information for practice

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.