OCWW | Vol 32, Issue 3-4

Spring/Summer 2003

Volume 32
Number 3-4

Title IX:
Taking Equity Seriously

Director's Outlook

From Where I Sit

Featured Topic

In Brief

National Initiative

Global Perspective

Data Connection

Links

Opportunities

For Your Bookshelf

Data Connection
"Do Babies Matter? The Effect of Family Formation on the Lifelong Careers of Academic Men and Women." Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden.

These "body profiles" illustrate the employment patterns at the University of California--Berkeley. The head of each figure represents the total number of faculty (including tenured and untenured faculty) on campus in each category--1,283 faculty total, 281 of which are women and 1002 of which are men. The neck of each figure represents "non-ladder rank academic personnel," including lecturers, adjuncts, and other academics. The torso of each figure represents staff, with the shoulders indicating the highest levels of management.

Mason and Goulden write that women "have a body problem. They're small of faculty head, fairly large in the lecturer neck, and exhibit a substantial staff torso. Men, in contrast, have a large head, and a very small neck. Their torso bottom is slimmer than that of women but they exhibit large shoulders since they are better represented among the directors and professional [staff]. Men taper down to the usual buildings and grounds jobs at the bottom, while women spread out at the hips with a higher representation of clerical employees and food-service workers."

Babies and Tenure

Women faculty who have babies early in their careers (within five years after earning the PhD) lag behind men with early babies in achieving tenure. The tenure gap between men and women with early babies is relatively uniform across disciplines and institutions.

For faculty with early babies in the sciences and engineering, women's tenure rate is 24 percent behind men's.

For faculty with early babies in the humanities and social sciences, the gap is slightly smaller--20 percent--even though there are more women in these fields than in science and engineering.

Twelve to fourteen years after earning the PhD, "62 percent of women who achieve tenure in the humanities and social sciences and 50 percent of tenured professors in the sciences do not have children in the household."

By contrast, "only 39 percent of tenured men in social sciences and humanities and 30 percent of tenured men in the sciences do not have children in the household 12 to 14 years out from the PhD."

These data were taken from the article "Do babies matter: The effect of family formation on the lifelong careers of academic men and women," by Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden, published in November-December 2002 by Academe (vol. 88.6). OCWW thanks the authors and Academe for permission to reprint these data and graphics.