Women, and particularly women of color, continue to face stubborn disparities in academia, according to a December data “snapshot” analysis by the American Association of University Professors.
The study relies on the most recent Integrated Postsecondary Education Data System (IPEDS) data from fall 2018 and compares it to research on faculty diversity fifteen years ago. It points to an ongoing gender gap in pay and both gender and racial disparities in academic rank.
“The story here is it’s more of the same,” said Glenn T. Colby, senior research officer at the American Association of University Professors. “The numbers have been pretty flat for years.”
The report found that salaries for full-time female faculty members are about 81.2% of their male counterparts’, with women earning $79,368 and men earning $97,738 per year on average. (The IPEDS data lacks salary data disaggregated by race.)
Meanwhile, both women faculty and faculty of color are underrepresented in academia’s highest faculty positions – and overrepresented in its more precarious ones. While women make up 46.7% of full-time faculty overall, among tenure and tenure-track professors, the higher the rank, the lower the percentage of women. Female faculty make up 50% of assistant professors, 45% of associate professors and only 32.5% of full professors with tenure.
Underrepresented faculty, meanwhile, make up a mere 12.9% of full-time faculty members, despite making up 32.6% of the US population. To break it down further, only 5.2% of full-time faculty members self-identify as Hispanic or Latinx and 6% identify as Black or African American, even though they’re 17.5% and 12.7% of the country’s population, respectively.
Those trends – and their intersections – are troubling to Dr. Rana M. Jaleel, assistant professor of gender, sexuality and women’s studies at the University of California, Davis, but they’re not surprising.
