The Gender Gap in Finance Faculty Positions at the Leading Business Schools in the United States

Dr. Sherman

Women hold just 16 percent of faculty positions in finance at top U.S. business schools. They are less likely to be hired at the highest-ranked schools, and are paid less, according to a study co-authored by Mila Getmansky Sherman of the Eugene M. Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst and Heather Tookes of the School of Management at Yale University. Women faculty members were less likely to be tenured and tended to be more likely to hold positions at lower-ranked business schools.

The authors found that the average woman faculty member had fewer total publications than the average man, but the average woman was also newer to the profession. When the team standardized and compared individuals’ performance, they found that — all else being equal — women were employed at schools ranked four spots lower on the U.S. News list of leading business schools than male faculty. “Even when we compared two people with the same number of publications and citations, the woman was more likely to be placed at a lower-tiered institution,” Dr. Tookes explains.

Dr. Tookes

The gap has been narrowing in recent years, but progress has been slow. “We observed a pretty significant gender imbalance in our profession,” Dr. Tookes says. “When we control for variables such as the number of publications or top publications, the gap in success that’s explained by gender alone appears to be narrowing.”

Dr. Tookes is a graduate of Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island. She earned a Ph.D. in finance at Cornell University in Ithaca, New York. Professor Tookes joined the faculty at Yale in 2004.

Dr. Sherman holds a bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering and a Ph.D. in management from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. She joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in 2004.

The full study, “Female Representation in the Academic Finance Profession,” may be accessed here.