Academic Careers And The Gender Gap

Women earn nearly half of all new PhDs in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Why, then, do they occupy a disproportionate number of the junior-level university positions while men occupy 80 percent of the more prestigious jobs? In Academic Careers and the Gender Gap, Maureen Baker draws on candid interviews with male and female scholars, previous research, and her own thirty-eight-year academic career to explain the reasons behind this inequality. She argues that current university priorities and collegial relations often magnify the impact of gendered families and identities and perpetuate the gender gap. Tracing the evolution of university priorities and practices, Baker reveals significant and persistent differences in job security, working hours, rank, salary, job satisfaction, and career length between male and female scholars.

Women earn nearly half of all new PhDs in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Why, then, do they occupy a disproportionate number of the junior-level positions at universities while their male counterparts continue to snap up 80 percent of the more prestigious jobs? In Academic Careers and the Gender Gap, Maureen Baker explains the reasons behind this inequality, drawing on interviews with male and female scholars, previous research, and her own thirty-eight-year academic career. Using a feminist political economy and interpretive theoretical framework, she argues that current university priorities and collegial relations often magnify the impact of gendered families and identities and perpetuate the academic gender gap. Baker sets academia in the wider context of restructuring labour markets and gendered earning patterns within families. The result is a revealing portrait of significant and persistent differences in job security, institutional affiliation, working hours, rank, salary, job satisfaction, collegial networks, and career length between male and female scholars.

Leading scholars investigate the profession of academic economics, with a focus on the intellectual environment and incentives for economic research.

Although women have made important inroads in science and engineering since the early 1970s, their progress in these fields has stalled over the past several years. This study looks at women in science and engineering careers in the 1970s and 1980s, documenting differences in career outcomes between men and women and between women of different races and ethnic backgrounds. The panel presents what is known about the following questions and explores their policy implications: In what sectors are female Ph.D.s employed? What salary disparities exist between men and women in these fields? How is marital status associated with career attainment? Does it help a career to have a postdoctoral appointment? How well are female scientists and engineers represented in management? Within the broader context of education and the labor market, the book provides detailed comparisons between men and women Ph.D.s in a number of measures: financial support for education, academic rank achieved, salary, and others. The study covers engineering; the mathematical, physical, life, and social and behavioral sciences; medical school faculty; and recipients of National Institutes of Health grants. Findings and recommendations in this volume will be of interest to practitioners, faculty, and students in science and engineering as well as education administrators, employers, and researchers in these fields.

Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty presents new and surprising findings about career differences between female and male full-time, tenure-track, and tenured faculty in science, engineering, and mathematics at the nation's top research universities. Much of this congressionally mandated book is based on two unique surveys of faculty and departments at major U.S. research universities in six fields: biology, chemistry, civil engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics, and physics. A departmental survey collected information on departmental policies, recent tenure and promotion cases, and recent hires in almost 500 departments. A faculty survey gathered information from a stratified, random sample of about 1,800 faculty on demographic characteristics, employment experiences, the allocation of institutional resources such as laboratory space, professional activities, and scholarly productivity. This book paints a timely picture of the status of female faculty at top universities, clarifies whether male and female faculty have similar opportunities to advance and succeed in academia, challenges some commonly held views, and poses several questions still in need of answers. This book will be of special interest to university administrators and faculty, graduate students, policy makers, professional and academic societies, federal funding agencies, and others concerned with the vitality of the U.S. research base and economy.

This book explores the experiences and perspectives of female professors. Analysing the gendering of this process using various theoretical perspectives, this edited collection examines the active ‘making’ of careers, and how this has been possible. The editors and contributors cut across institutions, cultures and continents to seek to understand how women navigate the gendered process of becoming a professor, with each chapter applying a different theoretical or methodological approach to her experience. The chapters are not mere descriptions of career trajectories, but analytic narratives anchored within distinct theoretical and philosophical frameworks. In turn, they shed important light on how – and if – institutional structures and systems are adapting to move towards gender equality. Offering practical advice as well as thoughtful reflection, this book will be of especial interest to early career female academics.

The literature on gender and science shows that scientific careers continue to be characterised – albeit with important differences among countries – by strong gender discriminations, especially in more prestigious positions. Much less investigated is the issue of which stage in the career such differences begin to show up. Gender and Precarious Research Careers aims to advance the debate on the process of precarisation in higher education and its gendered effects, and springs from a three-year research project across institutions in seven European countries: Italy, Belgium, the Netherlands, Iceland, Switzerland, Slovenia and Austria. Examining gender asymmetries in academic and research organisations, this insightful volume focuses particularly on early careers. It centres both on STEM disciplines (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and SSH (Social Science and Humanities) fields. Offering recommendations to design innovative organisational policies and self-tailored ‘Gender Equality Plans’ to be implemented in universities and research centres, this volume will appeal to students and researchers interested in fields such as Gender Studies, Sociology of Work and Industry, Sociology of Knowledge, Business Studies and Higher Education.