Women are four times more likely than men to believe they will be evaluated negatively for tenure, according to a survey of AEJMC members released Thursday.

Paula Poindexter, associate professor at the University of Texas at Austin, said the results came from a Web survey of 641 current and retired AEJMC members last spring.

Poindexter, who chairs the AEJMC Elected Standing Committee on Research, presented her findings at a plenary session Thursday. She was joined by two panelists who suggested ways to make the process more transparent.

“Because the review process is the backbone of publishing and tenure and promotion decisions, we thought it was essential to survey AEJMC members about their connections to this important activity that operates in secrecy,” Poindexter said.

Reponses to the survey showed that tenure was the most biased review process, followed by promotion.

Furthermore, while 80 percent reported that their institutions had written tenure standards, only 25 percent thought the standards were specific enough.

Molly Carnes, keynote speaker and a professor in the departments of internal medicine and industrial and systems engineering at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, shared her research about roadblocks facing women in the academy, such as receiving prestigious research awards, being hired into faculty positions and receiving tenure.

Carnes said unconscious assumptions about how women and men should behave are the main reasons women fall behind men in attaining leadership roles.

“The unconscious prescriptive assumption about elite leaders overlap with the prescriptive behavior of men,” Carnes said, which leaves women disadvantaged.

The fight for a fair promotion and tenure review process begins with confronting unconscious assumptions about gender roles.

“Gender-linked stereotypes are deeply embedded in the way we all think,” Carnes said.

The survey of AEJMC faculty also addressed the academic journal review process. When asked what most threatened the integrity of journal reviews, AEJMC faculty cited journal editors who did not know or care about their research interests.

Jack McLeod, professor emeritus at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, said the academic journal peer review process could be more efficient and more open.

“We cannot and should not completely remove [the review process] because it is central to academic freedom,” McLeod said. But he said improvements are needed.

“First we need to get better evidence of how [the review process] works,” McLeod said. In addition, McLeod said educators should focus on collecting new ideas like developing a code of ethical standards for reviewers, allowing authors to fill out evaluations of reviewers, and electing an ombudsman to handle author complaints.