Back-of-the-Envelope Calculation: Reaching Gender Equality in Physics Faculty

In yesterday’s post about the lack of money in academia, I mentioned in passing that lack of funding is part of the reason for the slow pace of progress on improving faculty diversity. That is, we could make more rapid progress if we suddenly found shitloads of money and could go on a massive hiring binge, but in the absence of flipping great wodges of cash, change comes more slowly.

This, naturally, sparked a sort of morbid curiosity about whether the scale of this problem would be quantifiable, and of course, there’s the AIP Statistical Research Center offering numbers on all sorts of features of the physics landscape. So, here are some numbers about what it would take to achieve equal representation for women within physics departments. These are grabbed from reports spread over a few years, so I’m going to aggressively round numbers, usually up, because the goal here is just to give a sense of the scale, not a precise prediction of anything.

So, according to a recent-ish report on the number of faculty jobs (pdf) there were about 9,400 physics faculty in the US, and 80% of those are on the tenure track. From the report on women in physics (pdf), about 14% of those are women.

Aggressively rounding these, that’s 7600 tenure-track faculty, 6500 men and 1100 women. Which means we’d either need to replace 3700 men with women to achieve the goal of equal gender representation, or create 5400 new faculty positions to be filled exclusively with women.

Assuming this replacement were to take place via the normal retirement/replacement process, how long would that take? Well, the AIP has a report on faculty turnover (pdf), which suggests we could ballpark the number of jobs on offer in a given year as about 600. Which means it would take a bit more than six years of exclusively hiring women into physics faculty lines to get to equal representation.

Leaving aside the massive legal issues with such a program, is that even feasible? Well, the report on graduate degrees (pdf) says that in recent years there were about 1900 Ph.D.’s in physics awarded per year, and around 20% of those went to women. Which we can aggressively round to about 400 women per year, so the “hire only women” plan would require hiring half again as many women per year as graduate with a Ph.D. in physics. If you just hired every woman who got a Ph.D. directly into a faculty job, it’d take a bit more than nine years to get to equal representation.

(Of course, this isn’t a really accurate representation of the job market, as there are a large number of recent-ish graduates in post-doc jobs, so there’s a larger reservoir of talent available right off. I don’t know how to quantify that, though, and again: I’m just trying to get a sense of scale, here…)

And just for giggles, what would the “shitloads of money” option require? Well, a few years back I recall the administration saying that they needed a donation of about $2 million to endow a faculty line. That’s a few years out of date, but then we pay a bit better than the median for faculty, and full professors in endowed chairs make more than new hires. So it’s probably not completely ridiculous to use as a number for sense-of-scale purposes.

So, if you wanted to just make the gender-equity problem disappear overnight by creating a huge number of new faculty lines exclusively for women, you’re talking about 5400 jobs at $2 million apiece, or just shy of eleven billion dollars. (Leaving aside the logistical question of who would fill all those jobs…)

So there’s some back-of-the-envelope math for you. This was undertaken mostly to satisfy my morbid curiosity from yesterday, and has basically confirmed said curiosity as morbid. You could do something similar for astronomy departments, but I don’t care enough to repeat it; you could also try to do a similar calculation for getting to proportional representation of racial diversity, but the numbers there are really depressing, so I’m not even going to look.

Again, the point here, as with all back-of-the-envelope calculations, is just to get a sense of scale. I’m not making a specific policy recommendation, or anything like that. Though if you do happen to have $11 billion burning a hole in your offshore bank account, drop me a line, and I’ll be happy to make some suggestions…