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The Effect of Family Formation on the Lifelong Careers of Academic Men and Women
For women academics, deciding to have a baby is a career decision. Traditional narratives of the academic career must adapt to new demands and new constituencies.
When I first became the dean of the graduate division at Berkeley last year, I had an extraordinary experience. Fifty-one percent of the 2,500 new graduate students whom I welcomed were women. Thirty-five years ago that number would have been closer to 10 percent. The graduate students included not only those pursuing doctotal studies, but also those seeking professional degrees in law, public health, social welfare, optometry, and other areas. Berkeley has no medical school, but if it did, women would be close to the majority there as well.
The sharp increase in women's participation in graduate education is a striking national trend. There are significant differences by discipline--engineering, for instance, has produced far fewer women Ph.D.'s than English literature. Overall, women's participation in higher education, and particularly in doctoral and professional programs, has risen dramatically since 1966. The percentage of doctoral recipients who are women has risen from 12 percent to 42 percent, while the percentage of women among recipients of professional degrees has risen even more sharply. Women law school graduates, for instance, made up only about 5 percent of their classes thirty years ago, but they now make up almost 45 percent.
Does this steady climb in all disciplines and in all professional schools over the last thirty years indicate that women are on a winning streak? Are women finally achieving equality in the academy?
The employment patterns at the University of California, Berkeley, which are representative of those at other major research universities, indicate that while gender equality may be the reality for graduate students, it is a far different story for ladder-rank faculty, non-ladder-rank academic personnel, and staff. Using a body profile to illustrate employment demographics makes it clear that the experiences of men and women are in dramatic contrast. The drawing on the left in Figure 1 illustrates a composite profile of all employees. The head, at 1,283, represents the total faculty count on campus, including both tenured and nontenured ladder-rank faculty. The middle drawing in Figure...