Gender Diversity in Academia

The Black Lives Matter movement spun a lot of reflections, not only regarding racial injustice, but also regarding gender and minorities as a whole. The discussion becomes particularly interesting in academia , where there is a lot of gender unbalance in many disciplines.

The differences may come from an early age, in which boys and girls are pushed to different tastes by parenting/schooling/society. However, the fact that over the years the gap increases shows that the problem does not stay constant ¹ . If the percentage of women professors is smaller than the percentage of women students, this clearly points to a bias through the career, not only as a starting point.

The Role Model Approach

I have seen people proposing that women should be role models . This means they should be more exposed, so that they can inspire girls to pursue academic careers. I see the value in the approach, but I think this puts even more pressure in the groups that are already under-represented.

Are institutions really willing to put the extra money and support, for example guaranteeing more teacher assistants to female professors in order to free their time to be role models? Are they lowering their involvement in internal bureaucracy, guaranteeing funds so they can spend more time fighting gender inequalities?

See also

• The problem with people in positions of power in academia
• technical inequality

TODO:

• I need to find sources with statistics, and links to discussions

Tags: #gender #gender-in-academia