In Their Own Words: Social Work Faculty and Work Inequity

Background and Purpose:  Achieving equal opportunity, equity and justice in paid work continues to be a struggle for women. To follow-up Sakamoto, McPhail, Anastas, & Colarossi (2008), a recent unpublished national survey was completed on the academic climate for social work educators, with questions in areas of work-life climate, discrimination and harassment, leadership, job satisfaction, workload, and salary.  For greater depth of understanding, the survey’s final comments were analyzed.  Too often an open-ended final question on a survey is not fully analyzed (O’Cathain and Thomas, 2004).  Yet, having a general open-ended question allows participants the chance to give more details on survey areas and on any issue not included in the survey.  Ignoring that data or treating it as an afterthought is disrespectful to those who provided considerable thought and time on an important issue.  In this case, the depth, force, and amount of comments in the national survey provided substantial data to be evaluated, and thus, required a separate analysis and write up.

Methods:  Qualitative data was collected from the comments at the end of a 115 question national survey on the academic climate for social work educators.  The survey used a stratified random sample, derived from all CSWE-accredited programs yielding an n=535 (21% response rate).  Of those 535 participants, 215 provided a response to the final, open-ended question: “Please use the space below to write any final thoughts about your experience as a social work educator (in regard to climate, workplace culture, satisfaction, burnout).”  Those comments were collected verbatim, placed in a word document, and provided to two independent reviewers not associated with the survey or quantitative data collection for test reliability.  The reviewers were instructed on content analysis and asked to read the comments, devise their own coding frame for common themes, and assign those codes to all comments (Patton, 2001).  Both reviewers came up with the same seven themes and one reviewer had two additional themes. 

Results:  Six themes found by both reviewers lined up with the survey questions:  Work environment, harassment/ discrimination, positive job satisfaction, salary differences, and workload differences and burnout.  Three unique themes were differing thoughts on men and women in the profession, leadership issues within the academy, and the research and/or survey itself.  Overall, the comments corroborated findings from the survey but also provided a greater depth of the frustration expressed by female participants.  In analysis of lines of text, comments ranged from one sentence to 50 lines!  Several respondents relayed entire stories or examples of inequity and discrimination that they have faced.  The average comments were close to 7 lines. 

Conclusion and Implications:  Findings both reinforced the results of the survey, and provided greater insight into the repercussions of unaddressed inequality and discrimination in the social work academy.  The need for continued collection of gender specific data is demonstrated to dispel the fallacy that women are enjoying work equity simply by being in a female majority field.  Addressing work inequality in the social work academy should remain a priority.