Sexism in academia

Sexism in academia refers to the discrimination and subordination of a particular sex in academic institutions, particularly universities, due to the ideologies, practices and reinforcements that privilege one sex over another. Sexism in academia is not limited to but primarily affects women who are denied the professional achievements awarded to men in their respective fields such as positions, tenure and awards.^[1]

There is controversy over whether women's under-representation in specific academic fields is the result of gender discrimination or of other factors such as personal inclination.^[2][3] Some individuals have argued that there are equal opportunities for women and men in sciences and that sexism no longer exists in these fields.^[4][5] Researchers note that as of 2015, women had closed the undergraduate degree gap for several STEM fields including both the social and biological sciences, but women only accounted for approximately 20% of the computer science and engineering undergraduate degree holders. Likewise, at the master's and doctoral level, the number of STEM degrees obtained by women had increased for many fields; however, only 27% of the master's degrees and 23% of the doctoral degrees in computer science and engineering were held by women.^[6] These claims of equal opportunity in scientific fields of academia are often attributed to women's "preference" and inclination for other fields of study and to teaching instead of research. However, such claims do not take into account that gender is central to the organization of higher education.^[1] This might explain women's under-representation in academia at more senior levels, and the way in which the organization of higher education institutions might be structurally disadvantaging women by the institutionalization, practice, and valuing of masculinity which ends up reinforcing hegemonic masculinities.^[7][1][8] Women are not represented in senior jobs in the humanities even though most students in these fields are women.^[9]

Although women make up 57% of undergraduate students, they make up 42% of the full-time positions in academia. In fall of 2009, according to the American Association of University Professors, half of all faculty members occupied part-time positions, and men were disproportionately underrepresented in those positions. Women earn the majority of undergraduate degrees, yet 28% of all full professors are women. This study illustrates that women are overrepresented at the undergraduate and part-time faculty levels, but underrepresented as full-time and tenured professors. Since the mid 1970s, the pay gap has remained the same; women in academia have been paid 80% of the average salary for a man, in part due to their underrepresentation among full-time and tenured faculty. In 2011, at all types of academic institutions, female full professors had a salary disadvantage of 12%, and female associate and assistant professors had a disadvantage of 7%.^[10]

Women are less likely to win academic awards. For instance, there are 48 women Nobel Prize winners, compared to 844 men.^[11] About two-thirds of these winners won a Nobel Prize for a humanities discipline, not a science discipline.^[12] In most scientific disciplines, a small portion of women full professors are nominated for awards compared to the number of women in the field.^[13] The Recognition of the Achievements of Women In Science, Medicine, and Engineering (RAISE) project have reported that the women represent 8.6% of Lasker Award winners.^[14]

Women of color in academia

Women of color face specific issues related to sexism in academia as well. One such problem is referred to as the "Chilly Climate" problem, wherein, because women of color are infrequent in academia, they are often isolated and face a lack of institutional support.^[15] Additionally, because women of color's bodies are both viewed racially and in terms of their gender in academia, their voices and identities are often overlooked through "elite racism", as coined by Allen, Epps, Guillory, Suh, and Bonous-Hammarth (2000). Because women of color in academia are sometimes minorities in regards to their colleagues as well as their students, it is suggested that they feel the aforementioned isolation, racism, and sexism from both groups.

Women of color in academia are not only seemingly ostracized by their colleagues, but by their students as well. Women faculty of color reported having their authority questioned and challenged, their teaching competency questioned and their knowledge and experience disrespected by their students. White male students were also seen to behave more aggressively towards these women and would also employ intimidating behaviors.^[16]

According to the National Science Foundation's 2015 survey of Doctorate recipients, only 40.41% of U.S. doctorate scientists employed in teaching positions were women, 61,750 out of a sample of 152,800. Of the female population, 75.95% were White, 11.01% were Asian, 5.34% were Hispanic or Latino, 5.67% were Black or African American, 0.32% were American Indian or Alaskan Native, and 1.62% constituted other races, including Native Hawaiian, Pacific Islander, and those who marked multiple races who were not Hispanic or Latino. In addition, Asian women held 3% of tenured positions, Latinas 2.4%, and Black women 2.3% according to a 2015 survey by the National Center for Education Statistics.^[17]

Women in academic publishing

In many academic disciplines, women receive less credit for their research than men.^{[18][19][20][21]} This trend is especially pronounced in engineering fields. A study published in 2015 by Gita Ghiasi, Vincent Lariviere, and Cassidy Sugimoto demonstrates that women represent 20% of all scientific production in the field of engineering. The study examined 679,338 engineering articles published between 2008 and 2013, and it analyzed the collaborative networks among 974,837 authors. Ghiasi et al. created networking diagrams, depicting the frequency of collaboration among authors, and the success of each collaboration was measured by the number of times the study was cited. The collaboration networks illustrate that mixed-gender teams have a higher average rate of productivity and citations, yet 50% of male engineers have collaborated only with other men and 38% of female engineers have collaborated only with men. The researchers use impact factors—the average annual number of citation that a journal receives—to measure the prestige of academic journals. Their study shows that when women publish their research in journals with high-impact factors, they receive fewer citations from the engineering community.^[18] The authors explain their findings as a possible consequence of the "Matilda effect", a phenomenon that systematically undervalues the scientific contributions of women.

In addition to engineering, a gender bias in publishing is exemplified in economics. In 2015, Heather Sarsons released a working paper comparing credit allocated to men and women in collaborative research.^[19] Sarsons analyzed the publication records of economists at top universities over the past 40 years, and found that female economists publish work as frequently as their male cohorts, yet their tenure prospects are less than half that of men. Women receive comparable credit to men when they solo author their work or co-author with other female economist, evinced by a 8–9% increase in their tenure prospects, implying that tenure prospects decrease with collaborative work due to lack of credit given to women, not the quality of their work. Men receive the same amount of credit for solo authoring and co-authoring their work, shown by a 8–9% increase in their tenure prospects; however, when women co-author with men, there is no increase in their tenure prospects.

In the academic disciplines of political science and international relations, research has found evidence of gender bias in publishing and teaching. The Teaching, Research and International Policy (TRIP) project gathers data and publishes analysis on the discipline of international relations.^[22] In 2013, a study published by Daniel Maliniak, Ryan Powers and Barbara F. Walter used TRIP data from peer-reviewed publications between 1980 and 2006 to show that women are systematically cited less than men after controlling for a number of variables including year and venue of publication, substantive focus, theoretical perspective, methodology, tenure status, and institutional affiliation.^[23] In a 2017 study on publishing patterns in political science journals, Dawn Langan Teele and Kathleen Thelen found that women authors are underrepresented compared to the share of women working in the profession, are not benefiting from the trend toward co-authored publications (dominated by all-male author teams), and lose out from the methodological partiality of top journals in the field.^[24] Activism aimed at uprooting gender bias in academic publishing and teaching has increased over the years and has led to initiatives such as #womenalsoknowstuff^[25], #womenalsoknowhistory^[26], and Jane Lawrence Sumner's Gender Balance Assessment Tool (GBAT)^[27]. In 2015, Jeff Colgan conducted an analysis of American post-graduate international relations syllabi and found that 82% of assigned reading was written by all-male authors.^[28] At the London School of Economics, a student-led body called the Gender and Diversity Project (GDP) conducted a similar assessment of syllabi from the full teaching curriculum in the International Relations department from 2015 to 2016. The results, published in 2018 (see Kiran Phull, Gokhan Ciflikli and Gustav Meibauer^[29]), revealed that 79.2% of assigned reading from all undergraduate, graduate, and post-graduate syllabi was authored exclusively by male authors, with the undergraduate curriculum being the least gender-diverse.

Pregnancy in academia

Female graduate students and postdoctoral fellows who give birth while students or fellows are more than twice as likely as new fathers or childless women to turn away from an academic research career. In a study of University of California doctoral students, 70% of women and more than 50% of men considered faculty careers at research universities not friendly to family life. Women professors have higher divorce rates, lower marriage rates, and fewer children than male professors. Among tenured faculty, 70% of men are married with children, compared to 44% of women.^[30] In science fields, women who are married with children are 35% less likely than married men with children to obtain tenure-track positions after finishing their PhDs.^[31]

A January 2018 NBER paper found that an increasing share of the gender pay gap between 1980 and 2013 is due to children.^[32] The phenomenon of lower wages due to childbearing has been termed the Motherhood penalty.

Motherhood can affect job choices as well. In a traditional role, women are the ones who leave the workforce temporarily to take care of their children. As a result, women tend to take lower paying jobs because they are more likely to have more flexible scheduling compared to higher-paying jobs. Since women are more likely to work fewer hours than men, they have less experience,^[33] which will cause women to be behind in the work force.

See also

• Gender inequality
• Gender pay gap
• Gender role
• Glass ceiling
• Old boy network, or male cronyism
• Publish or perish
• Sex discrimination in education
• Sexism
• Sexism in medicine

References

Further reading

• Patton, Tracey (2004). "Reflections of a Black Woman Professor: Racism and Sexism in Academia". Howard Journal of Communications. 15 (3): 185–203. doi:10.1080/10646170490483629.
• "Gender bias alive and well in academia." Practical Neurology Feb. 2013: 66. Academic OneFile. Web. 10 May 2014.
• Ratliff, Jacklyn M (31 May 2012). A chilly conference climate: The influence of sexist conference climate perceptions on women's academic career intentions (Ph.D.). University of Kansas. Retrieved 20 November 2013.

External links

• "Nepotism and sexism in peer-review" at Nature (journal)