Karen Cook, the Ray Lyman Wilbur Professor of Sociology and vice provost for faculty diversity and development at Stanford University, recently issued a report on efforts to hire more women and underrepresented minorities to the university’s faculty. Dr. Cook admitted that progress in this area “has been slow and somewhat uneven.”
The data shows that in 2004 there were 408 women on the Stanford faculty. By 2014, there were 545 women on the university’s faculty, an increase of more than one third. But during the period, the overall size of the Stanford faculty grew by nearly 20 percent. So the closing of the gender gap in faculty appointments has not progressed to a major degree. In 2004, women were 22.9 percent of the total faculty. A decade later, women made up 27.2 percent of the Stanford faculty.
If we project on a straight-line basis the progress achieved in closing the gender gap over the past 10 years (4.3 percentage points), it would take more than a half century for women to make up half of the Stanford faculty.