The article at this link is a report on a recent study of women in academia by Christine Hult, Ronda Callister, and Kim Sullivan, at Utah State University. It appeared in the Summer/Fall, 2005 issue of Peer Review. Here is an excerpt:
While global warming toward women in academia (in this case a desirable trend) may be occurring in some academic departments or institutions-most notably in community colleges-the same cannot be said for many colleges of Science, Engineering, and Technology (SET colleges). There, the climate for women is very chilly indeed. As Cathy Ann Trower reports in Science magazine (2001), 42 percent of full professors in two-year colleges are women; however, women comprise only 17 percent of the full professor ranks at doctoral-granting institutions. For SET colleges, the figures are even lower. “In 4-year colleges and universities,” Trower reports, “women SET (science, engineering and technology) faculty hold fewer high-ranking posts than men, are less likely to be full professors, and are more likely to be assistant professors” (1).
Even though there are increasing numbers of women graduates in the pipeline, the statistics for women’s representation at the higher ranks and in the SET colleges have been largely unchanged for the past twenty years. The situation is no better in Europe. “Although women constitute more than half of the student population across Europe, they hold fewer than 10% of the top positions in the academic system” (Dwandre 2002, 278).
In the 1970s, Rosabeth Moss Kanter (1977) wrote about the adverse effects that can occur when women or minorities are tokens in their departments. Many subsequent studies also have found that when women represent less than 15-20 percent of a department they are more likely to feel the effects of gender stereotyping. More recently, Virginia Valian (1998) has developed cognitive analyses to explain the persistent inequalities in academia. She claims that both men and women operate under certain stereotypical gender schemas that affect our expectations of men’s and women’s roles. For example, Valian cites research showing that, after reviewing identical curricula vitae but with different names attached, men and women academics both consistently rate the women as less competent for an academic position than the men. Gender schemas go a long way toward explaining the subtle dynamics at work during recruitment and promotion on university campuses.
