Although women have surpassed men in degree attainment in many fields, women’s numbers in coveted tenure positions and leadership posts still lag behind.
During University of Miami President Donna Shalala’s first teaching job in the early 1970s at Bernard M. Baruch College of the City University of New York, her department chair extolled her teaching skills and prolific publishing.
He also signaled that her stellar performance didn’t really matter.“‘ We have never tenured a woman, and never will; [it’s] a bad investment,’” she recalls him saying.
Life for women in the academy is a different story now. Such explicit gender discrimination is uncommon these days. Today, women are 57 percent of undergraduates at U.S. colleges and they earn a majority of the doctorates awarded to U.S. citizens, according to a recent report by the Association of American Colleges and Universities.
However, women’s numbers in coveted tenure positions and leadership posts — while growing — still lag behind those of men. From the implementation of family-friendly policies to aggressive diversity initiatives, many universities are trying to change that. The American Association of University Professors reported in a 2006 study that women are being hired at higher numbers into nontenure- track positions where their prospects for promotion and salary hikes are limited. Women held just 31 percent of tenured faculty posts and 45 percent of tenure-track posts, according to the AAUP study.
Those numbers worsen for women the more prestigious the assignment, with women at doctoral-granting universities having significantly lower shares (26 percent) of tenured posts.
For the top jobs in academe, the prospects have been even drearier for women. Shalala, who has been president of the University of Miami since 2001, is a rarity. Just 23 percent of college and university presidents are women, according to the American Council on Education’s Center for Policy Analysis. It’s just 14 percent at doctoral universities.
