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Gender Inequities Persist on U.S. Campuses
By Leigh A. Neithardt
In 2004, thirty-two years after Congress passed Title IX prohibiting sex discrimination in education, women earned more than 50 percent of all graduate degrees awarded, but held only about 24 percent of all full professorships at four-year colleges and universities in the previous year, according to a report the AAUP released in October.
Gender Equity Indicators 2006 provides data on four measures of gender equity for faculty at more than 1,400 colleges and universities across the country. The four indicators, on which the report compares men and women, are employment status (full and part time); tenure status for fulltime faculty; promotion to full professor rank; and average salary for full-time faculty. The report includes an article titled “Organizing Around Gender Equity” by Martha West of the University of California–Davis, a consultant to the AAUP’s Committee on Women in the Academic Profession, and John Curtis, the AAUP’s research director; aggregate national tables for each of the four equity indicators by type of institution; and an appendix listing the four indicators for the individual colleges and universities in the report. Data are drawn primarily from the AAUP’s annual faculty compensation survey, with additional data on part-time faculty coming from the U.S. Department of Education.
“We hope the individual campus listings included in the report will help promote discussion of faculty gender equity at the local level, where the success of existing strategies to improve the situation of women academics can best be evaluated,” Curtis explains. “In this way, the AAUP aims to move discussions about the full participation of women as faculty members from the realm of abstract goals into concrete actions.”
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