The surveys of academic departments and faculty have yielded interesting and sometimes surprising findings. For the most part, men and women faculty in science, engineering, and mathematics have enjoyed comparable opportunities within the university, and gender does not appear to have been a factor in a number of important career transitions and outcomes. The findings below provide key insights on gender differences in Academic Hiring (Chapter 3), Climate,
Institutional Resources, Professional Activities, and Outcomes (Chapter 4), and Tenure and Promotion (Chapter 5). Complete findings in each of these areas can be found at the end of the relevant chapter and are summarized in Chapter 6.
As a foundation for understanding the survey findings, it is important to remember that although women represent an increasing share of science, mathematics, and engineering faculty, they continue to be underrepresented in many of those disciplines. While the percent of women among faculty in scientific and engineering overall increased significantly from 1995 through 2003, the degree of representation varied substantially by discipline, and there remained disciplines where the percentage of women was significantly lower than the percentage of men. Table S-1 shows the percent of women faculty in selected scientific and engineering disciplines during this time period at the assistant, associate, and full professor levels.
In 2003, women comprised 20 percent of the full-time employed S&E workforce and had slowly gained ground compared to men in the full-time academic workforce; by 2003, they represented about 25 percent of academics. Women’s representation in the academic workforce, of course, varied by discipline: in the health sciences, women were the majority of full-time, employed doctorates, while in engineering they were less than 10 percent. The greatest concentration of women among full-time academics was at medical schools; the lowest was at Research II institutions.