Women now make up a large share of the academic talent pool and receive more than half of all awarded doctoral degrees. Yet, they’re vastly underrepresented in the highest levels of academia, making up just one-third of full professors in the United States. 

A new report published in the Journal of Women’s Health explores this phenomenon. It highlights the inequalities women face in academia and provides methods to solve them. Fittingly, the report was published on February 11, the fifth annual International Day of Women and Girls in Science. 

In addition to making up a disproportionately low share of full professors, women are statistically less likely than men to achieve tenure. Notably, these disparities are even more significant among minority women and those in the fields of science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine, according to the report. 

And these factors, altogether, are causing women to leave academia at a disproportionately higher rate than men. 

“Some close female friends and colleagues from my postdoctoral fellowship and I started our faculty positions and had children around the same time,” Emily Dhurandhar, a co-author of the report and assistant professor at Texas Tech University, said in a news release.  

“We were all running into so many issues when striving for tenure that we started a chat group to brainstorm and exchange ideas,” she added. “The issues we were troubleshooting seemed to be universal to all women faculty striving to get tenure and succeed in academia, so we decided to write this manuscript.”

Dhurandhar and her colleagues from the University of Florida, the University of Alabama at Birmingham, Drexel University, the University of Connecticut and Penn State University, identified the “chutes” and “ladders” for women in academia — the factors that prevent them from rising to high positions and the potential strategies that could lift them up. 

The four primary chutes highlighted in the report include biases against marriage and having children, a lack of working-mother role models, grant-funding disparities and a tendency for students to consistently rate men higher than women in student reviews. 

The authors also note that women are typically the primary caregivers of children, which makes for a difficult work-life balance.

“Sometimes the hours of academia, being outside a typical 9-5 workday, makes for challenging child care situations – for example, dinners with visiting speakers or faculty candidates or early-morning or weekend data collection in the clinic with study participants,” Dhurandhar said in the release. “There also is an expectation to travel to conferences to present research and connect with collaborators, which comes with the hidden cost of either additional child care to help my husband when he is home alone with the kids, or travel for the kids to join me and child care at the conference site itself, or the cost of travel for my mother-in-law to come with me so she can watch the kids.”

“It is frustrating that the infrastructure of academia, like many industries, was built with the expectation that faculty will be living in a single-income family structure, where one spouse is always available for household duties, and this has yet to change,” Dhurandhar added. 

The suggested “ladders” that could propel more women to high positions in academia include mentoring programs with senior women faculty members, equitable pay, using rubrics and peers or third parties for standardized evaluations, and family-friendly employment policies, including paid family leave, access to child care and being reimbursed for any work-related child care expenses during the workday, according to the release.  

“To show a real commitment to gender equality, supportive policies at all institutions should provide the infrastructure needed for dual-earning households to succeed without overburdening themselves, or without one spouse having to sacrifice their success,” Dhurandhar said in the release.  

“Women need to be educated and empowered to understand their worth when they have a career,” she added. “Their role at home can, and should, change if they are expected to contribute equally, if not more, to the financial stability of the family. But ultimately, the demand to change the status quo in the household has to come from women, and women first have to believe the burden of household and child care duties should no longer be on their shoulders alone.”