Changes in the position of women in UK academia

There have now been two surveys of the relative position of women in academic economics in the UK published on behalf of the RES Committee for Women in Economics (CWE). The first survey was carried out by Denise Osborn and reported on by Karen Mumford (KM, 1997), the second was commissioned to the Institute for Social and Economic Research and reported on by Alison Booth and Jonathan Burton (B+B,1999). Results from the second survey confirm the pattern found in the first: there is a clear pyramidal structure with women making up some 30% of the base and roughly 5% of the apex (see columns 1 and 2 of Table 1). Nevertheless, over the last two years women have increased as a proportion of all grades except Professor where they have remained pretty much constant. The extent of these increases grows as we move down the ranks until we get to the two most junior categories where the proportions of women who are fixed term lecturers has risen dramatically, as has the number of female PhD students. There appears to be either an increase in interest in becoming an academic economist amongst women and/or an increase in the propensity of departments to hire women at this level.