Participation on Committees

Chairing committees was examined as one proxy for measuring marginalization—not having decision-making power within the department. As a first step, a variable was created to reflect the proportion of committees chaired by considering committees served on (i. e., the numerator is the number of commit­tees chaired and the denominator is the number of committees served on, where the denominator is between zero and 9). Among the 1,063 faculty who served on at least one committee, 387 had chaired at least one committee. The variable was then dichotomized for faculty who participated on at least one committee into those who chaired at least one committee and those who chaired none of the committees on which they served. There was no significant difference between men and women in whether they chaired a committee on which they served (39 percent compared to 34 percent). An example of one of the committees reviewed is the chairing of undergraduate thesis committees. For this committee, there were disciplinary differences between male and female faculty in terms of chairing committees, with women chairing more committees than men in all fields except electrical engineering (see Appendix 4-5).