Women in the Ivory Tower: Women, Academia, and Pay

By Julie J. Miller, Vanderbilt University, Nashville, Tennessee

In an effort to draw attention to the significant gender gaps in many categories of faculty employment, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released, in October 2006, a report called AAUP Faculty Gender Equity Indicators 2006.

Congress passed Title IX prohibiting sex discrimination in education in 1972, yet women today hold only 24 percent of full professor positions in the United States, despite the overwhelming presence of women students on college and university campuses for the past 25 years. The increased participation of women in higher education as students was under way before Title IX in 1972, yet Title IX’s explicit prohibition of sex discrimination in education marks a useful starting point to examine the rapid expansion of women’s graduate enrollment in higher education in the United States.

In 1972, women earned 41 percent of master’s degrees awarded by U.S. universities, 6 percent of first professional degrees, and 16 percent of doctorates. In 2004, 32 years later, women earned more than half of all graduate degrees: 59 percent of master’s degrees, 49 percent of first professional degrees, and 48 percent of doctorates (U.S. Department of Education, Digest of Education Statistics 2005, Table 246). Among U.S. citizens, 53 percent of PhD recipients in 2004 were women (Digest, Table 267).

Whereas one would expect women’s presence on university and college faculties to have increased in tandem with women’s enrollment in graduate programs, women’s integration into the faculty ranks has occurred at a much slower rate. In 1972, women made up 27 percent of all faculty in higher education (Carnegie Commission on Higher Education, Opportunities for Women in Higher Education, 1973). By 2003, women made up 43 percent of all faculty, 39 percent of full-time faculty, and 48 percent of part-time faculty (Digest, Table 223). Women occupied about 9 percent of full professor positions at four-year colleges and universities in 1972 (Carnegie) and still only 24 percent of all full professors in 2003 (Digest, Table 227).

The AAUP developed a set of gender equity indicators for individual colleges and universities to illustrate women’s progress or lack thereof in the pursuit of academic careers. The four indicators represent different aspects of the overall status of women faculty: employment status, tenure status, full professor rank, and average salary. Unfortunately, the four indicators at their current levels amount to a series of accumulated disadvantages. Women faculty members are less likely than their male counterparts to hold full-time positions. Women in those full-time positions are underrepresented in tenure-track positions and have not attained senior faculty rank (represented in the report by full professor rank) at the same rates as men. At each full-time faculty rank, women earn less than men.

Visit the AAUP website to access the entire report and discover the status of women faculty on your own college or university campus.

Many explanations exist for the disparities reported. For example, salary disparities may best be explained by disciplinary salary differentials, not gender. At the very least, the disparities reported call for leaders of individual colleges and universities to investigate deeper the status of women on their campuses and discover the causative factors of disparities between women and men.

Access table about the percentage of academics who are women and how much they are paid compared to men at the Insider Higher Ed website.

The American Association of University Women Educational Foundation publishes groundbreaking research about pay equity and sex discrimination. To find out more about sex discrimination on campus, see Tenure Denied: Cases of Sex Discrimination in Academia.

The Educational Foundation’s most recent research report, Behind the Pay Gap, shows that just one year out of college, women working full time already earn less than their male colleagues, even when they work in the same field. Ten years after graduation, the pay gap widens.