W.O.W. Where are Our Women?
An exploration of female faculty at Harvard and beyond.
Take a look around your classroom.
You will most likely see an even distribution between male and female students.
But what about the professor lecturing in front?
Scroll to continue
What percent of Harvard faculty do you think are listed as female?
Hover over the icons to highlight them and click the number out of 10 Harvard faculty you think are female.
Let's take a closer look by concentration.
In this sunburst diagram, the inner circle represents the 4 major divisions of Harvard's faculty of Arts & Sciences. The outer circle represents concentrations within these divisions.
Hover over the individual segments to explore the number of female faculty as well as gender trends across faculty positions for each concentration and division.
of faculty
are women
* Note: The numbers correspond with the number of faculty of the specified gender, position, and concentration. The numbers do not add up as there are other faculty positions not listed.
The number of female faculty exceeds that of male faculty in only 6 concentrations.
And let's also take a look at differences in wages.
Wage Gap Between Male and Female Professors at Harvard
Hover over the graph to see the difference in wages by gender. You can select the faculty position using the select box below.
* Note: Dotted line indicates that data is not available.
- Average Male Faculty Wage
- Average Female Faculty Wage
To examine this further, let's explore data from other Ivy League universities.
Female Faculty Percentage and Wage Across Ivy League Universities
Click on the map to see the percentage of female professors as well as wage difference on that campus.
* Note: Wage difference was calculated by dividing female faculty wage by male faculty wage. These figures are based on 2015 data.
This appears to be a nation-wide phenomenon.
Women are underrepresented in academia, especially in higher-ranking positions.
It is important also to remember, however, that women are overrepresented in lower-ranking academic positions.
While women represent over half (51.5%) of Assistant Professors and are near parity (44.9%) among Associate Professors, they accounted for less than a third (32.4%) of Professors in 2015.
Men outearn women at all faculty levels.
At all categories of institutions, full professors who are women earned on average $98,524 a year compared to $104,493 for their male colleagues in 2016–2017. That’s 94.3% of what men earned.
Nevertheless, it appears that there is a greater imbalance at Ivy League Universities than at the average US postsecondary institution, according to the data in the preceding visualization.
However, these problems are nothing new.
There has always been a gender imbalance among faculty at these institutions. Only centuries after their founding did women become a part of their leadership.
History of Female Leadership in Academia
Select any school or combination of schools to explore a timeline of its history of female leadership relative to milestones for women
in US history.
Hover over an event (represented by each circle) for a brief description. Click for more information.
The data shows that something is off. So how do people at Harvard feel about all this? And what now?
An overwhelming majority understand that there is a gender imbalance among Harvard faculty. As it stands, this is 86.1% of those who responded to our survey.
Here are some of their thoughts:
If you believe that there indeed is a gender imbalance, why do you believe this is the case? What can be attributed to this imbalance?
If you believe that there indeed is a gender imbalance, how do you think this imbalance can be mitigated? What, if anything, do you think Harvard is already doing to address this?
"Lack of Harvard support looking for good professors/paying them enough. Female reluctance to accept a position at Harvard because of the preexisting imbalance?"
"I think all the intro classes I have taken thus far in econ, math, statistics (Stem related subjects) are mainly male. I think there is a bias that stem is dominated by men."
"Personally, I've noticed that most of my professors are male, even in the humanities, where the vast majority of TF's are female"
"I believe it is difficult for female academics to break into higher faculty roles because of implicit bias that exists in the structures that oversee these assignments."
"At least in CS there is a gender imbalance. That is not restricted to Harvard but generally the case in Universities."
"I think that historically marginalized groups continue to be discriminated against not only in the process of becoming a potential faculty member, but also getting to the point where one may become a faculty member in a place like Harvard."
"I think there is a gender imbalance within the mathematics, natural sciences, and life sciences departments (basically anything having to do with STEM). It appears that female faculty are more prevalent in the humanities departments. Not sure why though, potentially because Harvard hires well-known, established professionals in their respective fields, and there happen to be more male candidates in STEM. "
"Of the 29 classes I have had so far, I have had only 5 female teachers. Of those 5, only 2 were female professors (1 being a graduate student and 2 being Preceptors)."
"Sexism in academia"
"Women are not promoted as often as men (not their fault though), women don't perceive academia to be an available option to them, women receive less mentorship and advising in higher education, sexist culture makes women feel less comfortable in academia"
"Although there is an imbalance in academia as a whole, there are women who would be more than happy to work at Harvard who are more than qualified. If Harvard offered more women tenure and offered them the money that they deserved, it would fix the imbalance."
"More female role models, more support systems"
"Create spaces for women within biased fields and make sure intro classes are equally accessible for all people via resources for those without previous background. Put an emphasis on noticing biases within department staff between men and women."
"Start as early as in kindergarten to fight gender stereotypes."
"This is a deeper issue than hiring; Harvard must encourage female graduate students, and should there be any case of sexual harassment, the University should have no tolerance for such behavior."
"Better childcare policies and less harassment"
"Actively recruit women to enter the pipeline to professorship and ensure that current female professors' concerns are addressed."
"Being more intentional in hiring, working on attrition (this is the largest problem, attrition is really high since the climate for female faculty in, say, the math department is pretty sad.) Don't know what Harvard is doing. It clearly isn't working. "
"I think there need to be systemic changes at Harvard and across the country that after retribution for discrimination as well as training to become aware of biases."
"More explicit support for female faculty, educational implicit bias programs for all faculty and teaching staff, and better maternity leave/childcare"
Now tell us how YOU feel!
About this Project
Our Team
Yanni Cho
Yanni is a sophomore in Lowell concentrating in Neurobiology.
Rachel Kang
Rachel is a sophomore in Lowell concentrating in Computer Science.
Haixing Yin
Haixing is a first year graduate student in the CSE program.
Notes
1. We would like to take special note to address that the gender-binary nature of this project is based merely on the data/information we were able to find in the time we had provided to work on this project. The lack of data concerning nonbinary gender identities is a serious issue that reflects the gravity of the problem. Due to the lack of data on this and due to our focus on women, however, this was not given the attention needed.
2. Our visualizations are based on publicly available data and information; any and all potential errors reflect those of these online resources.
References
- The gender ratio of Harvard faculty for each concentration was obtained from the Harvard Open Data project.
- The wage difference of Harvard faculty as well as other Ivy League university faculty was from Chronicle Data.
- Data about the faculty gender ratio of each Ivy League university was obtained from information released by each school. (Brown University, Columbia University, Cornell University, Dartmouth College, University of Pennsylvania, Princeton University, Yale University)
- National data found from an article called "Gender Inequality Across the Academic Life Course" and Catalyst.
- Timeline data was found from the following sources: Harvard University Faculty Development & Diversity, Yale University Visitor Center, Yale University Office of the President, Princetoniana, Princeton University Mudd Manuscript Library Blog, Brown University Pembroke Center, Columbia 250, University of Pennsylvania University Archives and Records Center, and Cornell University 150.
- Responses were collected from a survey we sent out to Harvard students and faculty.