, and (c) women faculty in non-STEM fields. Findings revealed that although several significant pathways to intention to leave for women faculty in STEM and in non-STEM fields were identified, the tested model is not an overall good fit of the data for any of the three samples, implying the need for new models of faculty departure intentions specifically for women in STEM and non-STEM disciplines. Implications for practice, theory, and future research are discussed.

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This dissertation examines the questions: “What are the experiences of Asian women faculty in the Canadian academy?” and “How do they navigate this space?” The study aims to generate new insights into how this understudied and underrepresented population negotiates various aspects of identity, such as gender, race, language and citizenship, as they pursue their academic careers. It provides an original examination of how “Asian” women faculty who have transnational life experience interpret the Canadian academy. Using a qualitative inquiry methodology with a transnational feminist perspective, I conducted in-depth interviews with nine Asian women faculty members in Canadian universities concerning their motivations, desires, contradictions, struggles, and coping strategies within their academic lives. Themes for the analysis arose from the literature, the conceptual framework, my own background and the data. Four major themes organize the analysis: 1) what impact the socially constructed discourse of Canadian citizenry has in the everyday lives of Asian women faculty and how “Asian-woman-ness” operates in the given contexts; 2) what technical difficulties and social barriers emerge from Asian women faculty’s experiences with spoken and written English language; 3) what “cultural logics” Asian women faculty utilize in order to survive/thrive in their social locations as Asian women in the Canadian academy; and 4) how Asian women faculty create their own legitimate space from their marginalized points of view. Through the dual process of their citizenry being de-legitimized in the academy and the nation-state, Asian women faculty strive to become legitimate through creating alternative understandings and definitions of their academic lives. This study was meant to initiate and promote reconfiguration of study on faculty’s lives by foregrounding the transnational feminist framework, which looks at/beyond the institutional, national and temporal borders and at the same time pays close attention to gender and race within the different types of borders. The study suggests that efforts to make higher education more diverse are more complex than some might imagine.

This dissertation examines the questions: “What are the experiences of Asian women faculty in the Canadian academy?” and “How do they navigate this space?” The study aims to generate new insights into how this understudied and underrepresented population negotiates various aspects of identity, such as gender, race, language and citizenship, as they pursue their academic careers. It provides an original examination of how “Asian” women faculty who have transnational life experience interpret the Canadian academy. Using a qualitative inquiry methodology with a transnational feminist perspective, I conducted in-depth interviews with nine Asian women faculty members in Canadian universities concerning their motivations, desires, contradictions, struggles, and coping strategies within their academic lives. Themes for the analysis arose from the literature, the conceptual framework, my own background and the data. Four major themes organize the analysis: 1) what impact the socially constructed discourse of Canadian citizenry has in the everyday lives of Asian women faculty and how “Asian-woman-ness” operates in the given contexts; 2) what technical difficulties and social barriers emerge from Asian women faculty’s experiences with spoken and written English language; 3) what “cultural logics” Asian women faculty utilize in order to survive/thrive in their social locations as Asian women in the Canadian academy; and 4) how Asian women faculty create their own legitimate space from their marginalized points of view. Through the dual process of their citizenry being de-legitimized in the academy and the nation-state, Asian women faculty strive to become legitimate through creating alternative understandings and definitions of their academic lives. This study was meant to initiate and promote reconfiguration of study on faculty’s lives by foregrounding the transnational feminist framework, which looks at/beyond the institutional, national and temporal borders and at the same time pays close attention to gender and race within the different types of borders. The study suggests that efforts to make higher education more diverse are more complex than some might imagine.