WOMEN FACULTY AGENCY: A CASE STUDY OF TWO UNIVERSITIES IN RUSSIA

Abstract

The purpose of the study was to explore professional and personal challenges experienced by women faculty in Russia and analyze organizational factors that influence their sense of agency. Expanding on O’Meara, Campbell & Terosky (2011) theoretical framework on agency, this research suggests differentiating two forms of agency experienced by women faculty in Russia, professional agency and personal agency.

Professional agency is shaped by a woman’s strong confidence in her capacity in professional fulfillment. Personal agency reflects a woman’s confidence to build relationships in her family that help her manage multiple roles in her personal and professional life, therefore, producing a strong mediating effect on professional agency perspectives and behavior and work satisfaction.

The use of structural equation modeling (SEM) revealed strong positive effects of organizational factors such as promotion procedures, collegiality, workload distribution policies and practices, resources and support, and work-family balance factor on women’s agency perspectives and behavior, and a strong effect of agency behavior on faculty outcomes such as academic rank promotion and leadership opportunities, research productivity and overall satisfaction with their careers. The SEM model did not find gender differences in the above relationships, suggesting that the effect of organizational factors on faculty agency and outcomes is significant regardless of gender.

Survey data also provided a broader picture of work environments of the two institutions and helped to gain understanding of which aspects of faculty work reveal significant differences by gender, rank, discipline, and type of institution, and whether women faculty in Russia feel more or less agentic than men faculty. In addition to pre-defined categories of organizational factors that influence faculty career, interviews with women faculty created space for emerging themes of issues shaping women experiences in their work environments and helped to identify what agentic perspectives and behaviors women faculty assume in their career that are pertinent to the Russian context.