...nationwide (National Center Education Statistics [NCES], 2003), rarely make up more than 30% of faculty at Research Extensive universities. Although the total number of tenure-track women faculty in higher education has increased steadily for the past 35 years, this increase and women's advancement through faculty ranks are described as excruciatingly slow (Valian, 1999).

Several broad perspectives attempt to explain or describe the paucity of women in various occupations. Although these theories encompass all types of occupations and tend to focus on occupational gender segregation, they also illuminate possible reasons for unequal gender representation among faculty in higher education. The prevailing perspectives group loosely into three categories: theories based on human capital (a neoclassical economic theory), on unaccommodating cultures and privilege maintenance (a feminist perspective), and on institutional organization (a structural perspective).

Human capital theory focuses on individuals as rational actors who seek employment in accordance to their personal characteristics or human capital--that is, their own bundle of acquired skills, experience, knowledge, education, preferences, and limitations (Becker, 1964). With regard to the supply of labor, the theory posits that women choose occupations that require less human capital or that impose fewer penalties for temporarily leaving the workforce in order to care for children. Applied to university faculty, such theories would propose that women are drawn away from academia (or certain disciplines within it) because it is an occupation that requires more than 40 hours of work per week, hampering healthy family-work balance. When women leave the labor force, they also interrupt their on-the-job accumulation of human capital, placing them at a disadvantage to their counterparts upon reentering the labor market. In academia, this could be evident in gender differences in the time needed to complete a Ph.D. or in the time between graduation and landing a tenure-track position. The flip side of the issue--employer demand for labor--emphasizes that women incur higher indirect labor costs than men do (particularly due to replacement and training costs), causing rational-acting employers to prefer men and resulting in a predominantly male occupation.

When employers act on their own individual prejudices by hiring employees only from a certain group, they are said to be "bad actors" practicing taste discrimination (Ferree & McQuillan, 1998, p. 9). Because a bad actor is acting on personal tastes rather than on rational decisions, his or her behavior will be negatively reinforced by market forces until the hiring discrimination stops or the business closes (preferences cause greater labor demand, driving wages upward until labor costs become too high for the business to profit). Since bad actors are eliminated by market forces, human capital theory suggests that the root of hiring discrimination grows outside the market. Thus resolving such discrimination requires greater attention to gender socialization in other social institutions such as education, law, and the family.

Feminist perspectives explain the lack of women in academia by focusing on interaction in the workplace, claiming that on-the-job socialization and the maintenance of unearned male privileges create a chilly climate or a work environment unaccommodating to women (Padavic & Reskin, 2002). According to privilege maintenance perspectives, a group of male workers learns to enhance unearned privileges by wielding social tools in the workplace to the disadvantage of women colleagues. In some occupations, these social tools may be sabotage, labor striking, or harassment (Reskin 1988, 1992, 1993, 2000). Discussants of the chilly climate for women in academia (Basow, 1995; Bellas, 1992; Cohn, 2000; Gray, 1985; Handelsman et al., 2005; Jacobs, 1989a, 1989b, 2003; Kolodny, 2000; Long, 1990; Mason & Goulden, 2002; Nelson & Bridges, 1999; Orenstein, 1994, 2002; Park, 1996; Riger, Stokes, Raja, & Sullivan, 1997; Sadker & Sadker, 1994; Sorcinelli & Near, 1989; Valian, 1999; Wells, 2003; Yoder, 1985) outline several practices that enhance male privilege and disadvantage women in academia: gender-biased performance evaluations, use of gender-biased student evaluations, demanding tenure criteria and short tenure clocks that favor male faculty, retention offers and salary counteroffers that reward mens'mobility, tokenism and hidden workloads, inadequate mentoring and networking opportunities, competitive rather than collaborative styles, hostility towards pregnancies and families, and the devaluation of certain disciplines and types of research. The accumulation of disadvantages in the career socialization of women (Clark & Corcoran, 1986) can lead to an unaccommodating culture in which women may be deterred from advancement or encouraged to leave the occupation altogether. Women's attrition from academia indicates at best a leaky pipeline and, at worst, an occupation mired in institutional discrimination.

The third perspective focuses on structural characteristics related to gender inequality across different types of institutions. Because this perspective offers a wealth of descriptions and trends but few explanations for them, its strength is in its ability to identify the context of inequality in higher education institutions. Konrad and Pfeffer (1991) have shown that new hires are more likely to be women if the overall percentage of women is already relatively high, if there are women in the administration, and if the previous incumbent of the position was a woman. Kulis (1997) reported similar findings: Women are more likely to be employed in institutions where there are higher proportions of women administrators and students, less emphasis on research, less endowed revenue, and more reliance on federal funding, which translates into more public scrutiny. Tolbert and Oberfield (1991) found that women are scarce in institutions with plenty of resources. Although there is some disagreement among authors, women's representation tends to decrease as the following factors increase: institutional prestige, level of selectivity (e.g., student entrance criteria), student population, absence of a women's studies program, research productivity, federal funding, and Carnegie Classification (Bach & Perucci, 1984; Konrad & Pfeffer, 1991; Kulis, 1997; Tolbert & Oberfield, 1991). The general pattern of inequality gleaned from these perspectives is that women's representation declines as institutions become more prestigious.

After reviewing these and other perspectives on occupational segregation and gender inequality, we realized that few addressed the rate or speed at which faculty populations are changing. There is a discrepancy between the percentage of women earning doctoral degrees and the percentage of women currently employed as professors, and this discrepancy is often cited as an indicator of inequality (Hargens & Long, 2002; Valian, 1999). We seek to explain why this particular discrepancy exists and why the pace of change appears to be slow. We are less interested in testing whether each theory determines segregation or causes gender inequality in academia than we are in determining the outcomes of policies based on these theories: how the effects of such policy changes will be observed over time in faculty populations, and how quickly it could be established that the policies are or are not having an impact. We also want to know if we will see gender equality in our lifetimes. We rely on an explanation emphasizing the inertia of demographic characteristics among faculty at a large Research Extensive university (hereby dubbed "Mountain University") and develop this explanation by examining theory-driven hypothetical intervention strategies such as hiring or retaining an equal number of men and women.

Demographic Inertia

Hargens and Long (2002) and others who have conducted longitudinal analyses of occupational segregation (Alpert, 1989; Feinberg, 1984) have indicated that desegregation is, indeed, moving at a glacial speed and will continue to do so because population change is limited by demographic constraints. For faculty populations, these demographic constraints are faculty age structures (and retirement patterns), gender composition among Ph.D. earners, faculty attrition rates, and the availability (or lack thereof) of new faculty positions. When these change slowly, they amount to inertia, or conservation of the status quo--that is, there is little or no visible progress toward the goal of either equal gender representation among faculty or a percentage that matches the representation of available, qualified women (i.e., the Ph.D. pools). This pattern of demographic inertia is seen in the extended length of time it takes before a sex ratio among tenure-track faculty matches that of new Ph.D.s. Even if universities hire new women faculty in proportion to their composition of Ph.D. earners, the incoming cohorts are still very small compared to the existing, predominantly male faculty body. According to Hargens and Long (2002), the process of change would take 35 years--a faculty career lifetime--before women's proportion of faculty matches their proportion of Ph.D. earners. In addition, Hargens and Long believe their estimates are optimistic compared to demographic analyses of labor forces by Feinberg (1984) and Alpert (1989).

For example, Feinberg (1984) conducted a longitudinal study among Black and White workers in the labor force. He measured the time to reach equality, defined as the point when the proportion of Blacks in the labor force would match the Black population. By testing various mathematical models incorporating recruitment rates, attrition rates, and the growth rate of positions at one company, his estimated time to equality ranged between 31 and 85 years. Several models indicated that equality would never be reached. Feinberg warns that "we should not be surprised by this slowness" that often characterizes affirmative action programs: "Clearly, such programs have a great structural disadvantage in attempting to overcome the arithmetic ... and we do a great disservice if we do not recognize that disadvantage" (1984, pp. 180-181).

On a similar tack, but focused on female representation within academia, Alpert (1989) claimed that equal gender representation among faculty at Research Extensive institutions will take 90 years to achieve, and equality among full professors (the most male-dominated...

NOTE: All illustrations and photos have been removed from this article.



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