In my last blog post, I examined a multi-year controlled set of full-time faculty gender data for 401 schools in the United States. This time, let’s narrow our focus to a snapshot of the most recent survey data and take a look at full-time faculty gender by world region for a set of 597 schools that participated in the 2015–16 Salary Survey. Two of the regional areas, Oceania and Africa, were excluded from this set due to insufficient data for the current survey year. For each of the other regions listed, the number of schools that provided valid data on gender is listed in the chart. Figure 1 provides an overview of the full-time faculty data discussed in more detail below.
Figure 1: Full-Time Faculty, Counts by Region and Percentages by Rank
Note: Comparison group of 597 schools from listed regions participating in the 2015–16 Salary Survey. Data for Africa and Oceania were excluded from this regional analysis due to insufficient data.
The professor rank has the smallest percentage of full-time female faculty members.
Based on seven schools reporting gender for 191 full-time professors in the Latin American and Caribbean region grouping, 28.3 percent were reported as female. While this is a small sample size for the region, it represents the highest percentage of professors reported as female for any region. While the percentages ranged from 12.9 percent female in the Asian region to 28.3 percent in the Latin American and Caribbean region, this means that, at most, less than one out of every three professors reported were women, and overall women made up only one out of every five professors reported on the most recent Salary Survey. Across all of the listed regions combined, women made up only 20.4 percent of all professors based on a total of 10,666 full-time professors reported.
Figure 2: Full-Time Professors, Gender Percentages by Region
Note: Comparison group of 597 schools from listed regions participating in the 2015–16 Salary Survey. Data for Africa and Oceania were excluded from this regional analysis due to insufficient data. Full-time professor total count was 10,666.
The associate professor rank shows stronger counts of female faculty than the professor rank.
While the professor rank still reflects a large percentage of male faculty members, there are definitely opportunities for that to change with the continued advancement of more female faculty—especially with more than 30 percent of full-time associate professors reported as female in all of the listed regions except for Asia and the Middle East. Even in those two regions, the jump in percentage of female professors to associate professors is impressive. At this rank, the highest percentage of female faculty was reported by the Europe and Near East region grouping, with 34.8 percent of associate professors reported as female. Female faculty made up approximately one out of every three to one out of every four associate professors in most of the regions listed.
Figure 3: Full-Time Associate Professors, Gender Percentages by Region
Note: Comparison group of 597 schools from listed regions participating in the 2015–16 Salary Survey. Data for Africa and Oceania were excluded from this regional analysis due to insufficient data. Full-time associate professor total count was 9,931.
The good news continues at the assistant professor rank.
At the assistant professor rank, two of the regions pass 40 percent female. In both Canada and the Europe and Near East region, more than two out of every five assistant professors were reported as female. In each region, women made up at least 25 percent of full-time faculty at this rank.
Figure 4: Full-Time Assistant Professors, Gender Percentages by Region
Note: Comparison group of 597 schools from listed regions participating in the 2015–16 Salary Survey. Data for Africa and Oceania were excluded from this regional analysis due to insufficient data. Full-time assistant professor total count was 9,407.
Female representation at the instructor rank is looking very positive.
Women are much more strongly represented at the instructor rank than at any of the other faculty ranks reported. For the 12 participating schools in Asia, 50 percent out of the 1,012 instructors were reported as female. All of the regions either surpassed or closely approached the 40 percent mark, indicating that classes taught by female instructors are likely common around the world. While there is no guarantee that instructors would move up in the other faculty ranks, the strong proportion of women represented here does help illustrate that women are active participants already working within business schools as a vital part of the schools’ faculties, helping to introduce and teach the next generations of business visionaries.
Figure 5. Full-Time Instructors, Gender Percentages by Region
Note: Comparison group of 597 schools from listed regions participating in the 2015–16 Salary Survey. Data for Africa and Oceania were excluded from this regional analysis due to insufficient data. Full-time instructor total count was 6,351.
Looking ahead to future faculty compositions by gender, the potential for continued growth is clear.
With such a promising set of pipeline numbers from the instructor through associate professor ranks, it will be interesting to see how the faculty composition continues to change in the future in each of these regions. While multi-year data are not yet available for all of the regions listed, this is a topic that we will revisit as the data set available continues to grow and offer more context for the important discussions about faculty and gender.
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