The Gender Breakdown of the Applicant Pool for Tenure-Track Faculty Positions at a Sample of North American Research Astronomy Programs

TL;DR

This study analyzes the gender composition of applicant pools for astronomy faculty positions, revealing that women constitute about 20% of applicants, with implications for diversity efforts in academia.

Contribution

It provides the first systematic quantification of female applicant proportions for astronomy faculty positions across multiple universities.

Findings

Female applicants make up approximately 20% of total applicants.

There is little variation in the female applicant ratio across different positions.

The study highlights the need for diversity efforts in faculty recruitment.

Abstract

The demographics of the field of Astronomy, and the gender balance in particular, is an important active area of investigation. A piece of information missing from the discussion is the gender breakdown of the applicant pool for faculty positions. For a sample of 35 tenure-track faculty positions at 25 research universities advertised over the last few years in astronomy and astrophysics, I find that the ratio of female applicants to the total number of applicants is ~0.2, with little dispersion and with no strong dependence on the total number of applicants. Some discussion is provided in the context of the fraction of women at the graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, and assistant professor levels, but strong conclusions are not possible given the limitations of the study. Current and future faculty search committees will likely be interested to compare their numbers to this distribution to decide whether or not they could be doing more to attract an applicant pool that is representative of the community.