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Abstract How to study inequality in innovation? Often, the focus has been gender gaps in patenting. Yet much is missing from our understanding of gendered inequality in innovation with this focus. This review discusses how gender and innovation are intertwined in durable academic inequalities and have implications for who is served by innovation. It summarizes research on gender and race gaps in academic entrepreneurship (including patenting), reasons for those longstanding inequities, and concludes with discussing why innovation gaps matter, including the need to think critically about academic commercialization. And while literature exists on gender gaps in academic entrepreneurship and race gaps in patenting, intersectional analyses of innovation are missing. Black feminist theorists have taught us that gender and race are overlapping and inseparable systems of oppression. We cannot accurately understand inequality in innovation without intersectionality, so this is a serious gap in current research. Intersectional research on gender and innovation is needed across epistemic approaches and methods. From understanding discrimination in academic entrepreneurship to bringing together critical analyses of racial capitalism and academic capitalism, there is much work to do. 

Abstract 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 arecalibrationof 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. 

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. 

Although on average women are underrepresented in academic science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) departments at universities, an under appreciated fact is that women’s representation varies widely across STEM disciplines. Past research is fairly silent on how local variations in gender composition impact faculty experiences. This study fills that gap. A survey of STEM departments at a large research university finds that women faculty in STEM are less professionally satisfied than male colleagues only if they are housed in departments where women are a small numeric minority. Gender differences in satisfaction are largest in departments with less than 25% women, smaller in departments with 25–35% women, and nonexistent in departments approaching 50% women. Gender differences in professional satisfaction in gender-unbalanced departments are mediated by women’s perception that their department’s climate is uncollegial, faculty governance is non-transparent, and gender relations are inequitable. Unfavorable department climates also predict retention risk for women in departments with few women, but not in departments closer to gender parity. Finally, faculty who find within-department mentors to be useful are more likely to have a favorable view of their department’s climate, which consequently predicts more professional satisfaction. Faculty gender and gender composition does not moderate these findings, suggesting that mentoring is equally effective for all faculty. Keywords: gender; STEM; climate; retention; faculty