Many different academic disciplines and professions face difficulties in addressing diversity within their workforces. The situation is definitely not unknown in business and management education fields, but, with all of the work aimed toward increasing diversity in higher education, it is a prime time to review some facets of diversity within the business school frame of reference.
Gender diversity among the faculty at a business school is perceived as one of the areas where schools can put into practice the important foundational work of being relevant, supportive, and welcoming in working with female students. This makes the question of female faculty important not just at a school administration level of inclusivity but in having a diverse faculty as a support system for a diverse student body, as well.
AACSB currently gathers gender data for full-time faculty through both its Salary Survey (per individual) and its Business School Questionnaire (in aggregate for the school). Collecting this information allows us to examine the full-time faculty makeup at participating AACSB member schools for any changes and trends relating to faculty gender.
In looking at the percentages for the United States from 2006–07 through 2015–16, you can see that there has been a slow but steady increase (from 26.9 percent to 31.2 percent) in full-time faculty reported as female when looking across all disciplines and faculty ranks combined (fig. 1). But does this tell us the whole story?
Figure 1: Overall Percentage of Full-Time Faculty by Gender—United States
Note: Controlled set of 401 schools that provided full-time faculty genders on the Salary Survey in 2006–07, 2009–10, 2012–13, and 2015–16.
What Happens If We Analyze the Data by Faculty Rank Instead?
Interestingly, there is also growth in the percentage of full-time faculty reported as female in all faculty ranks except Instructor, where there has been a bit of a decrease (fig. 2). Other than at the Instructor rank, women have increased as a proportion of faculty within each academic rank.
The largest gains from this perspective are within the Associate Professor and Professor ranks, with 32.3 percent of all Associate Professors and 20.2 percent of all Professors being reported as female in 2015–16. These two ranks still have the smallest overall percentages of female faculty, but the steady increases are a good sign that these ranks are also trending toward a more balanced overall gender ratio over time.
Figure 2: Percentage of Female Full-Time Faculty Within Each Faculty Rank—United States
Note: Controlled set of 401 schools that provided full-time faculty genders on the Salary Survey in 2006–07, 2009–10, 2012–13, and 2015–16.
What Happens When We Compare Full-Time Female Faculty to the Total Full-Time Faculty Reported?
We know that women made up 26.9 percent of full-time faculty in 2006–07, which increased to 31.2 percent in 2015–16, and we further know that percentages of women within each faculty rank other than Instructor have increased, but let’s look next at how those work out when we examine the faculty within each rank as a percentage across the total full-time faculty reported within this comparison group.
Taking this view helps to control for the differences in overall hiring at the different faculty ranks, so when looking at these percentages, use this to compare to the entire business school full-time faculty. As an example, Figure 3 below shows that 5.8 percent of female full-time faculty held the Instructor rank in 2006–07, but by 2015–16 the number had increased to 7.4 percent. This shows that while the proportion of Instructors reported as female has declined (fig. 2), the proportion of the total faculty count made up of Instructors reported as female has increased (fig. 3). Reviewing the underlying data to better contextualize how this happens shows that, while there has been an increase of 43.2 percent in the number of female Instructors since 2006–07, this growth has been outpaced by an increase of 58.4 percent in the number of male instructors in the same timeframe.
Figure 3: Female Full-Time Faculty by Rank as a Percentage of Overall Full-Time Faculty—United States
Note: Controlled set of 401 schools that provided full-time faculty genders on the Salary Survey in 2006–07, 2009–10, 2012–13, and 2015–16.
So Where Does This Leave Us? Surging, Lagging, or Stalling?
Based on this data set—none of the above. It is clear that there has been significant growth in female faculty both as a percentage within ranks and as an overall percentage of full-time faculty, but the growth has been slow and steady so far. It is encouraging that female faculty are continuing to be a growing and important part of business schools, but we still have lots of progress yet to make and even more data to review to help us on our way.
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