Inside Higher Ed
By Colleen Flaherty
February 24, 2021
Women are 60 percent of all professionals in higher education and have been earning the majority of master’s and doctoral degrees for decades. Yet women represent just 24 percent of the highest-paid faculty members and administrators at 130 leading research universities, according to a new study from Eos Foundation’s Women’s Power Gap Initiative, the American Association of University Women and the WAGE project. Women of color are even more grossly underrepresented, at just 2 percent of top core academic earners.
No Excuses
“Schools struggling to ‘find’ women and people of color for leadership positions should deeply examine their institutional cultures and seek to systematically change their hiring, retention and advancement practices to more quickly and urgently close the power and pay gaps,” the report says.
Women’s Power Gap isn’t strictly about higher education. It encourages pay and gender parity within corporations, too. But Eos and its collaborators say they focused this new report on academe because education “is viewed as the great equalizer, and institutions of higher education are considered moral exemplars for society.”
