Women mount the highest steps of the ivory tower in greater numbers each year&mdash a growth pattern resembling that of a kudzu vine more than that of the proverbial ivy.
In the US, women have been earning solid majorities of the bachelor’s and master’s degrees for more than a decade. And in the past few years, women have overtaken men at the doctoral level as well. A report from the Council of Graduate Schools released this week shows a small lead, with women just clearing the mark at 50.4% of doctorate-level degrees conferred in 2008-2009. But another set of statistics, released by the US Department of Education in May, show a greater lead even earlier, with women taking 51% of all doctoral degrees awarded in 2007-2008.
If you break those latter numbers down by race, the gender gap widens even further&mdash for all ethnicities. Of all PhDs awarded to white Americans, women earn 55% of them. Among black Americans, it’s 66%.
How are American men still even competing? Turns out they’ve had to bring in a little outside help. The only category in which men are still besting women is among nonresident aliens, who, as a whole account for over a quarter of doctoral degrees earned in the US. Foreign female students are quickly closing that gap, though; in 10 years, their share of doctoral degrees has jumped ten percentage points, to 36%.
But university faculties remain overwhelmingly male, especially in the fields of science and mathematics, as we highlighted in a Nature Medicine editorial this past May. Even after receiving eight years’ worth of funding from an NSF program aimed at increasing the number of women in science faculty positions, women in tenure-track positions in the life sciences at the University of Michigan stood at just 30%. And female bioscience faculty members earn, on average, $13,000 less than their male counterparts with the same academic ranking, according to a study in Academic Medicine.
When I spoke with Carolyn Bertozzi after she became the first female winner of the MIT-Lemelson prize, I asked her how universities could correct the gender imbalance at the faculty level. Her answer was quite succinct:
“It’s simple—they should hire women. It’s not rocket science!”
Image by pthread1981 via Flickr Creative Commons