There has been significant progress toward gender parity in many academic fields — and beyond it in some. The usual starting point for looking at this question in the US is the NSF’s ‘Survey of Earned Doctorates,’ which provides an annually-updated account of trends in PhD education. According to the most recent report from 2021, women make up almost 72% of psychology PhDs, 68% of health science PhDs, 53% in the biomedical sciences, and 50% in the social sciences. From there, percentages drops quickly: 33% in the physical sciences, 28% in math and statistics, 26% in engineering, and 25% in computer and information science. These percentages are not a measure of later employment in those fields — in fact the reality is probably somewhat worse due to professional drop-off among women in the STEM fields in which they are a minority. But it’s a place to start.
There is a parallel, widely held but harder to empirically document argument that the role of women in the curriculum lags their presence as faculty and instructors — and in some fields by a lot. Here, Open Syllabus can offer solid confirmation. The new Gender Statistics dashboard in Open Syllabus Analytics explores the question of author and instructor gender ratios across the full syllabus collection — some 16 million in early 2023. The most useful view at the moment is of the 62 fields into which Open Syllabus classifies syllabi. The results are striking.



Let’s pause for a moment on the
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