Once women enter a tenure-track position, family effects alone no longer explain their decreased likelihood of continuing on in the pipeline to tenure. Rather, tenure-track women regardless of family status are less likely than tenure-track men to eventually become tenured. On a year to year basis, men are 20% more likely to achieve tenure than are women. We do not know why this is true, but theorize that other factors such as discrimination may be at work (e.g. Valian 1998).
From a pipeline/resource related issue, this second leak for women, the tenure-track to tenure leak, is troubling, but the first leak is even more worrisome because it is earlier in the pipeline and thus has a compounding effect. Achieving tenure is obviously preconditioned on entering a tenure-track faculty position and thus married women, particularly ones with young children, are lost to the professoriate within a first few years after the receipt of the PhD.
Robert M. Gray, September 12, 2004
