Gender Preferences in Hiring

Aspazia at Mad, Melancholic Feminista has a thoughtful post here about gender issues in faculty hiring, with a special emphasis on Philosophy, which is her discipline. Meanwhile, for anyone who hasn’t seen them, the AALS has posted 2004-2005 faculty composition statistics here. This table demonstates that the number of women in law teaching has increased substantially over the past 14 years. What it doesn’t show, however, is that women tend to be disproportionately hired into non-tenure-track positions.

You have to pay attention to figure out exactly what the numbers mean; this table lists faculty by gender and race according to “rank.” However, “rank” is deceptive; as this table makes clear, there are a lot of full time law teachers with the rank of “Assistant Professor,” “Associate Professor” and even “Professor” who are neither tenured nor tenure-track, and the vast majority of folks teaching on a contract basis are female. This table illustrates that almost 90% of the men teaching full time in AALS member law schools are tenured or tenure-track, while only slightly over 70% of women law teachers are similarly privileged. [NB: Note that there is “no data” on job security status for almost 14% of the women law teachers and over 10% of the men.]