(view the Executive Summary as a pdf)

Women at the University of Michigan, prepared for the Office of the President under the sponsorship of the President’s Advisory Commission on Women’s Issues, provides data on the current status of women students, staff and faculty at the University of Michigan’s Ann Arbor campus. This edition adds to the knowledge base established by three earlier editions, the first of which was produced in 1992 at the request of then-President James J. Duderstadt. The report presents an accurate measure of the relative standing of women in the University, identifies areas where inequities exist, and provides benchmarks for setting goals and measuring progress. Administrators, researchers, and other University personnel will find the data to be valuable for a wide range of initiatives, policy decisions and other uses.

Highlights from this edition of Women at the University of Michigan:

SECTION I:
Women’s Progression Through the Ranks from Student to Faculty to Academic Administrator

• Women receive 51% of all bachelor’s degrees granted by the University of Michigan (Chart 1). The proportion of women enrolled in master’s or professional degree programs has increased since 1995 to 46% and 45% respectively, while women now represent 39% of doctoral degree recipients. Caucasian women students account for 36% of all degree holders; Asian women, nearly 6%; African-American women, 4%; Hispanic women, 2%; and Native American women, 0.2% (Chart 3).
  
  
• When comparing UM’s percentage of women faculty to the percentage of women in the relevant hiring pools of Ph.D.s, the University lags dramatically behind the national pool in terms of gender representation. Despite having an adequate number of women Ph.D.s in most fields, the percentage of women faculty within most academic disciplines at UM continues to be at or below the 1979 national levels of women’s Ph.D. attainment (Chart 4).
  
  
• Women’s presence in some levels of academic administration has markedly increased over the past decade. In 2001, women held 50% of executive officer positions and 47% of dean posts. Women, however, account for only 28% of all department chairs (Chart 1). Women of color hold a small number of academic leadership positions: 10% of executive officers, 5% of deans, and 2% of department chairs (Chart 2). These percentages equate to 1 executive officer, 1 dean and 4 department chair positions being held by women of color. This is a good example of how percentages should be considered in conjunction with the actual numbers presented in any given chart.

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SECTION II:
Faculty Composition and Tenure Attainment

• Among the faculty ranks, women’s representation is largest -- 64% -- in the ranks of archivists, curators and librarians, and lowest -- 26% -- in the tenured and tenure track instructional ranks (Chart 60). Among archivists, curators and librarians, caucasian women make up 56% of all staff, while women of color represent 8%.
  
  
• For the Ann Arbor campus as a whole, 17% of full professors, 34% of associate professors, and 34% of assistant professors are women (Chart 62). These figures represent an increase in the full and associate professor ranks since 1995, but a slight decrease in the assistant professor rank. Worth noting is the fact that the percentage of women in the assistant professor rank has remained around 33% for more than twenty years (Chart 61).
  
  
• Women of color represent 2% of all full professors, 7% of associate professors, 12% of assistant professors, and 13% of lecturers (Chart 63). These figures show an increase in all ranks since 1995.
  
  
• Among the non-tenure track ranks, women make up 57% of lecturer positions (Chart 60). Since 1990, the number of lecturer positions has grown by 37%, with women accounting for 82% of the increase.
  
  
• The schools of Dentistry, Law and Medicine (Charts 73, 78 and 80) experienced large increases in the number of women and men hired into Clinical II positions over the last decade. Within the Medical School, the number of Clinical II positions rose seven-fold between 1990 and 2001. Clinical II faculty there, 46% of whom are women, now make up one-third of all Medical School faculty (Chart 80). Campus-wide, 45% of all Clinical II personnel are women: 37% are caucasian women and 8% are women of color (Chart 60).
  
  
• Since the mid-1990s, about 33% of faculty hired into tenured positions have been women, with a peak of 53% in 1996-7 and a low of 23% in 2000-1. Women of color accounted for an average of 8% of senior hires during this period. In the same time period, the proportion of women hired into new tenure track positions also remained fairly steady at one-third, with women of color averaging 12% of these hires (Chart 64).
  
  
• Growth in the percentage of tenured and tenure track women faculty varies. While some schools and departments (department level analyses were conducted for the schools of Medicine and Literature, Science and the Arts) saw increases in the percentage of women faculty since 1995, others have shown decreases or remained static. See Charts 70 through 142 for specific data.
  
  
• Charts 144 through 158 present the results of two cohort analyses of tenure attainment by gender. Each cohort includes all faculty hired into tenure track positions with a title of assistant professor or instructor during a given time period. The early cohort was hired between July 1, 1982 and June 30, 1988. The later cohort was hired between July 1, 1988 and June 30, 1995. An overall analysis combined both the early and later cohorts. Each analysis portrays the number of men and women, respectively, who received tenure, transferred off the tenure track, had tenure decisions pending, or who left the University.
  
  
  Among the cohort of assistant professors hired between 1988 and 1995, women attained tenure at the same rate (50%) as did men (Chart 154). Among faculty of color from this cohort, women of color attained tenure at a slightly lower rate than men of color (47% vs. 49%) (Chart 155). However, this difference was not statistically significant.
  
  
• When the two cohorts of assistant professors hired between 1982 and June 1988 and between July 1988 and 1995 were analyzed together, the rate of tenure for women was 47% compared to 51% for men (Chart 144). In numerical terms, more than twice as many men as women received tenure. Women of color hired as assistant professors attained tenure at a rate of 45% as compared to 50% for men of color (Chart 145).
  
  
• Within the primary research track, women represent 36% of all positions. Caucasian women account for 29% and women of color represent 7% of all primary researchers (Charts 60 and 68).

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SECTION III:
Staff Composition and Compensation

• An analysis of staff composition by gender shows that women continue to hold the vast majority of positions within most job families (Chart 159), yet senior positions are more often held by men.
  
  
• Marked differences in gender composition exist in certain job families. In the Office and Nursing job families, over 90% of positions are held by women; in the Operating Engineers and Trades job family, only 3% of staff are women (Chart 159). These discrepancies have persisted over the past decade.
  
  
• When staff composition is analyzed by race, women of color continue to hold fewer than 8% of positions in the following job families: Academic Administrative Ungraded, Operating Engineers and Trades, Security and Public Safety, and Technical (Chart 159). The job family with the highest percentage of women of color is the Service/Maintenance Staff, where they make up 26% of the staff. For most job families, composition rates by race have remained nearly constant over the past decade (Charts 160 through 168).
  
  
• Within the more highly compensated salary grades, staff women tend to hold fewer positions than men. Except in job families that are overwhelmingly female, a greater percentage of women than men earn salaries at the low end of the spectrum, while a greater percentage of men earn salaries at the high end of the spectrum (Charts 169 through 173).
  
  
• Despite their still being a minority, increased numbers of women entered into the higher salary grade ranges, compared to 1995 (Charts 174 through 178). Particular advancement occurred among Professional and Administrative and Academic Ungraded Staff, where women in salary grades 16 and above increased from 30% to 41% between 1995 and 2001 (Chart 176).

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