Faculty Diversity at the University of Iowa: Women Have a Long Way to Catch Up

The University of Iowa reports that as of November 2016, 32.3 percent of tenured or tenure-track faculty members are women. Women make up 92.9 percent of the faculty in the College of Nursing but only 12.6 percent of the total faculty in the College of Engineering.

In 2010, the university initiated a cluster hiring initiative to bring highly regarded scholars to the university in seven disciplines: water sustainability, obesity in research and education, aging mind and brain, public digital arts, public humanities in a digital world, informatics, and genetics. Of the faculty members hired under this initiative 27.8 percent have been women.

Sara Mitchell, a professor in the College of  Liberal Arts and Sciences, told the Daily Iowan, “If you identify research areas for the clusters that tend to be in male-dominated disciplines, then that’s going to produce a pattern in which you don’t hire very many female faculty.”