The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints boasts an exciting and expansive doctrine regarding the relationship between men and women. That doctrine is not always emphasized, nor does it translate easily or consistently into practice at church-owned institutions and in meetinghouses. In its class “The Eternal Family,” the BYU-Provo School of Religion attempts to teach the doctrine on the relationship between the sexes to every student who attends the school. The natural question, then, is this: how are women faring in the BYU Religion Department? And are students catching the vision?
Our first thought was to look at student ratings of male professors versus female professors of religion at BYU. Since we do not have access to the institutional data on student ratings, we relied upon ratings from the website Rate My Professor. Of course, pulling data from this type of website is never going to give a completely accurate picture of any teacher or any department. But working with the resources at our disposal, we pulled the average student rating, difficulty rating, and ‘would take again’ rating for 77 teachers affiliated with the BYU Religion Department. [1] The weighted average for student ratings for female professors was 4.34/5, and the weighted average for male professors was 4.69/5. Student reviewers were slightly more likely to say that they would take another class from female professors with a rating of 0.83 to male professors’ average of 0.81. The difficulty rating between male and female professors was similarly small - 2.85/5 for women and 2.94/5 for men. So what did we find from this analysis? Across the board, the ratings for male and female professors were relatively close. Female professors received slightly lower ratings, which follows a pattern seen across the nation at religious and non-religious institutions. [2] Clearly, students do not have a serious or unique problem with female professors in the BYU Religion Department.
The average ratings culled from Rate My Professor are not the interesting finding in our study, however. Rather, it’s the number of ratings pulled from Rate My Professor that begin to tell a concerning story. Female professors attached to the BYU Religion Department received 813 reviews to male professors’ 8930 reviews. We were naturally curious as to why female professors receive less than 10% of the reviews. Are students less interested in reviewing a class taught by a female professor? No, it turns out there are simply far fewer female professors in the BYU Religion Department than men. From the faculty list on the website for the department, we find that there are 19 women and 76 men. Only 20% of all teachers in the Religion Department are women. And that is a historic high for BYU.
An 80:20 male to female ratio in a department is hardly unique at BYU, where such ratios are very common even outside the hard sciences and engineering. For example, the ratio in the Department of Economics is 88:12, and the ratio is 79:21 in the Department of Political Science. Furthermore, the ratios provided from economics and political science are the ratios of tenure track men to tenure track women. Put to that same comparison, the School of Religion falls to a ratio of 86:14. Of course, it could be argued the ratio doesn’t matter so much as the presence of both men and women in the department, and there are (a small minority of) women. Perhaps the professorial ratio need not match the student ratio, which is 49:51 male to female at BYU. But we are actually more concerned about the ratio in the Religion department than the Economics department. The BYU Religion Department is uniquely tasked with producing life-long committed members of the church who are capable, if given the opportunity, of forming healthy marriages and contributing to wards, communities, and nations with an understanding of the equal potential of the sons and daughters of God. The pattern for this orthodoxy is maintained and transferred to each new generation at BYU, and thus it absolutely matters that women are involved in the conveyance of that orthodoxy.
But this is not all that we found that was concerning. Even the disproportionate number of men versus women in the BYU Religion Department is not the most interesting finding of our study. More interesting than the ratio of men to women is the type of positions that those men and women occupy in the department. BYU has several types of teaching positions: Professor, Associate Professor, Assistant Professor, Teaching Professor, Associate Teaching Professor, Assistant Teaching Professor, Visiting Assistant Professor, Visiting Instructor, and Adjunct Instructor. Visiting and Adjunct positions are temporary, ad hoc positions that fill gaps in the teaching schedule of the department. These positions do not generally qualify for benefits or promotions and are paid at a significantly lower rate than the professorial track. Adjuncts have been called the modern day “serfs” of academia, and their pay often places them in poverty. [3] Adjuncts rarely move onto the tenure track at their associated institution. Of the 19 women in the BYU Religion Department, 12 are adjuncts. That is, 63% of all women in the BYU Religion Department are adjuncts. Whereas women make up 20% of all teaching positions, they fill 43% of all adjunct positions.
What of the remaining 37% of women? Of the seven women who are not adjuncts, 2 are full professors, 4 are associate professors, and 1 is an assistant professor. These numbers are also concerning because they portend a serious reduction in the number of tenure-track women in the School of Religion in the future. If BYU was looking to increase the number of female tenure track faculty in its School of Religion, the largest--not the smallest--number would be at the assistant professor level. Has the pool of tenurable LDS women in religion shrunk? That would be very strange for an academic field in which women’s participation is growing! [4]
What about the men? Of the 76 men in the department, only 16 are adjunct instructors (21%). 42 (55%) of the men in the department are on the standard tenure-track with full access to benefits, stability, promotion, and competitive pay. The remaining ten men are the exclusive members of the “teaching-track” option. Teaching professors can receive promotions, but because they are not expected to undertake research, are generally not paid as well as tenure-track faculty, and may not be permitted to teach graduate classes. However, they can receive BYU’s equivalent of tenure, which is called CFS (Continuing Faculty Status). [5] Thus, teaching professors have full access to benefits, career stability, promotion, and much better pay than adjunct professors. A teaching professor is a regular professor whose focus is on teaching instead of research. In sum, a teaching professor is simply at a vastly different level of prestige, pay, and stability than an adjunct instructor. It is hard not to be confused as to why all the teaching track professors in the religion department of BYU are men. And why does it seem the majority of women in the School of Religion are stuck in dead-end adjunct-hood? We would hate to think that the answer is found in money and prestige, since we are discussing BYU. But it is noteworthy that women are certainly welcome as secretaries and assistants in the School of Religion; in fact, they form the majority of that workforce. But in terms of teaching, it appears women are more welcome if they will accept less money, less prestige, less stability, and little to no chance for promotion as adjuncts. Men are far more likely to be given access to all those benefits in the all-male “teaching track.”
How does BYU explain these numbers? Certainly it is not that women are less interested in religion or job security or equitable pay. Is it that few women in the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints are pursuing doctorates in the fields from which the religion department draws its assistant professor hires? We have no figures on this, but national figures indicate that there are more women receiving doctorates in the United States than men, so this seems an unlikely explanation. [6] We know that in the last century, BYU did exhibit a preference against women professors, especially if their children were not yet grown. [7] There was a time when being a faculty member of the BYU religion department was seen as correlated with priesthood authority. If these mindsets have lingered into the present century, then perhaps women are still thought of as being more appropriately adjuncts and secretaries but not as tenure-track professors (read: serious authorities) of religion (or school presidents). We hope that is not the case, but the numbers we have presented are certainly concerning. The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints is the keeper of a remarkable doctrine that restores women to full equality with their brethren. It’s time for the BYU School of Religion to examine these numbers and decide whether its preaching, its mission, and its hiring practices are consistent.
NOTES:
[1] Only teachers with more than three ratings were included. Likewise, only teachers primarily affiliated with the Religion Department were included. [Back to manuscript].
[2] McNeil, Lillian, A. Driscoll, A. Hunt (2015) “What’s in a Name? Exposing Gender Bias in Student Ratings of Teaching,” Innovative Higher Education, August 40(4): 291-303. http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10755-014-9313-4
--- [Back to manuscript].
[3] https://www.nybooks.com/articles/2020/03/12/adjuncts-serfs-of-academe/ and https://www.aft.org/news/report-shows-alarming-poverty-among-adjunct-faculty --- [Back to manuscript].
[4] https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators/higher-education/gender-distribution-degrees-religion --- [Back to manuscript].
[5] BYU Rank and Status Policy. --- [Back to manuscript].
[6] https://www.aei.org/carpe-diem/women-earned-the-majority-of-doctoral-degrees-in-2020-for-the-12th-straight-year-and-outnumber-men-in-grad-school-148-to-100/#:~:text=Of%20the%2076%2C111%20doctoral%20degrees,more%20than%20113%20female%20graduates --- [Back to manuscript].
[7] See https://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleHudsonAncientScripture.html and https://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleCopeFronk.html --- [Back to manuscript].
Full Citation for this Article: Savannah Eccles Johnston & Samuel Johnston (2023) "Women & Religious Education At BYU," SquareTwo, Vol. 16 No. 3 (Fall 2023), http://squaretwo.org/Sq2ArticleJohnstonBYUEducation.html, accessed <give access date>.
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