ABSTRACT
Disproportionately fewer faculty women than men achieve high levels of success in academe. Although falling well short of parity, women have made small gains in hiring in the past several years, but securing an entry-level position and sustaining a successful academic career are two quite different things [11, 12, 24]. According to Cole [7], women who have persevered are survivors who have gone against the grain of occupational stereotyping to enter a primarily male profession. For those who have defied the tough odds of the gatekeeping processes, their occupation has always had a position of primary importance relative to marriage, family, and other pursuits. In spite of the salience of the career to faculty women and the lengths to which they go to sustain it, there is the well-documented issue of differential progress [1, 7, 11, 12, 24, 33, 36]. The problem is especially acute in elite, research-oriented institutions and in the ranks of tenured faculty [2, 32]. Possible explanations include overt and subtle sex discrimination, differential interests and preferences for teaching rather than research, lack of sponsorship and collegial networks, and others suggesting accumulative disadvantage in the structure of the occupational career.
