There are more women in full-time faculty positions than 30 years ago but research institutions are still reluctant to hire women or pay them in parity with their male hires, according to an annual report by the American Association of University Professors released today.
The report, “AAUP Faculty Gender Equity Indicators 2006,” highlights data from individual schools for the first time in the hopes of generating on-campus dialogue on employment and salary inequities.
“We hope to move from a perspective of national diversity and equity to one of more local dialogue on campuses about these issues,” says Dr. Ann Higginbotham, professor of history at Eastern Connecticut State University and chair of the AAUP Committee on Women in the Academic Profession.
The report says that women have nearly reached parity and are 47 percent of tenured full-time faculty at community colleges. The number of tenured women faculty members decreases to a little more than one third at masters- and baccalaureate-degree granting colleges. But doctoral universities had only one-fourth of tenured faculty who are women. This means that full-time women faculty are only half as likely as men to have tenure, the report says.
Among historically Black colleges and universities that grant doctoral degrees, at Howard University, for instance, 32 percent of tenured faculty were women. That figure was lower at Auburn University, where 20 percent of tenured faculty were women.
