3 Inside Higher Ed articles on women in academia

Inside Higher Ed is an online compilation of articles and news about higher education (with a US focus but it looks at other countries too).  Over the holiday they had several interesting articles related to gender in higher ed.

Gender Matters looks at several new studies which examine the correlation between hiring/tenure rates of women and the proportion of women on the boards doing the selecting.  As the article summarizes:

Among the findings:

• Institutions with female presidents, female provosts (or academic vice presidents), and more women on boards of trustees saw larger increases in the share of female faculty members than did other institutions.
• The magnitude of the impact of women in these positions is greater at smaller institutions, which the report suggests may be due to those being institutions "where central administrators may play a greater role in faculty hiring decisions."
• The impact of having more women as trustees kicks in only when a critical mass has been reached, either of the female proportion on the board (25 percent) or the number of women on the board (5).

The idea of needing a "critical mass" of women in order to see these effects is interesting.  In a lot of the scientific fields, women are approaching that 25% level, so maybe that's a good sign for rapid change in the future.  I don't have a sense of how many women are at high levels in business, but I'd imagine it's similar to the sciences where it tends to hoover around the 20% level.



Role Models and Stereotypes looks at what influences women's decisions slightly lower down on the academic ladder.  This article summarizes new research which suggests that women's choice of major at university is more a function of societal norms about women's abilities than it is about the abundance or lack of female role models in those fields for students.  However, it includes the caveat that in fields with particularly low representation of women (e.g. engineering) more female role models can increase the uptake among women choosing that major.

I find this sort of argument less than compelling, though... yes it would be great to change societal norms first, but that is a less than pragmatic solution to the problem.



The final article, Proof that Mentoring Matters, looks at an experiment which takes a random sample of women who were accepted to an economic mentoring program and women who were turned down from the program and finds that

"Comparing the participants and non-participants in the years since the mentoring took place, the study found significant gains for those who received mentoring in three key factors: total number of publications, total number of publications in "top tier" journals, and total number of federal grants won."


Yay for mentoring!