New Gender Equity Report

Available from AAUP

Washington, D.C. -The American Association of University Professors (AAUP) today issued a new report: AAUP Faculty Gender Equity Indicators 2006. The report provides data on four specific measures of gender equity for faculty at over 1,400 colleges and universities across the country. The individual campus listings included in the report will serve to promote discussion of faculty gender equity at the local level, where the success of existing strategies to improve the situation of women academics can best be evaluated. In this way, the AAUP hopes to move discussions about the full participation of women as faculty from the realm of abstract goals into concrete actions for improvement.

This report is the latest in a series of AAUP initiatives aimed at improving the status of women faculty, dating from the formation of AAUP's Committee W on the Status of Women in College and University Faculties in 1918. Over the intervening decades there has been considerable progress-yet equity remains elusive. Thirty-four years after Congress passed Title IX in 1972, prohibiting sex discrimination in education, women earned more than half of all graduate degrees awarded in 2004. Yet, among other findings, the AAUP report indicates that women occupied about 9 percent of full professor positions at four-year colleges and universities in 1972, and were still only 24 percent of all full professors in 2003.

The four indicators compared in the report for men and women faculty are employment status (full- and part-time); tenure status for full-time faculty; promotion to full professor rank; and average salary for full-time faculty. The report consists of three sections: an article on "Organizing Around Gender Equity," authored jointly by Professor Martha S. West of the University of California, Davis and John W. Curtis, AAUP Director of Research and Public Policy; aggregate national tables for each of the four equity indicators by type of institution; and an appendix listing the four indicators for each individual college and university. Data for the report are drawn primarily from the AAUP Faculty Compensation Survey, with additional data on part-time faculty from the US Department of Education.

The report is available on our Web site at <http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/research/geneq2006> http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/pubsres/research/geneq2006 . For general questions about the report and faculty gender equity, contact: Martha West, University of California, Davis, Telephone (530) 752-2322 and e-mail mswest@law.ucdavis.edu ; Ann Higginbotham, Eastern Connecticut State University, chair of the AAUP Committee on Women in the Academic Profession, Telephone (860) 465-4604 and e-mail higginbotham@easternct.edu ; or Anita Levy, AAUP Department of Academic Freedom and staff to the Committee, Telephone (202) 737-5900 ext. 125 and e-mail alevy@aaup.org . For specific questions on the data used in the report, contact John W. Curtis, AAUP Director of Research and Public Policy, Telephone (202) 737-5900 ext. 143 and e-mail jcurtis@aaup.org .

The American Association of University Professors is a nonprofit charitable and educational organization that promotes academic freedom, tenure, and due process in American higher education. The AAUP has about 45,000 members at colleges and universities throughout the United States .