Women Are a Small Percentage of Finance Faculty But Some Slow Progress Is Being Made

Dr. Sherman

A new study conducted by Mila G. Sherman, professor of finance in the Isenberg School of Management at the University of Massachusetts Amherst, and Heather Tookes, professor of finance at the Yale School of Management, finds that only 16 percent of the finance faculty at the nation’s top business schools are women.

In a review of finance faculty from the top 100 business schools in the U.S. from 2009 to 2017, Professor Sherman and Tookes found that women tended to work for lower-ranked institutions and were less likely to be tenured than men. The analysis showed that less than 15 percent of the population of tenured finance faculty were female in every year of the sample.

Dr. Tookes

The authors did report some encouraging news. They found that over the course of the study period there was a gender gap of only 3.7 percent. The data showed a more significant gap in the earlier years of the sample, but by 2015, the pay gap had disappeared.

“By the last years of the sample, we are finding that research productivity, and not gender, explains most of the variation in where a faculty member is employed, whether the faculty member has tenure, or exits the profession,” the authors wrote. “These changes are occurring at the same time that we observe another slow-moving trend in the data: more women are entering the profession and obtaining tenure.”

Professor Sherman joined the faculty at the University of Massachusetts in 2004 and was promoted to full professor in 2018. She is the editor of the Journal of Alternative Investments. Dr. Sherman holds a bachelor’s degree and a Ph.D. from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Professor Tookes joined the faculty at the Yale School of Management in 2004 and was promoted to full professor a decade later. She holds a bachelor’s degree in economics from Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island, and a Ph.D. in finance from Cornell University in Ithaca, New York.

The full study, “Female Representation in the Academic Finance Profession,” was published in the Journal of Finance. it may be accessed here.