In this thread Jender called my attention to a study showing that women do more service work than men in academia. One of the effects of this additional service work appears to be that women are stuck in associate professor positions several years longer than their male colleagues. As the following quote describes, women apparently feel that they are hitting up against the glass ceiling when the issue of promotion to full professor comes up.
How does a successful associate professor with a distinguished publication record, a visible leadership role among women scientists on campus, and prestigious grant funding for interdisciplinary initiatives in graduate and undergraduate training as well as research feel about seeking promotion to full professor? In the course of our research, we commonly heard, "It feels like the first time in my life that I’m hitting up against the glass ceiling."
And it's not just a feeling. The following statistics suggest that women really are seriously lagging behind.
A 2006 report of the Modern Language Association’s Committee on the Status of Women in the Profession, Standing Still: The Associate Professor Survey, showed that women professors in the association were less likely to be promoted than their male counterparts, and it took women from one to three and a half years longer than men to advance to full professorships, with women at doctoral universities lagging farthest behind.
Though these numbers are not about philosophy specifically, we do know that the number of women goes down drastically when we move from the level of associate professor to the level of full professor. For whatever reason, woman in philosophy and other areas in academia are having difficulties getting promoted to full professor.
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