Academic Careers and the Gender Gap

Although women have made great strides in the world of academia over the past four decades, they still occupy a relatively small number of the coveted top rung of university positions.

In Academic Careers and the Gender Gap, Maureen Baker explains the reasons behind this inequality, drawing [...]
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Although women have made great strides in the world of academia over the past four decades, they still occupy a relatively small number of the coveted top rung of university positions.

In Academic Careers and the Gender Gap, Maureen Baker explains the reasons behind this inequality, drawing on interviews with male and female scholars, previous research, and her own thirty-eight-year academic career. Using a feminist political economy and interpretive theoretical framework, she shows that gender inequality still affects countless female academics throughout Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Although women in these countries earn nearly half of all new PhDs, Baker argues that current university priorities, collegial relations, and gendered families impede women's ascension to more prestigious positions and keep them clustered in the junior ranks.

Tracing the evolution of university hiring practices alongside shifting family dynamics and the personal and professional ambitions of academics, Baker sets academia in the wider context of restructuring labour markets and gendered earning patterns within families.The result is a revealing portrait of significant and persistent differences in job security, institutional affiliation, working hours, rank, salary, job satisfaction, collegial networks, and career length between male and female scholars.