Spotlight on Gender

Gender in academia has been a hot topic in the news in 2005. In January, HarvardUniversity’s president, Lawrence Summers set off a national debate with remarks speculating on the reasons for the dearth of women in science and engineering faculties. He presented three possible hypotheses for this disparity, which he called “the high-powered job hypothesis”, “the different availability of aptitude at the high end” and “the different socialization and patterns of discrimination”.

An article in the New York Times in September, 2005 by Louise Story titled “Many Women at Elite Colleges Set Career Path to Motherhood”gives some support to the “high powered job hypothesis”. Summers statedthat women might be discouraged from an academic career because they “don’t want to have a job that they think about eighty hours a week”. The article describes a recenttrend in whichfemale studentsatelite collegesplanwell in advance of becoming mothers toabandon their future careers tostay home with their children.

Interviews with 138 women at Yale, Story’s alma mater, provided the bulk of the research for the article. However, she also cited data from the Yale alumni survey (conducted by COFHE – see note on page 5) on the percentage of women working in the classes of 1979, 1984, 1989, and 1994 five and ten years after their graduation. Fifty-six percent of women in their 40’s worked, significantly less than the 90% of men who were employed. The pattern had not changed substantially between surveys conducted in 2000 and 2005.

Thisprompted us to checkNorthwestern’s COFHEalumni and senior survey datafor similar trends. For alumni, we currently have limited data becausewe have chosen to survey one class every five years, ten years after they havegraduated. Our data on the classes of 1989 and 1994 (in their early 30’s when surveyed)shows slightly more women working from the class of 1994. Sixty-eight percent of women in the class of 1994regarded paid employment as their primary activity, while the corresponding figure for the class of 1989 was 64%. This is slightly lower than the 70% for all COFHE schools participating and much lower than the 88% to 90% of men working from those same classes.

We have more years of data for the senior survey (classes of 1998, and 2002 to 2005), but the survey instrument only asks one question about the importance of raising a family. That aloneis insufficient to detect the trend that Ms. Story suggestsin her article. The percentage of female alumni and seniors regarding raising a family as “very important” or “essential” has risen slightly over the years (see below). However, the figures for male seniors have increased by a slightly larger percentage. The eight point decreasefor male NU alumni between 1989 and 1994 on this question is puzzling. Is this just a fluke in the data ordoes it really reflect changing attitudes?If we had data to follow a cohort to see how their attitudes change over time,larger shifts might be easier to interpret. One possibility would be to survey alumni five and fifteen years after graduation in addition to our current survey schedule.

It should also be notedwhen comparing NU and COFHE data that a higher percentage of the NU female alumni respondents report having children than the male alumni. However, the reverse is true for the COFHE alumni. The figures have also decreased from the 1989 to the1994 class for both genders:

Also, there were gender differences in response rates on both the senior and alumni surveys. Both hada higher percentage of females responding compared to the overall class. The gender breakdown of Northwestern undergraduates in the last few years has been approximately 53% female and 47% male. The breakdown of respondents follows:

The alumni survey does ask a number of questions that allows us to detect different employment patterns by gender, but it includes no explicitquestion on part-time work. The survey asks about primary and secondary activities the year following graduation and in the current year, but the only choices about work are “employed for pay” or “internship paid or unpaid”. COFHE added two new employment related questions to this year’s survey. Oneasks about breaks in employment and the other aboutswitching career fields. Men are much more likely to work without breaks and NU women tend to take more short breaks than men or COFHE women. Since the question does not specify the reason for the breaks and these alumni are within ten years of graduation, further education could be a reason why both men and women take of breaks up to two years in equal numbers. NU women appear to be somewhat more likely to move around in the same career field as NU men.

Alumni Survey Data

Income is another item often used to measure progress of women in the workplace. The alumni survey asks about both individual and household earnings. The answers are based on ranges and the ranges have changed between surveys. It is also difficult to compare directly between years because of inflation. The following chart shows imputed average income (using the midpoint of the range) for alumni who indicated that their primary activity is paid employment. NU women’s individual salaries have not increased proportionally to men’s between the two years surveyed. However, there is more income equality between men and women for NU alumni than for COFHE alumni and NU females have higher individual and household incomes than their COFHE counterparts. Also, NU females report higher household incomes than males. This indicates that they tend to marry spouses with higher incomes than themselves.

Income data from alumni survey

Education beyond the undergraduate level is another survey item relatedto Summers’ remarks on the lack of women professors. Unfortunately, the NU senior survey results do not show any clear upward trend of NU females enrolling in graduate or professional school immediately after graduation. An exception is the class of 2003 which reported a higher percentage of females than males attending graduate school. One explanation for the change in pattern is that only half of the class was surveyed that year.

However, there is some progress in graduate degrees reported by alumni. NU women have increased their percentages in all Ph.D. and professional degrees categories except for Law. They lag behind their COFHE peers except in having or pursuing MBAs:

Another area that showslack progress relative to the shortage of women in science and engineering is the proportion of females majoring in those disciplines. The percentage decreased between the classes of 2003 and 2004 and only increased slightly in 2005.

Senior survey data:

Overall though, NU women alumni seem very happy with their choices When they are asked “In general, how satisfied would you say you are with your life right now?” they answer “very satisfied” by a much wider margin than either NU men or COFHE men or women.

This is a small subset of the responses that can be analyzed for gender differencesin thealumni and senior survey data. Questions for the Student Surveys Planning Group to ponder include: Should we survey additional cohorts of alumni or students to obtain more complete longitudinal data? Are there items we are interested in tracking by gender or other demographicsthat we are not currently capturing in the surveys?

We are somewhat constrained by the COFHE surveys, but there is an opportunity to suggest changes when the instruments are updated and there is always the opportunity to ask supplemental questions. Currently, Northwestern is participating in an AAUDE (Association of American Universities Data Exchange) effort to create common questions for faculty climate surveys. When developing questions, a strong emphasis is placed on gender differences that have emerged in surveys by participating institutions. Many schools are planning or have conducted faculty climate surveys to obtain data on whether women and minority faculty are being treated differently. Not surprisingly, Harvard is very involved in that effort!

Note on COFHE: The Consortium on Financing Higher Education (COFHE) is an institutionally supported organization of thirty-one private colleges and universities: Amherst, Barnard, Brown, Bryn Mawr, Carleton, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth, Duke, Georgetown, Harvard, Johns Hopkins, MIT, Mt. Holyoke, Northwestern, Oberlin, Pomona, Princeton, Rice, Smith, Stanford, Swarthmore, Trinity, U of Chicago, U of Pennsylvania, U of Rochester, Washington University, Wellesley, Wesleyan,Williams, and Yale. Not all COFHE schools participate in each survey, so schools included in the COFHE results will vary by survey and year.

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