Replication data for Opportunities for Faculty Tenure at Globally Ranked Universities: Cross-National Differences by Gender, Fields, and Tenure Status

This paper describes and explains gender differences in tenure among faculty in a sample of globally ranked universities across 13 countries. Drawing on a unique dataset of nearly 12,000 faculty from 52 globally ranked universities in four fields (Sociology, Biology, History, and Engineering), we examine the percentages of women faculty by tenure status, field, and country to show where women faculty reside cross-nationally. Subsequently, we conduct multilevel logistic regression analyses to examine individual and national characteristics associated with tenure status.

It is essential to clarify how we define “tenured” faculty positions across the 13 countries in our cross-national study. To begin, we selected four fields (departments) from four universities per country to arrive at close to 12,000 university faculty (a list of universities included in the study and the sampling procedure are available by request). The first author and a research assistant collected the data between February and July 2014 by visiting each departmental website. As we illustrate in Table 1 of our paper, we coded academic ranks for each faculty member as of 2014 using classifications of professor rankings constructed by Altbach et al. (2012) and later confirmed by other sources (e.g., Finkelstein and Jones 2019). Shaded cells indicate positions considered permanent or “tenured” equivalent in their respective countries. As definitions of tenured or permanent faculty varied across countries and institutions within countries, university employment and promotion guidelines were consulted, as were scholars from each country. In our sample, women comprise roughly one-third of all faculty and only 23 percent of tenured faculty. Nonetheless, there is significant variation across fields and countries.

In the regression models, the dependent variable is a binary variable indicating tenure status in 2014, coded 1 if an individual faculty member is tenured and 0 if not. Due to the nature of our data, all non-tenured faculty were coded as 0, regardless of whether they were on a tenure track.

At the individual level, our primary predictor of interest is gender, coded 1 for women and 0 for men. We also include a set of binary variables operationalizing field of study, with History as the reference group.

At the country level, we measure the availability of women doctoral graduates who could enter academia with the percent of total doctoral graduates who are women, i.e., tertiary International Standard Classification of Education (ISCED) 8 programs in 2002, which represents a lag of over ten years (UNESCO 2012). Second, we examine the impact of national opportunities for tenure (i.e., likelihood of available tenure positions) by creating a variable that classifies countries into three categories (low, medium, high) based on the percentage of men faculty who are tenured in the country across all four fields. In analyses not reported here (but available by request), we include women’s share of the labor force for women ages 15 and over (World Bank 2014) and tertiary system size (UNESCO UIS 2014) as control variables. As the findings were no different from the ones reported in the paper, they are not included in the final models.

Findings from a series of multilevel regression analyses suggest support for a gender filter argument: women are less likely to be tenured overall and in every field. Opportunities for tenure also matter. In countries with very low tenure rates and those with very high tenure rates, women are much less likely to be tenured relative to men than in countries with pathways both into and upward in academia.