AACSB Data and Research Blog

AACSB and AAUP Faculty Salary Comparative Analysis

By Joshua Barillas 

Recently, the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) released this year’s Annual Report on the Economic Status of the Profession, which includes results of their annual Faculty Compensation Survey. According to the report, the average salary increase for full-time continuing faculty at participating AAUP institutions was approximately 3 percent (from a subset of 1,018 U.S. institutions representing 378,865 full-time faculty members).

AACSB International conducted a similar analysis using our faculty data from the Staff Compensation and Demographics Survey (SCDS), formerly the Salary Survey, from the past two years (2017–18 and 2016–17). The SCDS collects not only salary information for full-time faculty and administrators but also additional information regarding part-time faculty and staff demographics. More information is available in an executive summary for our most recent SCDS (2017–18).

Institutions participating in AAUP’s survey report aggregate full-time faculty salary data split by academic rank and gender for nine- and/or 12-month contracts. AAUP collects related information, such as the number of faculty; total contracted salaries; and the number of tenured, tenure-track, and non-tenure-track faculty. For full-time continuing faculty, institutions report the number of continuing faculty and the total salary outlays for the current and previous year by academic rank, from which the percentage increase in salary is calculated. A recent AAUP presentation on the survey provides further information, including an introduction, overview, and resources.

Unlike AAUP’s survey, participating AACSB member business schools within the SCDS report faculty salaries and demographics at the individual level. Schools are allowed to reference faculty with unique anonymous identifiers; however, these unique identifiers are an optional variable, so not all schools utilize them, which limits our ability to track individual continuing faculty across years.

The initial subset of SCDS data used for a comparative analysis consists of 12,246 continuing full-time faculty. These faculty represent 228 business schools from institutions that are (1) based within the United States and (2) also present in AAUP’s list of participants. Continuing full-time faculty in the context of the SCDS refers to individuals who had a matching unique identifier and further matching demographic characteristics to track on the personal level, even if they were promoted in academic rank between 2016–17 and 2017–18. However, no individual in the sample was promoted within this time frame. Characteristics used to match were discipline taught, gender, and contract length.

Following with AAUP’s methodology, schools whose faculty salaries experienced an average decrease of more than 1 percent or an average increase of more than 16 percent by academic rank with no satisfactory explanation were excluded from all subsequent calculations. Our final data set consisted of 11,675 individuals from 225 U.S. business schools. The following are some highlights from our analysis using SCDS data.

Highlights

• The average salaries for full-time continuing business school faculty (professors, associate professors, assistant professors, and instructors) increased by 2.6 percent over the previous year, without adjusting for inflation.
• Female professors and instructors saw an average salary increase equal to or greater than that of their male counterparts. Table 1 below shows the average salary increase percentage by gender for all academic ranks. Note again that these numbers represent only continuing faculty and that not all schools had continuing faculty in all ranks.

Table 1. Average Salary Increase Percentage for Continuing Faculty by Gender

Rank	Percent Increase (Female)	Percent Increase (Male)
Professor	2.47	2.34
Associate Professor	2.26	2.26
Assistant Professor	1.97	2.07
Instructor	2.65	2.57

• The table below shows the percentage of business schools in the sample that pay men more than women at the same academic rank. Like AAUP’s methodology, parity in pay was calculated as the ratio between the average salary by rank for women divided by the average man’s salary. A ratio below 1 indicated the average woman’s salary was below the man’s average salary at that rank, and a ratio above 1 indicated the average woman’s salary was above the man’s average salary at that rank. The numbers below indicate the percentage of schools in the sample whose parity was below 1 for each academic rank. Note again that these numbers represent only continuing faculty and that not all schools had continuing faculty in all ranks.

Table 2. Percentage of Schools Where Average Salary Was Below Gender Parity by Academic Rank

Rank	Percentage of Schools Below Parity	N Schools
Professor	69	203
Associate Professor	52	215
Assistant Professor	51	212
Instructor	66	169

• The average salary for professors was 162,000 USD. Associate and assistant professors earned, on average, 134,000 USD and 128,000 USD respectively. The average instructor salary was 78,400 USD. The figure below shows the 2017–18 distribution of average salaries by academic rank.

Figure 1. Distribution of Average Salaries by Academic Rank, 2017–18

Additional Resources

Custom reports that provide detailed breakouts by field/discipline, accreditation status, and institutional control (public vs. private) using the most recent SCDS data are available to all participating schools. Access is available via the AACSB DataDirect benchmarking tools.

For additional requests and questions, please contact us at [email protected].

Factors Affecting School Size Categories (Part II)—Or, What Makes A School Large, Small, or Somewhere in Between?

By Colin Nelson

As promised in my last post, we have continued exploring potential alternate parameters for categorizing schools according to size. This post explores the impact on the number of schools classified as small, medium and large—if the parameters are changed from the standard parameters based on counts of full-time faculty to the various alternate parameters mentioned in Part I. We look at that impact at subsets of AACSB member schools offering different combinations of degree levels.

Figure 1. Net Change in Size Categories, Standard vs. Alternate Parameters by Degree Program Levels Offered

 

Some of the considered alternative size parameters cause the numbers of small, medium and large schools to differ more significantly from our standard classification scheme than others do. For example, when using the alternate parameters of Full-Time Equivalent (FTE) Faculty Counts or Total Enrollment Counts, in each case the vast majority of schools stay in the same size category as when defined by the current standard Full-Time (FT) Faculty parameters. Schools that do change category almost inevitably move down the size scale, particularly schools that offer both undergraduate- and graduate-level programs. Only among schools that solely offer undergraduate programs does the change in size category potentially go in either direction.

By contrast, when we apply alternate parameters based on student/faculty ratios, the numbers of schools that change size category from the standard parameters are far greater, comprising anywhere between 20 to 40 percent of the schools in each group. The net changes for both types of student/faculty ratios follow the same general pattern, but that pattern is much less uniform than that of the alternate parameters of FTE Faculty and for Total Enrollment.

Schools with doctoral programs, for example, appear much more likely to move down in size category when using either Student/FT Faculty or Student/FTE Faculty Ratios. In particular, application of the Student/FT Faculty Ratio results in over 34 percent of schools that offer doctoral programs moving down in size category, whereas nearly 19 percent of all schools without doctoral programs move up in size category.

When selecting peer schools for benchmarking in DataDirect based on school size, it is important to keep factors such as these in mind. What other characteristics do you think might influence the size category under these alternate parameters?

Factors Affecting School Size Categories (Part I)

By Colin Nelson

Historically, AACSB International has classified business school size categories by the number of full-time (FT) faculty reported on the annual Business School Questionnaire (BSQ), according to the following parameters: small (35 or fewer), medium (36-74), and large (75 or more). Since the recent release of the BSQ data from the 2016–17 iteration of the survey, however, we decided to explore some other potential parameters for size categorization, to see whether any significant differences would result. For the purpose of this experiment, we chose total overall enrollment, the numbers of full-time equivalent (FTE) faculty (the sum of the headcount of FT faculty and the reported FTE of part-time faculty), and student/faculty ratios for both FT and FTE faculty totals as new, alternate parameters.

Figure 1. Comparison of Size Categories, Standard vs. Alternate Parameters

As the data show, of these different ways that business schools can be categorized by size, some cause the categorization to differ more significantly than others from our standard classification scheme. For example, the alternate parameters for FTE faculty and for total enrollment each retain the majority of schools in each size category from the standard FT faculty parameters. By contrast, the differences from the standard parameters in the number of schools that fall into each size category for the alternate parameters for student/faculty ratios are far greater.

Notably, institutional control type also appears to have a significant effect on the proportion of schools that change size categories, regardless of which alternative parameters are used:

Table 1. Percent of Schools Remaining in Original Size Categories, by Control Type and Alternate Parameters

Source: AACSB 2016–17 Business School Questionnaire (BSQ).

The figures in Table 1 indicate the proportion of schools in each set that did not change size category when alternate parameters were applied. Further, any change in size category can be in either direction. Depending on the alternate parameters used, there were some schools that shifted from large to small, and vice versa, and others that moved only one step up or down.

The numbers clearly indicate that the effect of alternate parameters is greater when applied to private institutions than when applied to public institutions, in that public institutions are less likely than private ones to change size category when alternate parameters are applied, regardless of which alternate parameter was used. Being cognizant of such variabilities can be useful for school administrators, particularly when selecting peer schools for benchmarking in DataDirect.

Look out for Part II of this series, which will delve into the effects of the alternate parameters in conjunction with the types of degrees offered by institutions.

Survey Says: New Changes Ahead for Salary Data Collection

By Colin Nelson

September 2017 will mark the opening of the 50th iteration of AACSB’s annual Salary Survey. On this 50th anniversary, in order to better serve our global membership’s needs for pertinent staffing and compensation data, AACSB will be enfolding the Salary Survey into a more holistic data collection instrument, which we will be renaming the Staff Compensation and Demographics Survey. This move will align the two previously independent but complementary data sets in the former version of the Salary Survey and the Business School Questionnaire (BSQ), allowing us to connect our members with more relevant, contextualized, and timely data on business school faculty and staffing, while also giving them better tools with which to benchmark against their peers.

A couple of months ago, we reached out to our membership for input on how we might design the new survey so that their data needs in this area could best be met. We received great feedback from over 100 member schools, representing 30 countries and territories from all over the world. This feedback validated some of the actions we were already planning, such as returning the survey section on faculty compensation practices to its original home:

Figure 1. Should the Compensation Practices Section Remain in the BSQ Finances Module, or Return to the Salary Survey?

In other cases, the survey results helped us realize where there were gaps in our data collection that we can now fill in a way that will benefit our members. For example, based on the requests of numerous respondents for the ability to track faculty cohorts, we will be adding a “Year Hired” column to the faculty sections of the Salary Survey form. With this addition, our members will be able to track faculty members’ longevity of service by a variety of factors, such as rank, disciplinary area, qualification type, etc.

Another similar change will occur in the way we track tenured/tenure-track faculty. Acknowledging that the concept of tenure is not applicable in all nations in which we have members (and not universally applicable even in nations where it does exist), we will be adding a “Not Applicable” option to the survey column in which respondents indicate whether a given faculty member is tenured/tenure-track or not. We will also be including questions regarding alternate faculty models, which we hope will garner further data on how schools across the world deal with faculty contracts.

Most significantly, starting this year we will be providing an option to allow schools to report and benchmark on the individual demographic data, separately from the salary data. It is very important to note here that the way in which AACSB collects and reports on salary data is in compliance with most national and international statutes regarding personal data privacy (e.g., the European Union’s newly adopted General Data Protection Regulation). All data pertaining to specific individuals are collected in anonymized form in a secure database. They are reported only in aggregate, in such a way that it is impossible to attribute a specific data point to a specific individual, or even to a specific reporting school. Nevertheless, we received feedback from a number of schools who that indicated that their parent universities have internal policies against sharing individual salary figures.

We took all these concerns into consideration, and as a result, the 2017–18 Staff Compensation and Demographics Survey will allow respondents to forego entering salary figures while retaining the ability to enter the remaining individual-level data points collected, such as the numbers of faculty by rank, disciplinary field, gender, qualification type, etc., all of which are data points collected only on the AACSB Staff Compensation and Demographics Survey. Naturally, only those participants who enter salary data will be able to benchmark on salary figures, but our hope is that the opt-out feature will allow more of our members to participate and gain benefit from the ability to benchmark on the other individual-level data points.

To conclude, thanks to our members’ input, we made these and other significant improvements to the survey and the benchmarking tools that draw on its data. We look forward to being able to serve their needs for data regarding business school staffing and compensation, in ways that better adapt to various international contexts. Be on the lookout in the early months of 2018 for postings of data gleaned from the results of our revised survey, as well as access to new and improved benchmarking tools!

Gender Equality and Pay Gap in Business Education: EMEA Region (Part I)

By Olga Sholderer

Many countries across the globe have made significant strides toward greater gender equality since the 1960s, the start of the feminist movement. Many forms of discrimination against women are now illegal in many developed countries, women are present in job markets that they did not have access to previously, the pay gap has shrunk, and women have increasing opportunities to take on leadership roles. Within academia, women’s presence has become more prominent among faculty and students and, as we have previously reported, there are higher growth rates for enrollment into online MBA programs among women.

Despite the progress, there is still a long way to go to ensure equal opportunities for men and women in both education and the workforce. While the enrollment rate for female students in business schools grows steadily (enrollment of female undergraduate students in business schools grew by 17 percent from 2010 to 2015 against 16 percent for male students, according to AACSB’s annual Business School Questionnaire), equal employment of women, and specifically in leadership positions at business schools, is still underwhelming. The Economist reports that overall in the private sector, “sixty per cent of firms surveyed by the Peterson Institute for International Economics, a research body, had no women on their board.” The business education sector hardly differs from this situation, as female business school deans are still considered an exception. AACSB’s 2014 Dean Survey identified only 69 female deans against 285 male deans among its participants globally.  Similar dynamics take place in compensation practices of business schools. Data from AACSB’s Global Salary Survey demonstrate that there still is a significant difference between salaries for male and female professors.

Graph 1. Professors’ Median Salaries, EMEA

Source: AACSB Global Salary Survey. N=15 reporting schools. Salaries indicated for 12-month period.

Table 1. Number of Professors Reported in Global Salary Survey by Year and Gender

The charts above show that median salaries for female professors in the Europe, Middle East, and Africa (EMEA) region are 16,800–47,450 USD lower than those for male professors. Interestingly, the average salaries for female professors drop significantly in the 2015–16 academic year, as reported by participating schools. Female professors are not well-represented in the sample (see Table 1) and, thus, the results may be biased.

A follow-up post will demonstrate the effect of tenured and tenure-track professors’ salaries in the EMEA region, and will share some measures business schools are taking to reach greater gender equality in business education.

Business School Activity Priorities and Faculty Gender Balance

By Colin Nelson

As promised in my last post, today I explore associations between the business school activity priorities reported on the annual Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) by AACSB member schools, and their reported faculty gender balance. As a reminder, the activity priority codes reported on the BSQ reflect one dimension of diversity in business school missions by identifying the rank-order prioritization of intellectual contributions, teaching, and service. There seems to be a small but clear progression in average gender balance based on whether schools reported emphasizing intellectual contributions (ICs) over teaching, or vice versa:

Table 1. Female Percentage of Total Full-time Equivalent (FTE) Faculty, by General Activity Priorities

Source: AACSB BSQ, 2015–16. Data come from all AACSB member schools that reported faculty data with gender breakouts.

I’ve grouped the general activity codes by the activity types that they each emphasize most highly in Table 1 above. Codes BPA-2 and BPA-4 both indicate that the sole high-priority activity of the school is ICs. However, the codes differ in that BPA-2 places medium emphasis on teaching and low emphasis on service, while BPA-4 holds the reverse emphases. Codes BPA-1, BPA-3, and BPA-6 indicate the same for teaching, differing in that BPA-1 places medium emphasis on ICs and low emphasis on service, while BPA-3 is the reverse, and BPA-6 holds both ICs and service as medium emphasis. BPA-5 and BPA-7 indicate both teaching and ICs are equally highly emphasized, but BPA-5 holds service as low emphasis, and BPA-7 holds it equally high with teaching and ICs.

The data show that both the mean and median percentage of female faculty are largest among schools that regard teaching as their sole high priority activity and lowest among schools that hold ICs as their sole high priority activity, while schools that emphasize both teaching and ICs equally highly constitute an intermediate position. This progression became even more obvious when the 760 schools were divided into four quartiles by their female percentage of FTE faculty:

Figure 1. General Activity Priority Groups, by Female Percentage of Total Full-time Equivalent (FTE) Faculty

Source: AACSB BSQ, 2015-16. Data come from all AACSB member schools that reported faculty data with gender breakouts.

What these data suggest is that schools with a greater focus on teaching are more likely to have a higher proportion of female faculty than those with a greater focus on producing ICs. If that is indeed the case, then my next question is this: Are schools with a greater focus on teaching more likely to have a higher proportion of female faculty because women are more likely to seek faculty positions at such schools? Or, are schools with a greater focus on teaching more likely to have a higher proportion of female faculty because they tend to hire more women than those with a greater focus on producing ICs?

Business School Priorities: A Comparative Analysis

By Colin Nelson

In the annual Business School Questionnaire (BSQ) that goes out to all member schools of AACSB International (The Association to Advance Collegiate Schools of Business), we ask for data on each business school's priorities when it comes to different types of mission-based activity. These data points are unique to AACSB, and help us to connect our members to their peer schools, who report similar emphases.

Our data show how business schools prioritize two primary types of activity: general school activities such as teaching, research, and service (coded as BPA-1 through BPA-7 in the visualization below); and types of research activity, including contributions to practice, discipline-based scholarship, and learning & pedagogical research (coded as BPB-1 through BPB-13). Each school that completes the BSQ is asked to identify how they prioritize these activity types from among a number of possible combinations, as shown below:

Figure 1. Prioritization of Business School Activities

Source: AACSB BSQ. Note: These figures do not represent a controlled set of schools across all years. All BSQ participants in each academic year are included. Please scroll down for the "full-screen" button to see the whole display.

Interestingly, activity priority codes that hold teaching as either the highest, or one of the highest, priority activities were consistently chosen 88 percent of the time by the whole population of reporting schools. Even when one limits the sample to AACSB-accredited schools, the ratio only drops by one percentage point. By contrast, activity priority codes that place the highest priority on intellectual contributions (singularly or jointly) were only chosen between 52-55 percent of the time by the whole population of reporting schools, or between 55-57 percent by accredited schools.

BPA-1 and BPA-5 are consistently the most frequently chosen activity priority codes, together accounting for over two thirds of all reporting schools in each year. However, it is interesting to note that BPA-5 (which gives equally high priority to teaching and intellectual contributions) overtakes BPA-1 (which places teaching alone as the highest priority) as the most popular choice after the 2012-13 BSQ, particularly among AACSB-accredited schools. It will be worth watching to see whether the emphasis on intellectual contributions catches up to that placed on teaching in years to come.

Similarly, discipline-based scholarship, which we define as “the creation of new knowledge”, is consistently given the highest research priority (singularly or jointly) by approximately 70 percent of all reporting schools each year. Indeed, BPB-1 (which gives higher priority to discipline-based scholarship, medium to contributions to practice, and lower to learning & pedagogical research) is consistently the most popular choice amongst the research priority codes across all years, garnering over a quarter of all reporting schools in each year, whether one controls for accreditation status or not.

By contrast, learning & pedagogical research, which we define as “the enhancement of the educational value of instructional efforts of the institution or discipline”, ekes out only slightly more than a quarter of all reporting schools giving it highest research priority each year, while contributions to practice occupies a middle ground between the two in terms of emphasis.

Please look out for my next post, in which I plan to explore connections between the activity and research priorities and the gender balance of full-time faculty!

A Focus on Business School Faculty

By Hanna McLeod

In many regards, faculty represent the engine behind the major activities that occur within the business school. They lead research efforts that shape the knowledge created around business, create curricula and learning experiences that prepare tomorrow’s managers and leaders, and engage with various internal and external stakeholders to help the business school follow through on its mission and create impact within its community. Faculty are continually evolving in all that they do and represent within their institutions, and as a result their changing roles, expectations, and perceptions can be challenging to keep up with.

On October 19, AACSB with support from EFMD will launch a survey focusing exclusively on faculty—a first of its kind by AACSB. The study will target business school faculty around the world and shed meaningful light on similarities and differences across different groupings of faculty with regard to their perceptions of expectations, and the degree to which they align with one another, their schools, and overall trends within business schools. The study will explore how these perceptions evolve across the trajectory of a faculty member’s career and what priorities may lie ahead of them in the future. Schools that meet a certain participation threshold will have access to aggregated findings representing their institution, in addition to the capability of being able to compare with aggregated findings from a global set of business schools.

As a faculty member, you are encouraged to participate in order to contribute to and subsequently better understand the environment you work in and, perhaps more importantly, the environment that you may find yourself working in the future. The survey invitation will be sent through the dean or head of the business school, who will also be invited to take an abbreviated version of the survey and distribute across his or her faculty. As a dean, encouraging your faculty to participate will not only grant them an opportunity to have their voices and experiences contribute to the body of knowledge around the faculty career, but it will also provide you with insight on how to create an environment that best aligns with the needs and expectations of your faculty.

As you await to receive the survey invitation in your inbox on October 19, I encourage you to read about some recent insights and data on business faculty:

• View the BizEd September/October 2016 Issue with a focus on faculty
• Explore the 2016 Business School Data Guide and its section on faculty (page 20)
• Watch for the release of 2015–16 Business School Questionnaire custom reporting tools, and create custom comparison groups to benchmark faculty-related data against other schools using DataDirect

Tenure Trends in Full-time Faculty

By Colin Nelson

Much has been said (or misstated) about systems of academic tenure in higher education. One of the more popular narratives is that tenure as an established practice is on its way out, for better or for worse. Since AACSB International tracks the numbers of full-time faculty who are tenured, tenure-track, or non-tenure-track in the annual Business School Questionnaire (BSQ), I thought it might be instructive to examine trends over time to see if our data bear out the popular narrative.

Figure 1. Percentages of Full-time Faculty by Tenure Status

Source: Controlled set of 494 business schools that reported tenure status data to the BSQ in all five years.

As you can see, the proportion of non-tenure-track full-time faculty has indeed been steadily on the rise, primarily (though not entirely) at the expense of the proportion of tenured faculty. While tenured faculty do not appear to be in any danger of losing their majority status yet, it is worth noting that these proportional patterns persist despite a 5 percent overall increase in the absolute number of full-time faculty reported by this controlled set of schools over the past five years. In fact, when looking at absolute numbers, the total numbers of full-time faculty in the tenured and tenure-track categories have each risen by only 1.5 percent over this period, while the number of non-tenure-track faculty has risen by nearly 19 percent.

Figure 2. Percentages of Tenured or Tenure-Track Full-time Faculty, by World Region

Source: Controlled set of 494 business schools that reported tenure status data to the BSQ in all five years. Note: The European version of the BSQ does not ask for tenure data, and there were too few schools in the set from Africa to include in Figure 2.

Looking across world regions, it seems that the trend toward decreasing use of tenured or tenure-track faculty is more pronounced in some regions than in others. The reporting schools from the Middle and Near East even reverse the trend during this period, with growth in the total numbers of tenured or tenure-track faculty, and shrinkage in the number of non-tenure-track faculty. Nevertheless, for all other world regions in which tenure data are collected, growth in the total numbers of non-tenure-track faculty outpaces growth in the numbers of tenured or tenure-track faculty, often significantly.

Women as Full-Time Business School Faculty – Does World Region Make a Difference?

By Jessica Brown

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.