Beginning around 2000, universities began to consistently add more women than men to their ranks of new assistant professorships:
As a result, in 2013 women began to outnumber men:
As of 2022, women held 54.4% of all assistant professorships.
Note that is an average. The numbers obviously vary tremendously among different academic fields.
Here’s something I find surprising. The vast majority of students in veterinary school are women. Over 80%. I wonder why.
Salaries are pretty poor for veterinarians. My daughter-in-law is an emergency vet out on Cape Cod, and she's not exactly making bank.
Around here they're doing pretty well...and the client charges have increased to reflect that. Many of the female vets want to work only 3-4 days to allow time with their kids (can't blame them at all). This causes a shortage as the same number of shifts need to be filled. Supply and demand. Salaries go up.
I have a friend who owns his veterinary practice. It took a year and a half to hire a vet to fill an opening.
Vet school is as competitive to get into as med school these days. If you've got the grades and the brains to get into veterinary school you could have more money and prestige doing something else.
In pharmacy it's the case that it's now dominated by women. I've seen the argument that both fields offer women more control over their time--more fixed schedules. It's not the owner of your neighborhood drugstore; it's part of a chain with set hours for their pharmacist employees.
Similarly with vets, it's not the guy in All Things Great and /Small being called out to big animals at all hours; it's a practice for dogs and cats brought in by their subjects during office hours (with an emergency hospital within driving distance, at least in the DC area.
See Claudia Golden's got a Nobelbook--she has a Nobel.
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B0923ZMB1F/ref=kinw_myk_ro_title
Vet medicine has been corporatized. My private practice vet retired and sold the practice to another vet, who turned around and sold it to VCA, one of the big conglomerates of vet practices. Some of the vet techs stayed on, but complained there was pressure to upsell services. Much more emphasis now on profits at the expense of care. They hire young vets straight out of school, who can presumably be paid less. It’s pretty sad.
Note that the labeling of the axis in the graph makes a relatively small difference appear bigger. There was no difference at all in 2012.
Is this resulting in a corresponding increase in the number of women in more senior/tenured positions (Associate and above)? Asking based on... Experiences.
The hiring of women in academia started at least a decade before 2000. Anyone on the academic job market in the 90’s would have seen that. College admin and dept heads knew that women were discriminated against for not just decades, but since the founding of universities in the 12th century. Every dept faced pressure to high more women (and people of color, and gay men and women) after decades of predominantly (straight) white male hires.
Universities only prioritize hiring groups that are tracked by the federal or state governments. Period. That means race and sex (not gender identity, and not sexual orientation). The only thing I and my gay male friends in academia have experienced is discrimination, not favoritism.
Interesting to note that without the disparity in favor of men in STEM fields these numbers would be much more skewed.