Trends in the representation of women amongst geoscience faculty from
1999-2020: the long road towards gender parity
Abstract
Inequalities persist in the geosciences. Women and people of color
remain underrepresented at all levels of the academic faculty, including
positions of power. The proportion of women among geoscience faculty has
been catalogued in previous studies but there has yet to be research
considering the effects of institutional practices on the
under-representation of women. Here, we compile a dataset of 2,531
tenured and tenure-track geoscience faculty from 62 universities to
evaluate the proportion of women by rank, discipline, and type of
institution. We find that 27% of faculty are women. The fraction of
women in the faculty pool decreases with rank, as women comprise 46% of
assistant professors, 34% of associate professors, and 19% of full
professors. We quantify the attrition of women in terms of a
fractionation factor, which describes the rate of loss of women along
the tenure track and allows us to move away from the metaphor of the
‘leaky pipeline’. Given significant disparities in race, this work is
most applicable to white women, and our use of the gender binary does
not represent gender diversity in the geosciences. Our results support
previous work that shows tackling the diversity problem at the student
level is insufficient to ensure gender parity at the faculty level.
Rather, efforts to address inequities in institutional culture and
biases in promotion and hiring practices over the past few years may
provide insight into the recent positive shifts in fractionation factor.