Academic Careers and the Gender Gap

Women earn nearly half of all new PhDs in Canada, the United States, Australia, New Zealand, and the United Kingdom. Why, then, do they occupy a disproportionate number of the junior-level positions at universities while their male counterparts continue to snap up 80 percent of the more prestigious jobs? In Academic Careers and the Gender Gap, Maureen Baker explains the reasons behind this inequality, drawing on interviews with male and female scholars, previous research, and her own thirty-eight-year academic career. Using a feminist political economy and interpretive theoretical framework, she argues that current university priorities and collegial relations often magnify the impact of gendered families and identities and perpetuate the academic gender gap.

Baker sets academia in the wider context of restructuring labour markets and gendered earning patterns within families. The result is a revealing portrait of significant and persistent differences in job security, institutional affiliation, working hours, rank, salary, job satisfaction, collegial networks, and career length between male and female scholars.