A NATIONAL ANALYSIS OF DIVERSITY IN SCIENCE AND ENGINEERING FACULTIES AT RESEARCH UNIVERSITIES

The first national and most comprehensive analysis to date of tenured and tenure track faculty in the " top 50 " departments of science and engineering disciplines shows that females and minorities are significantly underrepre-sented. • There are few tenured and tenure-track women faculty in these departments in research universities, even though a growing number of women are completing their PhDs. Qualified women are not going to science and engineering departments. In some engineering disciplines, there is a better match between the representation of females in PhD attainment versus the faculty , but these disciplines are the ones with very low percentages of females in PhD attainment. • Underrepresented minority (URM) women faculty are almost nonexistent in science and engineering departments at research universities. In the " top 50 " computer science departments, there are no Black, Hispanic, or Native American tenured or tenure track women faculty. • The percentage of women in BS attainment in science and engineering continues to increase, but they are likely to find themselves without the female faculty needed for optimal role models • There are few female full professors in science and engineering ; the percentage of women among full professors ranges from 3% to 15%. In all but one discipline surveyed, the highest percentage of female faculty is at the level of assistant professor. • In most science disciplines studied, the percentage of women among recent PhD recipients is much higher than their percentage among assistant professors, the typical rank of recently hired faculty. Even in disciplines where women outnumber men earning PhDs, the percentage of assistant professors who are White male is greater than females. For example, in the biological sciences, 44.7% of the PhDs between 1993 and 2002 were women; while in 2002, they accounted for only 30.2% of the assistant professors. In some disciplines, it is likely that a woman can get a bachelor of science without being taught by a female professor in that discipline; it is also possible for a woman to get a PhD in science or engineering without having access to a woman faculty member in her field. The data demonstrate that while the representation of females in science and engineering PhD attainment has significantly increased in recent years, the corresponding faculties are still overwhelmingly dominated by White men. There is a drastically disproportionate number of male professors as role models for male students. For example, …