Gender segregation among academic faculty: a study of elite higher education institutions across 13 countries

• In Event: The internationalization of higher education: conceptualizations, strategies, and consequences

Proposal

In March 2013, participants of the “Action for Women in Higher Education Leadership” session at the Going Global 2013 endorsed a “Manifesto for Change,” calling for the inclusion of gender equality as a key performance indicator for international higher education institution rankings (Forestier 2013; Morley 2018). The manifesto included other critical measures to increase women in research, faculty positions, and academic leadership, including the creation of a global database on women in different levels of higher education institutions (HEIs). Such initiatives are representative of a prominent challenge being tackled across HEIs worldwide: while women have increasingly outnumbered men as students and consumers of higher education, women continue to be relatively underrepresented as faculty – the creators and disseminators of knowledge – particularly in tenure track positions and in certain fields of study. This paper aims to examine why, despite the tremendous growth of women faculty over time (Wotipka et al. 2018), gender segregation among tenured faculty persists, even in elite institutions.

Drawing on a unique dataset of over 12,000 faculty from 52 elite universities, in 13 countries worldwide, this study provides an unprecedented descriptive analysis of the representation of women faculty. Furthermore, this study examines what structural, cultural, and economic features of countries contribute to the varying levels of gender inequality in the academic profession across four different fields of study – history, sociology, engineering, and biology. These fields of study were chosen based on their levels of variation across “High/Low women representation” and “High/Low Paradigm,” with low paradigm fields of study representing fields of study that have lower levels of predictability (i.e., vary more vastly across institutions and countries), compared to high paradigm fields of study that hold high levels of predictability due to implied understandings of the topics considered important to study (i.e., tend to stay more constant across institutions) (Kuhn 2012; Lodahl and Gordon 1972).

From the perspective of world society theory, structural diversification, and gendered processes of political and social change, we aim to uncover diverse mechanisms across higher education ecosystems that coincide with the differential status of women in faculty positions cross-nationally. Descriptive findings reveal that women faculty are under-represented across all levels across all countries, but most strikingly at the higher, tenured ranks. It is noteworthy however, that even at non-tenured levels, men still outnumber women faculty in the vast majority of countries. Thus, women remain a minority in this profession, even at the lower ranks of the hierarchy, and for the four fields. For the statistical analysis, we examine the percent of tenured women faculty. Findings suggest support for most of our hypotheses as well as clear differential outcomes for women faculty in different countries, notably horizontal differences across disciplines and vertically across ranks.

Authors

• Mana Nakagawa, Facebook

• Christine Min Wotipka, Stanford University

• Elizabeth S. Buckner, University of Toronto