On average, women faculty take on more childcare responsibilities, posing barriers to career success. Work-family policies represent one solution for advancing gender equity in academia as they support parents after childbirth with benefits for children, employees, and organizations. We contribute to understanding how the availability and use of dependent care policies (paid parental leave and childcare benefits) relate to long-term research productivity trends. Based on the work-home resources model, we theorize that policy availability provides contextual resources and policy use provides personal resources, leading to improvements in an individual's research productivity after they have a child. We also examine potential gender differences in the effect of dependent care policies on research productivity trends. We leverage n = 6945 yearly top publications and h-index observations for 386 business professors from 108 universities. Consistent with our hypotheses, the availability and use of paid parental leave and childcare benefits were associated with increased research productivity trends, though the effects depend on birth order, policy, and gender to some extent. Our findings have considerable theoretical and practical implications for organizations and society.

We examine validity and bias in external review letters (ERLs) in academic settings. ERLs play a critical role in promotion and tenure (P&T) decisions across the globe, ending careers in some cases while allowing other scientists' careers to flourish. We coded and analyzed 995 ERLs submitted by letter writers at various institutions as part of the P&T portfolios of 195 candidates at an R1 university. We examined their relationship with P&T committees' percent of positive votes by department, college, and university committees. We investigated how ERL linguistic features, letter writer characteristics, and candidate characteristics (productivity and gender) relate to P&T decision-making. Results show writer characteristics are more strongly related than candidate characteristics to ERL linguistic features associated with P&T decisions at the department and university levels. We develop recommendations for policymakers, including changes in the use of ERLs for the P&T process. © 2023

Underrepresented minority (URM) faculty face challenges in many domains of academia, from university admissions to grant applications. We examine whether this translates to promotion and tenure (P&T) decisions. Data from five US universities on 1,571 faculty members' P&T decisions show that URM faculty received 7% more negative votes and were 44% less likely to receive unanimous votes from P&T committees. A double standard in how scholarly productivity is rewarded is also observed, with below-average h-indexes being judged more harshly for URM faculty than for non-URM faculty. This relationship is amplified for faculty with intersectional backgrounds, especially URM women. The differential treatment of URM women was mitigated when external reviewers highlighted candidates' scholarship more in their review letters. In sum, the results support the double standard hypothesis and provide evidence that different outcomes in P&T decision-making processes contribute to the sustained underrepresentation of URM faculty in tenured faculty positions. Masters-Waage et al. report that underrepresented minority (URM) faculty in the USA face barriers in the promotion and tenure process, receiving more negative votes and fewer unanimous positive decisions at the college level. This is partly due to a double standard: URM faculty are held to a higher standard than non-URM faculty in terms of scholarly productivity.