Humanities Resources Online

Distribution of Humanities Faculty by Gender

NOTE TO READERS: Please include the following reference when citing data from this page: "American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Humanities Indicators, http://HumanitiesIndicators.org".

Back to Section III-D

See the Note on the Definition of Faculty and on the Classification of Disciplines.

While the humanities have lagged behind nearly all other fields in terms of the ethnic diversity of their faculty (see Indicator III-12, Ethnic Composition of Humanities Faculty), they have incorporated more women into the postsecondary faculty than most other fields. If faculty of all ranks are considered, just under 50% of humanities faculty were women in 2004, up from 37% in 1988 (Figure III-13a). By 2004, only two fields, education and health sciences, had greater proportions of female faculty.

	Figure III-13a, Full Size
	Supporting Data

Women, however, remained a minority among the highest-ranking humanities faculty. Women still represented less than 40% of tenured faculty in 2004 (Figure III-13b). In addition, between 1988 and 1993 the percentage of nontenure track faculty who were women rose 8 percentage points to 59%. While this proportion subsequently dropped somewhat, women remained overrepresented among nontenure track faculty. Moreover, although the percentage of faculty eligible for tenure who were women rose between 1988 and 1993, it then dropped steadily throughout the remainder of the 1990s and into the early 2000s.

	Figure III-13b, Full Size
	Supporting Data

Note on the Definition of Faculty and on the Classification of Disciplines

Faculty

For the purposes of the Humanities Indicators, a faculty member is defined as an employee of a two-year or four-year college or a university who teaches credit-earning courses and who may also perform research activities. Faculty thus include not only individuals who have faculty status in their institutions but also those who are classified as instructional staff by their employers. Faculty exclude those individuals whose duties are purely research oriented (even though such individuals may be classified as faculty by their institutions).

Classification of Academic Disciplines

The Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS), the collector of the data on which the first indicator in this section is based (III-9, Number of Humanities Faculty) sorts postsecondary faculty by academic discipline, using a scheme that includes six humanities-related categories. Five of these have been combined by the Humanities Indicators for the purposes of estimating humanities faculty employment. They include:

	English Language and Literature
	Foreign Languages and Literatures
	History
	Philosophy and Religion
	Area, Ethnic, and Cultural Studies

The sixth BLS category, Arts, Drama, and Music, does not distinguish between faculty who teach the academic study of the arts (treated by the Humanities Indicators as a humanities activity) and those who teach studio and performing arts. Consequently, faculty teaching the history and criticism of the fine arts and film are not included in the estimate of the number of humanities faculty.

The National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF), the source of the data for the other indicators in this section, conceptualizes the humanities somewhat more narrowly than does the Humanities Indicators, including only those individuals teaching English, foreign languages, history, philosophy, and religion. Additionally, the NSOPF treats computer science as a natural science (although the Humanities Indicators considers this discipline to be part of the engineering field and classifies it as such for the purposes of the other indicators).

Back to Content