Assessing the Progress of Women Faculty at Yale University

A new report has found that women make up 34 percent of the tenure and tenure-track faculty at Yale University in New Haven, Connecticut. Women are 24 percent of the tenured faculty. This has improved from 17 percent a decade ago.

The survey found that 30 percent of the tenured faculty in the humanities are women and women make up 25 percent of the tenured faculty in the social sciences. But in the physical sciences, only 11 percent of the tenured faculty are women. Twelve percent of the prestigious Sterling Professors at Yale are women.

Some 18 percent of all department chairs in the arts and sciences are women and 17 percent of the university’s deans are women.

The report found that women are 22 percent of the tenured faculty at the Yale Medical School. This was an improvement from 16 percent a decade ago. In other professional schools at Yale, women are 35 percent of tenured faculty. This is up from 25 percent a decade ago.

In an effort to enhance the experience of women faculty members, the Women’s Faculty Forum at Yale University has established the Side-Step mentoring program which pairs junior faculty members with senior-level faculty. The program unites junior faculty members with a colleague from another discipline in an effort to facilitate nurturing relationships in a less formal professional arrangement.

Priya Natarajan, professor of astronomy and physics at Yale and chair of the Women’s Faculty Forum, states, “Gender bias is alive and well, even in the sciences, where we all tend to believe that the scholarship can be evaluated objectively.”