TENURE AND PROMOTION AWARDS. Tenure Descriptive Data

In the case of tenure, the survey first asked whether departments engaged in any tenure decisions during the past 2 academic years (2002-2003 and 2003­2004). Most of the 417 responding departments (78 percent) indicated that they did. Very similar results were obtained by disaggregating the departmental responses by discipline. In all fields, the percentage of departments indicating that they had such tenure cases was between 75 and 84 percent.

Responding departments noted a total of 768 tenure decisions. Most deci­sions were reported by public institutions (587), rather than private institutions (181). For individual departments that reported any tenure decisions, the median response was two tenure decisions (mean = 2.2), with a range from 1 to 15 deci­sions. By gender, 125 cases involved female faculty; 642 cases involved male faculty. In 1 case, the gender was not reported. In addition, for 9 cases, the tenure outcome was not reported by departments.

Across all the departments sampled, 15 percent of the tenure candidates were female, compared to 20 percent of the pool of assistant professors, a difference significant at better than.01. There are a number of possible explanations for the smaller percentage of women among tenure candidates compared to the percent­age in the tenure pool. If women are more likely than men to resign their position before being proposed for tenure, then we would expect to see fewer women among the tenure candidates. On the other hand, if departments have substantially increased their efforts to hire more women on tenure-track appointments, the dis­parity may be due to the lag between the time at which a faculty member is hired and the time at which he or she is put up for tenure. Most institutions impose an upper bound on the number of years in which a faculty can serve in a tenure-track position. Early tenure decisions—while not truly rare—are not commonplace either. However, many universities allow for extending the allotted time by up to 2 years to accommodate new parental responsibilities.

The findings on percentages of women among tenure candidates were not uniform across disciplines. Women were most likely to be underrepresented in the fields where they accounted for the largest share of the faculty. Female faculty were considered for tenure in 27 percent of the cases in biology and 15 percent of the cases in chemistry. In both fields, their representation among the assistant professor pool was greater—36 percent of the pool in biology and 22 percent of the pool in chemistry. In the remaining four fields, the differences in represen­tation were less pronounced, although in every case the percentage of women among tenure candidates was less than in the tenure pool. The percentage of women among tenure candidates was 16 percent in civil engineering, 11 percent in electrical engineering, 16 percent in mathematics, and 12 percent in physics. During the same period, the percentage of women among tenure-track assistant professors was 23 percent in civil engineering, 13 percent in electrical engineer­ing, 22 percent in mathematics, and 16 percent in physics.

Contrary to the implication from previous research that the lower percentage of women among tenured relative to untenured faculty results from a lower prob­ability of a positive tenure decision for women, the committee’s data showed the opposite. Controlling only for field and gender of the candidate, we found that a woman was marginally more likely than a man to receive tenure (p = 0.0567).

NOTE: In 1 case, the gender of the individual up for tenure was unknown, and in 9 cases, the tenure outcome was not reported.

SOURCE: Survey of departments conducted by the Committee on Gender Differences in Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty.

As shown in Table 5-4, men received tenure in 548 out of 633 cases (87 percent); women received tenure in 115 out of 125 cases (92 percent). (See p. 120 for an explanation of the use of summary survey data.).[92] Disaggregated by field, women had a significantly higher percentage of being granted tenure only in chemistry, where each female faculty member up for tenure was successful. In the other fields, the differences were not significantly different for men and women.