Our faculty survey also asked respondents how many undergraduate courses they were teaching in the current term/semester. In general, answers ranged from zero to two. There were no significant differences in the average number of undergraduate courses men and women were teaching (men, 0.83 courses; women, 0.82 courses; see Appendix 4-1). The NSOPF :04 data presented a similar picture, with a lower average number of undergraduate courses for women (men, 0.7 courses; women, 0.6 courses).
Looking at each of the six disciplines we surveyed, men were teaching marginally more undergraduate courses than women in electrical engineering; none of the other fields had significant differences between men and women. In the NSOPF:04 data, there were no significant gender differences in the teaching of undergraduate courses in the biological sciences, physical sciences, mathematics, and computer science. (There were too few cases to do this analysis for engineering faculty.)
The above analyses were repeated for graduate courses. Faculty teach fewer graduate courses, so here the distinction is between faculty who were doing no
graduate teaching in the current term or semester and faculty who were doing some graduate teaching in the current term or semester. There was no significant difference found between men and women in terms of whether they were teaching graduate courses in our data (percent doing no graduate teaching: men, 50.8; women, 54.9; see Appendix 4-2.) or in the NSOPF:04 data (percent doing no graduate teaching: men, 46.8; women, 47.3).
There was no significant difference in any of the six fields we surveyed between men and women faculty in terms of whether they are teaching graduate courses. The data approaches significance in physics, where men are less likely to be teaching graduate courses than women. We conducted a similar analysis of the NSOPF:04 data and found that men were significantly more likely to be teaching graduate courses in the biological sciences (men, 65.8 percent; women, 59.7 percent) and in the physical sciences (men, 37.3 percent; women, 29.6 percent). In mathematics and computer science, there was no significant difference between men and women in terms of whether they taught graduate courses (men, 52.9 percent; women, 55.4 percent). (There were too few cases to conduct this analysis for engineering faculty.)
Finally, we explored whether gender is associated with the number of graduate thesis or honor thesis committees on which a faculty member serves. These data are shown in Appendix 4-6, and from the table, we see that the number of thesis committees on which faculty report serving is quite variable, ranging from zero all the way to 30. There appear to be some differences between men and women in terms of the numbers of committees on which they serve, but these differences appear to vary by discipline.[62] The NSOPF:04 asked faculty how many hours they spent on thesis and dissertation committees, and men spent marginally more time than women (men, 1.8 hours; women, 1.3 hours).