Unequal credit in academic collaboration has long been understood through the Matthew effect-more credit is given to already famous coauthors. The Matilda effect posits that women receive less credit than men, assumed to be riding collaborators' coattails. Analyzing 62 interviews that center women faculty of color contrasted with three same-rank colleagues (white women, men of color, and white men), we theorize the Maya effect: how unequal crediting for collaborative work is inseparable from both racialized and gendered oppression. The Maya effect theorizes not just the authorship end point, but also how inequalities arise in crediting output, illustrating how each stage of collaboration operates in gendered and racialized ways. Our narrative data holistically illustrate racialized and gendered patterns in collaboration at the stages of finding collaborators, maintaining collaboration, and crediting output of collaboration. We see racialized gender disparities in who can enter collaborations without fear of mistreatment, in silencing of ideas, and in how unequal crediting arises within ongoing research team interactions. The Maya effect is necessary to understand the meanings and mechanisms of inequality in collaborative work, and ultimately in whose knowledge is produced.

Despite much research on the immediate disparate impacts of COVID-19 on faculty members, less work considers longer-term disparities. We examine the continuing pandemic effects on faculty equity and inclusion. Survey data from before (2018) and after (2022) the acute pandemic period show a significant decline in faculty’s feelings of inclusion, controlling for gender and caregiving status, race, sexuality, rank, and field. On average, faculty feel that campus life has gotten worse since the pandemic. Controlling for demographic variables, faculty with health disadvantages feel more excluded. Interestingly, simply being a caregiver does not predict greater feelings of exclusion; however, faculty whose caregiving responsibilities took them away from work during the pandemic feel more excluded. Research on the continuing unequal effects of the pandemic is needed to address and improve feelings of inclusion, and thus to retain a more diverse faculty.

In her ASA presidential address, Misra calls for making solution-oriented, community-engaged, and participatory research more central in the discipline. She argues that solution-oriented work can strengthen the discipline, clarifying the promise and importance of sociology. She first discusses how sociologists engage in solution-oriented work that they communicate publicly. She then uses her collaborative work to suggest how to design research geared toward solving social problems. She emphasizes how feminist and decolonial methods that bring sociological researchers into collaborative and participatory partnerships with broader communities can develop transformative solutions, building communities of hope, justice, and joy. After discussing sociological approaches that empower communities, she emphasizes recognizing, valuing, and centering community-engaged research in the discipline.

Climate studies that measure equity and inclusion among faculty reveal widespread gender and race disparities in higher education. The chilly departmental climate that women and faculty of color experience is typically measured through university-wide surveys. Although inclusion plays out at the department level, research rarely focuses on departments. Drawing from 57 interviews with faculty in fourteen STEM departments, we compare experiences with inclusion among faculty in the same departments and rank who differ by race and gender. Drawing from theoretical frameworks of diverse learning environments and organizational sociology allows us to analyze the department as an organizational context. Analyzing multiple perspectives on the same departments reveals three types: inclusive, improving, and marginalizing. Department types vary on perceptions of representation, collegiality, and democratic leadership. Faculty across race and gender largely agree when they are in inclusive or marginalizing departments. In improving departments, there is greater disagreement. By focusing on faculty who share the same department and rank, but differ by race and gender, we identify key approaches leaders can take to create more inclusive departments. Our focus on the department level helps develop new insights about how inclusion operates in university settings.

Many studies document that faculty of color, and particularly women of color, find the academy unwelcoming. Yet research that centers intersectional understanding of the mechanisms leading to these inequalities is underdeveloped. We identify three context-dependent mechanisms of racial and gender disadvantage among faculty: active exclusion, overinclusion, and passive exclusion. Taking an explicitly intersectional approach that builds on relational inequality theory, our study focuses on 32 faculty of color, including 18 women and 14 men, comparing their experiences to 30 same-rank white departmental colleagues. Comparing the experiences of faculty who share the same rank and department but differ by race and gender provides a deeper understanding of how race and gender inequalities intersect and are shaped by organizational processes. Active exclusion involves the devaluation of BIPOC faculty's research, as well the barring of access to resources and positions. Overinclusion is characterized by the overreliance of the university on the labor of faculty of color, particularly women of color, without appropriate compensation. Finally, we conceptualize a more passive kind of exclusion, where BIPOC faculty are left out of collaborations, mentoring, and decision-making relative to white colleagues. Moving beyond rhetoric to disrupting racism in the academy requires addressing overinclusion, and both active and passive forms of exclusion.

Previous articleNext article No AccessSymposium: Changing WomenRevolution or Incursion? Academic Sociologists and Gender in the 21st Century1Joya MisraJoya MisraUniversity of Massachusetts, Amherst Search for more articles by this author PDFPDF PLUSFull Text Add to favoritesDownload CitationTrack CitationsPermissionsReprints Share onFacebookTwitterLinkedInRedditEmailPrint SectionsMoreDetailsFiguresReferencesCited by American Journal of Sociology Volume 129, Number 3November 2023 Article DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1086/728974 © 2023 The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.PDF download Crossref reports no articles citing this article.

Retail workers are strong in numbers, but union density is weak. Transformation of the retail sector is possible. Returning stability to these jobs would change the lives of millions of workers and their families. The retail labor process provides multiple points for resistance and mobilization to occur. Leveraging relationships between workers and with consumers are crucial tactics to help curb employers’ power.

In this essay, I lay out my motivations for doing publicly engaged sociology, emphasizing both the joys and the challenges of this work, and some of the key lessons that I have learned. I explore my attempts to impact policy at the federal level and the local level of my university, as well as efforts to shape changes across academia during the COVID‐19 crisis. I have found it meaningful to be working toward all of these changes. Moreover, making sense of the spaces that I inhabit, collecting data, exploring patterns, and connecting it to social theory, has deepened my thinking as a sociologist, and bettered my research more broadly.

Feminist scholars have long documented the complex, multiple ways in which academic institutions reproduce gender inequalities (National Academy of Sciences. National Academy of Engineering. & Institute of Medicine, 2007). In times of crisis, institutional commitments to diversity, equity, and inclusion may be sidelined (Tulshyan, 2020). Academia must enact responses to coronavirus disease (COVID-19) that retain and promote diverse women faculty who are already disadvantaged in their institution. This includes ensuring that structural shifts, such as policy changes, lead to deep, cultural change, embedding equity into the fabric of institutional norms and values. In this article, we outline a model for institutional change-the Thinking Ahead, Resource Provision, Evaluation, Equity (TREE) model-with the aim of informing diversity efforts in higher education more broadly during the pandemic.

In this paper, we theorize the intersectional gendered impacts of COVID-19 on faculty labor, with a particular focus on how institutions of higher education in the United States evaluate faculty labor amidst the COVID-19 transition and beyond. The pandemic has disrupted faculty research, teaching, and service in differential ways, having larger impacts on women faculty, faculty of color, and caregiving faculty in ways that further reflect the intersections of these groups. Universities have had to reconsider how evaluation occurs, given the impact of these disruptions on faculty careers. Through a case study of university pandemic responses in the United States, we summarize key components of how colleges and universities shifted evaluations of faculty labor in response to COVID-19, including suspending teaching evaluations, implementing tenure delays, and allowing for impact statements in faculty reviews. While most institutional responses recenter neoliberal principles of the ideal academic worker that is both gendered and racialized, a few universities have taken more innovative approaches to better attend to equity concerns. We conclude by suggesting a recalibration of the faculty evaluation system - one that maintains systematic faculty reviews and allows for academic freedom, but requires universities to take a more contextualized approach to evaluation in ways that center equity and inclusion for women faculty and faculty of color for the long term.