Finding 3-1: Women accounted for about 17 percent of applications for both tenure-track and tenured positions in the departments surveyed. There was wide variation by field and by department in the number and percentage of female applicants for faculty positions. In general, the higher the percentage of women in the Ph. D. pool, the higher the percentage of women applying for each position in that field, although the fields with lower percentages of women in the Ph. D. pool had a higher propensity for those women to apply. The percentage of applicant pools that included at least one woman was substantially higher than would be expected by chance. However, there were no female applicants (only men applied) for 32 (6 percent) of the available tenure-track positions and 16 (16.5 percent) of the tenured positions.
Finding 3-2: There are statistically significant differences in the percentage of women in the tenure-track and the tenured applicant pools across the six disciplines surveyed. Biology, chemistry, and mathematics had significantly higher percentages of female applicants than did all other disciplines. The percentage of female applicants in civil engineering, physics, and electrical engineering was significantly lower. The percentage of females among applicants to tenured positions was similar to the percentage of females among applicants to tenure- track positions.
Finding 3-3: In all six disciplines, the percentage of applications from women for tenure-track positions was lower than the percentage of Ph. D.s awarded to women. There were substantial differences among the disciplines. In civil engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics, and physics, the percentage of women applying for faculty positions was only modestly lower than the percentage of women receiving Ph. D.’s. However, in the fields with the largest representation of women with Ph. D.s—biology and chemistry—the percentage of Ph. D.s awarded to women exceeded the percentage of applications from women by a large amount (Table 3-2).
Finding 3-4: The median number of applications a department received for tenure-track jobs was 52 applications from men and 8 applications from women—or about 7 applications from men for every application from a woman. For tenured positions, the median number of applications a department received was 40 applications from men and 8 from women, for a ratio of 5 to 1. (Figure 3-1)
Finding 3-5: For job openings where only individuals of one gender applied, the gender was more likely to be male. There were no female applicants (only men applied) for 32 tenure-track positions or about 6 percent of available positions. Similar findings were seen for tenured positions. No women applied to 16 tenured jobs—or 16.5 percent of the positions. Most of the cases (29 of 32) when only men applied occurred in physics or the engineering fields.
Finding 3-6: Five factors were associated with the probability that at least one female would apply for a position, including (1) the type of position (p <
0. 0001); (2) the number of family-friendly policies in effect at the institution (p = 0.001); (3) a set of discipline indicators (p = 0.03); (4) prestige of the institution (p = 0.04); and (5) type of institution (approaches significance p = 0.08). No other factor was statistically associated with the probability of there being at least one female applicant.