The under representation of females among faculty in the fields of science and engineering has been a concern and a topic of research of many committees, institutions, and scholars. There seem to be a multitude of causes behind this under representation of females in scientific academic jobs. Starting from high school, women seem to drop out of the science/engineering pipeline at practically every step along the way. This project focuses on the last stage in this process - the low proportion of women at the associate or full professor ranks. It is the first study to be based on a continuing panel of PhD's and to use the panel nature of this data to follow people's careers as they develop over time. This approach is superior to the cross sectional analysis in other studies because it controls for the size of the entrant cohort, allows covariants to have independent effects on the probabilities, and accounts for people who leave academia. The panel data allow analysis of the entire time pattern of the likelihood of promotion and comparison of the probabilities of eventually receiving tenure. This project focuses on gender differences in promotion in academic jobs in the fields of economics, the other social sciences, science and engineering. It uses panel data collected by the National Science Foundation in its biannual survey of Doctorate Recipients. The project investigates whether women and men who enter academia with similar backgrounds have the same likelihood of progressing in academic careers and progress at similar speeds in their careers. Using hazard rate analysis, the project estimates gender differences in the probabilities of receiving tenure. A similar approach is used to study the promotion to full professorship. The first stages of the research will consider the field of economics. Specifications and models developed for the field of economics will then be extended to other fields with the social sciences and to science and engineering. The final stage of the analysis will perform similar on all fields together in order to be able to draw conclusions about the overall promotion process in academia and on how differences among fields in the promotion process can be explained by different characteristics of the fields themselves.
