Women Faculty Come Up Short in Tenure Appointments

The academic workforce has shifted from mostly full-time tenured or tenure-track faculty to mostly contingent faculty, including full-time non-tenure-track, full-time with no tenure system, and part-time faculty. Specifically:

• Over two-thirds (68 percent) of faculty members in U.S. colleges and universities held contingent appointments in fall 2021, compared with about 47 percent in fall 1987.
• Nearly half (48 percent) of faculty members in U.S. colleges and universities were employed part-time in fall 2021, compared with about 33 percent in 1987.
• About 24 percent of faculty members in US colleges and universities held full-time tenured appointments in fall 2021, compared with about 39 percent in fall 1987.

Women were more likely than men to hold part-time faculty positions in 2021. Some 46 percent of all women faculty were part-time in 2021 compared to 39 percent of male faculty. Of all women faculty, 54 percent held tenure or tenure-track appointments compared to 65 percent of male faculty. Nearly half of all male faculty were tenured compared to 36 percent of women faculty.

The report concludes that “tenure is the primary means of protecting academic freedom and exists not only to protect individual faculty members but also to benefit students and serve the common good by ensuring the quality of teaching and research in higher education. Overreliance on contingent appointments, which lack the protection of tenure for academic freedom and the economic security of continuing appointments, threatens the success of institutions in fulfilling their obligations to students and to society.”