Higher Education
Women outpace men in college admissions and degrees, but lag behind men at all leadership levels.
According to the National Center for Education Statistics, the degree-granting post-secondary institutions (almost 4600 Colleges & Universities) in the United States employ a total of 1.5 million faculty members (53% full-time and 47% part-time). Their titles, and their influence within their institutions, range from Professors, Associate & Assistant Professors, Instructors, Lecturers, Adjunct & Interim Professors.
Of these full-time faculty members, 54% are male and 46% are female. These numbers hide the disparity at the top, however. For full Professors, just 33% are women and 67% are men (54% of the total are white men), while women are more than half of the lower-paid Assistant Professors, Instructors and Lecturers. The NCES also reports that 22% of female faculty are in non-tenure track positions, compared to only 16.8% of male faculty.
Mothers often face a “mommy track” or “baby penalty”. An article in the Chronicle of Higher Education identifies that PhDs in the sciences who are married women with children are 35% less likely than married men with children to attain a tenure-track position. Furthermore, female full professors earned less than their male counterparts in 2017: $98,524 vs $104,493, not to mention underearning at all faculty levels.
Marc Goulden, Karie Frasch, Mary Ann Mason, and The Center for American Progress, Staying Competitive: Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences (2009): p. 2.
American Association of University Professors, “Table 3: Average Salary for Men and Women Faculty, by Category, Affiliation, and Academic Rank, 2016–17 (Dollars),” Visualizing Change: The Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, 2016-17 (2017): p. 16
How about at the top? In the 30-year span from 1986 to 2016, women presidents of colleges and universities rose from just 10% to 30%. In the same 30 years, women have gone from 50% of undergraduates to 56% of 16.8 million total undergraduates in 2017. Furthermore, women now earn 53% of all doctorate degrees (PhDs), 57% of all Master’s degrees, and were nearly 58% of all graduate school enrollment in 2017. (Note: Women graduate students are overrepresented in fields such as Humanities, Biology, Health Sciences, Education, Social work, and Public Administration, and underrepresented in Business, Engineering, Math and Computer Sciences, Physics and Chemistry).
In 1970, the Carnegie Commission on Higher Education created the Carnegie Classification for US Colleges and Universities. The basic classifications identify Doctorate-granting Universities at the top, followed by those that grant Master’s degrees, Bachelor’s degrees, Associates degrees, and Special Focus degrees. The nation’s best known, and most prestigious universities tend to fall under the top group, with 130 Doctoral Universities classified as performing Very High Research Activity, 132 attracting High Research Activity, and another 161 conferring Doctoral and Professional degrees.
According to the American Council on Education, at this top level of Carnegie Type, men are 77% of University Presidents and women just 23%. Female presidents increase in inverse proportion to Carnegie type.
Furthermore, men are more likely to lead private institutions, are less likely to have “altered their career progression to care for others,” and serve longer on average as President than do women (6.8 years vs 5.8 years).
Times Higher Education reports that of the top 200 Universities worldwide, just 34 are run by women – 17%. The US universities on this list include three Ivy League schools – Penn, headed by political theorist Amy Gutmann since 2004 (with a contract running through 2022); Cornell, headed by AI researcher Martha Pollack since 2017 (previously provost of UMichigan), and Brown, headed by economist and public health expert Christina Paxson since 2012. Top Public universities headed by women on the Times list are UCBerkeley, headed by literature scholar Carol Christ since 2017 (and formerly President of Smith College for a decade); Univ of Washington, headed by psychology professor Ana Mari Cauce since 2015 (the university’s first permanent woman president, and first Latina president); and University of Wisconsin-Madison, headed by economist Rebecca Blank (after serving as acting secretary of commerce in the Obama administration).
[Note: Subsequent to the Times Higher Education report, Rebecca Blank was tapped to lead Northwestern University, but left after only a few months due to a cancer diagnosis. Amy Gutmann’s was replaced at Penn by Elizabeth ‘Liz’ Magill.]