Women Economists Have Not Advanced as Readily as Male Peers, Scholar Says By D.W. MILLER
After making great strides in the 1980s, women's drive toward parity on the nation's economics faculties stalled out in the 1990s, a new study finds. There are far fewer female economists -- among tenured professors, department heads, and deans in particular -- than one would expect from looking at the number of women who entered the profession a decade ago. The study was presented Saturday at the annual meeting of the American Economic Association, in Atlanta.
"What seemed like it was getting better at the end of the 1980s now seems to be ... getting worse," said Shulamit Kahn, an associate professor of economics at Boston University's School of Management, who subtitled her paper "One Step Forward, Two Steps Back."
The proportion of bachelor's degrees in economics earned by women grew rapidly in the 1970s and '80s, and leveled off at about 30 percent in the 1990s, Ms. Kahn found, using data gathered by the National Science Foundation and the association's Committee on the Status of Women in the Economics Profession. And in the past decade, male and female economics majors were about equally likely to pursue graduate degrees in that subject.
But even as the share of new economics Ph.D.'s earned by women has risen steadily, to about 27 percent in 1999, Ms. Kahn said, the proportion of women among new assistant professors peaked at about 29 percent in the early 1990s and has hovered between 20 and 25 percent ever since.
Most tellingly, Ms. Kahn added, the trend toward more women among associate professors -- the first rung on the tenure ladder -- abruptly stopped around 1990. The share of newly tenured associate professors who are women hovered around 10 percent for most of the decade, and has only recently begun creeping up again. That, she has calculated, is 6 to 16 percentage points lower than expected, depending on assumptions about how quickly new Ph.D.'s rise through the ranks. Today, about 6 percent of full professors of economics at Ph.D.-granting institutions are women.
Furthermore, she said, female economists in academe are far more likely than men to occupy non-tenure-track positions -- and the disparity is growing. In 1989, according to her data, the proportion of female economists at Ph.D.-granting institutions who were in non-tenure-track jobs was about 2.5 times that of men. But by the late 1990s, female academic economists were nearly 4 times more likely than men to toil off the tenure track.
"The number of women assistant professors who should have been associate professors by this time had been ballooning in the 1980s," she said while presenting her paper. "Where are they?"
To investigate gender differences in professional attainments, she analyzed the careers of a random sample of 103 men and 103 women hired as assistant professors in Ph.D.-granting economics departments in the 1980s. She found that a third of both the men and women had left academe altogether. And about equal proportions of men and women in her sample were still employed at their original universities.
But about 36 percent of the men had attained the rank of full professor or had been named to a chairmanship or deanship, compared with just 23 percent of the women. She noted that nearly all of that difference could be accounted for by the large number of men who occupied such high positions at institutions other than their original place of hire.
The main statistical difference that emerged from her sample, she said, is that "men in academe who get denied tenure or who know they are not going to get tenure go somewhere else in academe and succeed." Ms. Kahn speculated that such men are more willing and able than their female counterparts to pursue promotions at less prestigious institutions.
Ms. Kahn noted that women in academe have traditionally been less free than men to move around the country for the sake of career advancement. "Maybe women are less mobile because they have children," she said in an interview after her presentation. "Maybe women care more about continuity for their children. Maybe women, having been denied tenure, were turned off by academe."
Her findings could also be explained by other theories, she said. Women might be less aggressive about pursuing opportunities elsewhere to advance their careers, for example. And economics departments might be guilty of discrimination against women, particularly in offering tenured positions to outside candidates.
Of course, Ms. Kahn admitted, there's no evidence that such factors became more prevalent in the 1990s, when women's progress in the field appeared to halt. But, she suggested, public opposition and legal challenges to affirmative action in the 1990s might have influenced economics departments to abandon earlier efforts to integrate women into the profession.
Oddly, female associate professors in her sample actually outnumbered their male counterparts, a finding seemingly at odds with the data from the NSF and the association. Ms. Kahn noted that, because she garnered her information from professors' Web pages, she might have counted among the ranks of associate professors some women -- and, presumably, a smaller number of men -- who had been given the title without tenure. The other data sets exclude such faculty members from the tenured category.