AAUP Report Blames Colleges for Gender Inequity Among Professors
The Chronicle of Higher Education
Thursday, October 26, 2006
By ROBIN WILSON
The American Association of University Professors is scheduled to release a report today that establishes four indicators of "gender equity" within the professoriate, and offers a listing of how 1,445 colleges and universities measure up. [Click here to view report.]
The report, called "AAUP Faculty Gender Equity Indicators 2006," marks the first time that a detailed breakdown of the nation's professoriate by gender has been released for such a large group of higher-education institutions, said Martha S. West, a professor of law at the University of California at Davis who helped write the report. The hope, she said, is that colleges will look at where they stand relative to their peers, and take steps to improve if they fall short.
The issue at the heart of the report has been much discussed in academe. Women still represent a distinct minority of tenured and tenure-track faculty members, even though women earn more than half of all Ph.D.'s conferred on American citizens.
The AAUP does not offer any new arguments about why women are not being hired by academe at the rate they are earning doctoral degrees, nor does it propose novel solutions. But it does take a particularly hard line, blaming the institutions for the "accumulated disadvantages" it says women face in academe, and holding individual colleges accountable. "My attempt is to put the academy on notice," said Roger W. Bowen, general secretary of the AAUP. "We've got work to do."
"Women face more obstacles as faculty in higher education than they do as managers and directors in corporate America," according to the report. Women have not been "welcomed into the faculty ranks," says the report, and they confront an "inequitable hurdle" when it comes time to apply for tenure. If higher education continues hiring, offering tenure, and paying women at the same rate it does now, says the report, it will take decades for women to "reach parity."
John W. Curtis, director of research and public policy for the AAUP, said the organization was releasing the campus-by-campus data "so it wouldn't be so easy to say, Yes, there are some problems over all on this issue, but we're doing fine here." While that has been the response of many institutions, he said, "the overall numbers show there hasn't been that much progress, even if you look at the last 30 years."
The report says campuses can measure gender equity by looking at the following four indicators:
* The proportion of full-time faculty members who are female. Nationally, the report says, women constituted just 39 percent of full-time professors in the 2005-6 academic year, while making up 48 percent of the part-timers. The situation represents an inequity, the report says, because part-time positions typically pay less and have little job security.
* The percent of women within the tenured and tenure-track ranks. Women, it says, held 44.8 percent of tenure-track positions in 2005-6, and only 31 percent of the tenured positions.
* The proportion of women who are full professors. The report says that, at all types of institutions in 2005-6, women held, on average, just 24 percent of full professorships.
* The average salary of female faculty members compared with males. In 2005-6, says the report, female professors across all ranks earned, on average, just 81 percent of what men earned.
Better or Worse?
The report includes a campus-by-campus listing of how the 1,445 institutions -- including doctoral universities, master's institutions, baccalaureate colleges, and two-year colleges -- measure up on the four indicators. The data came from both the U.S. Education Department and an annual survey of faculty salaries that the AAUP completes each year.
The report also singles out institutions that are doing better than the national average -- and those that are doing worse. On the plus side, for example, it says that at Adelphi University 63 percent of tenure-track professors are female, compared with the national average of 44.8 percent.
Marcia G. Welsh, Adelphi's provost, said one reason for the high proportion is that many of the institution's professors work in areas that are female-dominated, including education, nursing, and social work. In addition, she said, the university has hired two-thirds of its 300 full-time faculty members in just the last six years, a step that has enabled it to take advantage of the female-heavy pool of recent Ph.D. recipients.
On the negative side, the report says that when it comes to the proportion of women within the tenured ranks, the University of Missouri at Rolla and North Dakota State University scrape the bottom of the rankings, with 8 percent and 10 percent women, respectively. The national average is 31 percent.
Mariesa L. Crow, dean of Rolla's School of Materials, Energy, and Earth Resources, said the university is heavily oriented toward science, engineering, and other technical fields. The small number of women within the tenured ranks at Rolla reflects the small proportion of women earning doctorates in those fields nationwide, she said. "In an ideal world, we'd have as many women going into technical fields as we have men," said Ms. Crow, "but I don't foresee that happening any time in the near future." She said the university had created a committee this year to look into the issue.
At North Dakota State, R. Craig Schnell, the provost, said he did not have a good explanation for why so few of the university's tenured faculty members are women. But he said that "it seems as soon as somebody gets hired, they leave, not necessarily for higher salaries, but for family reasons." The university has applied for a federal grant to study why so many women leave North Dakota State after earning tenure.
Geraldine L. Richmond, a professor of chemistry and materials science at the University of Oregon who has studied reasons for the lack of women in academic science, said the AAUP report provides a "take-home message" that faculty members who want to see change can use at their own institutions.
But George C. Leef, vice president for research at the John William Pope Center for Higher Education Policy, said it is not wise for anyone to focus on any particular goal when it comes to the gender makeup of the faculty. "We're talking about the results of thousands and thousands of individual decisions that people and institutions make, and each person, each institution, tries to make the most sensible decisions they can," he said of the hiring process in academe. "To expect that the results of this market process should conform to any particular person's view of equity, I think, is badly mistaken."
Piper Fogg contributed to this report.
