Positive News on the Gender Front

The National Academies has recently released a report, Gender Difference at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering and Mathematics Faculty, which has found no evidence for bias against women in hiring or promotion at the faculty level in academia. In fact, in certain disciplines, women are more likely to be offered faculty positions than their male competitors.

Unfortunately the news wasn't all rosy. The study found that women are applying for positions at a lower rate than men, i.e. scientifically trained women were more likely to leave academia after grad school or post docs. However, they observed that women are more likely to apply for a position if there is a woman on the search committee. They also found that women spend longer as assistant professors and leave academia before obtaining tenure more frequently than male counterparts. But they also found that there were no significant differences in the success of male and female professors by looking at measures such as salary, grants awarded, publications and honors or national appointments. The one area where men slightly outdid women was rate of publication; in chemistry and math men published several percent more papers, in physics, civil engineering and biology there was no difference and in electrical engineering women published more than men. Another nice finding was that 'stopping the tenure clock', a choice to delay your tenure decision for a year for family care, did not degrade either men or women's chances of obtaining tenure.

Because of my own observations of academia I am not very surprised by the committees' findings. In general I haven't seen overt bias or discrimination but tensions between scientific and family life seem to draw women out of the field. Luckily work-life balance is getting more attention these days. I've skimmed the summary of the report and read an article about it in Science, where I poached the graph below. It might be worth a full read since it seems to be be somewhat contradictory to the conclusions of other reports, but in line with some others.