Leadership in Education

Based on the partnering status of full-time tenured and tenure-track faculty in thirteen top U.S. research universities, Dual-Career Academic Couples explores the impact of dual-career partnering on hiring, retention, professional attitudes, and work culture in the U.S. university sector. It also makes recommendations for improving the way universities work with dual-career candidates and strengthen overall communication with their faculty on hiring and retention issues.

The relatively low proportion of women in academic science and engineering (S&E) has been the topic of numerous recent books, reports, and workshops. Data for 2006 show that women continue to constitute a much lower percentage of S&E full professors than their share of S&E doctorates awarded in that year. Even in psychology, a field heavily dominated by women, women were less than half of all full professors, even though they earned well more than half of doctorates in 2006.

There are more medical women today in academia as students, residents and faculty than ever before. However, a certain silence continues to dismiss the challenges they face in balancing career demands, family life, gender biases and harassment. This same silence continues to perpetuate a culture that is inhospitable to the retention of women in academic medicine.
 

Black Women in the Ivory Tower, 1850-1954: An Intellectual History, Stephanie Y. Evans (2008), chronicles Black women's struggle for access to higher education. http://www.upf.com/book.asp?id=evansf06

The Association of American Colleges and Universities has released a report that compiles the latest data on women and gender equity in higher education. The report, "A Measure of Equity: Women's Progress in Higher Education," made its debut in Seattle during the association's annual meeting, which ended on January 24, 2009. The report updates a 1995 "data-driven" overview of women in higher education published by the American Council of Education, the association said in a written statement. It concludes that women have made strides in higher education, but the progress isn't across the board. Among the topics explored in "A Measure of Equity" are inequities for women in specific fields, how the careers of female faculty members are affected by families, and the growing pool of women in contingent faculty positions with no chance of being promoted.

Report: "Women, Work and the Academy: Strategies for Responding to ‘Post-Civil Rights Era' Discrimination." This report is based on the Virginia C. Gildersleeve Conference, organized so as to take stock of the extant research and interventions and to chart a course forward. The report highlights the effects of a diffuse set of barriers to women's participation.