Women, Men, and the Academic Hierarchy: exploring the relationship between rank and sex

Abstract Women working in higher education find themselves in a minority when compared to their male colleagues. In addition, they display different characteristics, as a group, to comparable men. Women, for example, tend to be younger, concentrated within specific subject areas, and clustered in the lower ranks of the academic hierarchy. In this paper, attention focuses upon the analysis and explanation of the variation between the ranks reached by men and women. A number of possible explanations exist as to the basis of this discrepancy. One such explanation concentrates upon the tendency for women to be found in groups unlikely to be considered for promotion to senior rank. In this paper a preliminary exploration and assessment is made of the utility of such arguments when applied to men and women working in higher education in the late 1980s. The survey of academic staff to which this article refers was carried out bySocial and Community Planning Research (SCPR) during October 1988 in collaboration with its initiator, Professor A. H. Halsey (then director of the Department of Social and Administrative Studies at the University of Oxford). For further information about the technical details of the survey, and for a detailed discussion of its general findings, see Halsey, A. H. (1992)Decline of Donnish Dominion. Parts of the data derived from the survey also formed the core of an M. Phil, thesis on women working in higher education. It is upon this thesis that this article is based.