Skip to main content

Where are all the women professors? Among the recently hired!

I recently wrote a series of posts entitled "Where are all the women professors?" here and here. I began with a simple premise: "men and women are equally capable of succeeding as professional astronomers. There is no inherent (intrinsic) difference in mental capacity, creativity, ability to learn, or any other factor that plays into the success of an astronomer." From there I examined the role of unconscious bias as one of the factors in a "leaky pipeline" that has resulted in an underrepresentation of women among astronomy professors.

The post was picked up by the Women In Astronomy Blog, and a commenter wondered, "What is the fraction of women hired on tenure track during the same time period as the statistics of the graduating students?" While the present representation of women among various astronomy faculty hovers somewhere around 15%, is there evidence that there have been improvements in recent years? The question stuck with me, but I wasn't sure how to assess it. However, the method recently became obvious: the Astronomy Rumor Mill!

The Rumor Mill is a fairly accurate accounting of the results from each hiring season (roughly Feb-Apr each year). While the short-lists don't always reflect reality, the final decisions, denoted in bold text, usually are. I went combing through the last three years of the rumor mill (previous years, before it was hosted by AstroBetter, are unavailable) and found the outcomes of 67 faculty searches at US institutions that advertised junior faculty appointments in either astronomy or astronomy-oriented physics positions (this was somewhat subjective in a small number of cases). Here are the statistics:

Number of men hired:          42
Number of women hired:        25
Percentage female (2011-2013) 37.3%

That's pretty impressive! As I noted previously, roughly 30% of recent PhDs over the past decade were awarded to women. These numbers are evidence the field has been hiring at a commensurate (or higher) rate over the past three years.

So while the current percentage of women on the faculty of various astronomy departments is much lower than the graduation rate of women, there is evidence over the past three years that the systematic biases in past hiring are being corrected. This is very good news for the field. What will be interesting to see is whether these newly hired women professors earn tenure at the same rate as their male colleagues.

There were many other interesting features in the statistics of recent hires. I recorded the PhD institution of each hired individual. Harvard grads where hired at the highest rate, making up 8 (12%) of the 67 hires. Next was the Princeton cohort, which made up 6 (9%) of all recent hires, followed by Berkeley (7.5%), and OSU (6%). Then came Caltech, Hawaii, UCLA , Washington and Arizona (3 [4.5%] each). Graduates from these 9 institutions made up 57% of all hires in the past three years. (Keep in mind that comparisons among these institutions is difficult since the sizes of their grad programs vary quite a bit. Harvard has the largest number of hired graduates, but it also has the largest graduate program.)

The gender breakdown of hiring among these nine institutions is pretty remarkable: women make up 8 out 17 recent hires at these institutions. To my eye, this is a sign of significant progress. But there's also a way to go still. The faculty of those nine institutions comprise a total of 195 professors, of which only 35 (18%) are women, and a third of those women were hired in the past 6 years.

So I'd conclude that there's a lot of ground to make up, but that based on the statistics of the past three years, the field is making significant progress. And I suspect that that progress will be accelerated as more people come to value diversity as a integral part of overall excellence.



Comments

kelle said…
pls consider also checking for prize fellowship rate. I'm curious how robust that oft-mention correlation is...
I did a similar count on the rumor mill back in 2000, and the results are archived here:
http://www.aas.org/cswa/bulletin.board/2000/07.05.00.html
----
3. Good News on Employment
From: alycia...astro.ucla.edu

Some good news on employment? To get an estimate of the relative employment success of men and women, I did a study based on the astrophysics Rumor Mill page (http://meltingpot.fortunecity.com/enfield/207/). I counted the number of faculty type offers made to men and women.

There were 78 offers total (this counts every offer every time it was made. So, an offer declined by one person and accepted by another is counted twice). Of those, 15 (20%) went to women and 61 (80% went to men). Two went to people whose sex is unknown to me and about whom I couldn't guess based on their names. In 1998, 23% of US doctorates in Astronomy and Astrophysics went to females (see Appendix Table A-1 of "Doctorate Recipients from United States Universities: Summary Report 1998", available at http://www.nsf.gov/sbe/srs/srs00410/htmstart.htm). I am the first to admit that the rumor page is hardly an authoritative source, but within the uncertainties, women seem to be getting jobs in proportion to their numbers in the field.

--------
Nice to see that in 13 years, there has been some progress (from ~20 to ~30%). But yes, there's a lot of ground to make up.

And as an aside, I was asked about my writeup nearly everywhere I interviewed for a job in 2001, which was an early indication to me of how many senior people were reading the rumor mill!
Matthew said…
If you want to go further back in time you can find previous records from the rumor mill on the Wayback Machine e.g. here.

Popular posts from this blog

back-talk begins

me: "owen, come here. it's time to get a new diaper" him, sprinting down the hall with no pants on: "forget about it!" he's quoting benny the rabbit, a short-lived sesame street character who happens to be in his favorite "count with me" video. i'm turning my head, trying not to let him see me laugh, because his use and tone with the phrase are so spot-on.

The Long Con

Hiding in Plain Sight ESPN has a series of sports documentaries called 30 For 30. One of my favorites is called Broke  which is about how professional athletes often make tens of millions of dollars in their careers yet retire with nothing. One of the major "leaks" turns out to be con artists, who lure athletes into elaborate real estate schemes or business ventures. This naturally raises the question: In a tightly-knit social structure that is a sports team, how can con artists operate so effectively and extensively? The answer is quite simple: very few people taken in by con artists ever tell anyone what happened. Thus, con artists can operate out in the open with little fear of consequences because they are shielded by the collective silence of their victims. I can empathize with this. I've lost money in two different con schemes. One was when I was in college, and I received a phone call that I had won an all-expenses-paid trip to the Bahamas. All I needed to d

Reader Feedback: Whither Kanake in (white) Astronomy?

Watching the way that the debate about the TMT has come into our field has angered and saddened me so much. Outward blatant racism and then deflecting and defending. I don't want to post this because I am a chicken and fairly vulnerable given my status as a postdoc (Editor's note: How sad is it that our young astronomers feel afraid to speak out on this issue? This should make clear the power dynamics at play in this debate) .  But I thought the number crunching I did might be useful for those on the fence. I wanted to see how badly astronomy itself is failing Native Hawaiians. I'm not trying to get into all of the racist infrastructure that has created an underclass on Hawaii, but if we are going to argue about "well it wasn't astronomers who did it," we should be able to back that assertion with numbers. Having tried to do so, well I think the argument has no standing. At all.  Based on my research, it looks like there are about 1400 jobs in Hawaii r