We knew that we could use data from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR), arguably one of the best employment datasets in the country, to test whether women and men progressed at different rates to tenure and whether issues of family formation affect these career patterns. Starting in 1973, the National Science Foundation (NSF), National Institute of Health (NIH), and other governmental agencies began to interview roughly a 10% subsample of all U.S. PhD recipients in the sciences and social sciences regarding their post-degree employment experiences (NSF 1995, 1999). The SDRÕs population is drawn from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED), a yearly census of U.S. PhD recipients, and is designed to be representative of all PhDs from U.S. institutions currently residing in the U.S. and under the age of 76. For each two years after the first SDR survey, 1975 to the present, NSF resurveyed all individuals previously included in the SDR and added a new sample of individuals who had received PhDs since the preceding SDR interview. In 1977, the National Endowment of Humanities (NEH) began to survey doctorates in the humanities with a similar instrument and continued to do so until 1995 when they dropped the survey for fiscal reasons. To date, more than 160,000 individuals have participated in this nationally representative survey.
Robert M. Gray, September 12, 2004
