A Prince article today reported on this shocking statistic: only 27% of Princeton’s faculty are female. This is the lowest number in the Ivy League, although the other Ivies still don’t achieve equal balances between men and women:
“Roughly 27 percent of the University’s faculty members are female, the Chronicle reported. Columbia and Yale led the percentage counts with 38 percent and 37 percent female faculty members, respectively. Harvard and Cornell shared the second-lowest rate, with 31 percent.”
This is disappointing, but not particularly surprising. The data can be broken down several ways, and slightly different percentages are possible, so “women held 25 percent of tenure-track faculty positions, 28 percent of full-time faculty positions and 31 percent of full- and part-time faculty positions at the University,” according to statistics provided by Dean of the Faculty David Dobkin. This is still not enough. Many people blame the tenure system for making it difficult for faculty members to balance families and successful careers, a challenge which mostly seems to face women. And although the university has, in recent years, made it easier for women to stop the tenure clock for maternity leave, the article quotes a professor who has given birth to two children during her time at Princeton but never took maternity leave.
The problem is clear. The solution is more nebulous. What can Princeton do about its low numbers of female faculty, and what is the reason for these statistics? What do you think?
4 Comments
December 2, 2009 at 9:49 pm
My aunt used to be a professor at Princeton, and desperately wanted tenure. But the university made it nearly impossible for her to gain tenure and raise my two younger cousins. She made the move to Georgetown where she is on tenure track after less than 5 years at the university.
Princeton is a prestigous university and it’s extremely sad that it cannot promote female faculty and search for them more actively.
December 2, 2009 at 11:27 pm
I think a lot of the problem really is the tenure. I’d like to see a breakdown of how many female professors actually get tenured. Shirley Tilghman, Princeton’s president, wrote an op-ed in the New York Times (this was years before she joined the administration) about how the tenure system should be abolished – I just tried unsuccessfully to find it online, but I’ll keep looking.
December 5, 2009 at 4:03 pm
I don’t know if tenure is the bulk of the problem. This 27% is in line with national trends, and other schools have varied tenure policies, some more progressive than others.
But I don’t know what exactly, in addition to tenure, causes these disparities. It’s not that women aren’t interested in academia. The fact that more women are enrolled in college than men (I think there’s 1.3 women students for every male student) sheds light on this. There are structural things going on here.
Does anyone know of any good studies in this department? I’d love to read some. Cuz shoot, I ain’t got the answers.
December 5, 2009 at 8:03 pm
It’s true that women have made gains in educational access and the workforce. But even these gains are quite revealing, in terms of new inequalities that feminism has instituted:
* Women outnumbering men in college admissions and graduations, based on girls outperforming boys in elementary and secondary schools
* Women having parity or majorities in all academic disciplines other than the STEM subjects, a disparity which is now the focus of measures to adjust it, while areas of female advantage and, in fact, domination, are ignored
* Women virtually always obtaining custody of children in divorces, even in cases where their husbands have been the primary care-giver
* Numerous fields being completely female-dominated (nursing, psychology, social work, primary and secondary education, numerous academic disciplines), with feminism not expressing any interest in adjusting such inequalities
And that leaves aside the substantial inequalities around reproduction that effectively give women totalitarian power over the means of reproduction, sidelining men as having only the decision as to whether to contribute sperm — so far, yet that right may itself be eradicated at some future point, in the interests of women and society, under some predictions.
Because of that, we see the women’s groups thoroughly disinterested in the advantages women have over men outlined above. Where women are ahead, feminism defends the status quo, while where women are behind, feminism demands changes to ensure parity or better for women.