A Report on the Academic Job Market in Gender, Women’s, Sexuality, Feminist, and Queer Studies, 2006–2018

Abstract

This report shows that job opportunities in the field of gender, women’s, sexuality, feminist, and queer studies (GWSFQS) in the United States, while fluctuating, grew strongly in the decade after the 2007–9 recession. Growth in advertised GWSFQS jobs outpaced growth in advertised jobs in the traditional disciplines of English, history, and sociology over this period; it also outpaced growth in similar interdisciplinary fields. The data presented in this report complicate the conventional wisdom that GWSFQS nationally has experienced the same level of institutional disinvestment as its disciplinary counterparts. On the contrary, these data suggest that GWSFQS may be particularly well suited to some of the current scholarly and economic demands of US colleges and universities, where value is increasingly being placed on academic and pedagogical expertise that crosses traditional disciplinary lines. As interdisciplinarity becomes one of the valued coins of the realm in higher education and as joint positions are seen as more cost effective, faculty lines are being placed in long-standing but underfunded interdisciplinary units such as GWSFQS, and jobs that request GWSFQS credentials are being advertised for disciplinary units. While advertised positions are only one metric of institutional investment in a field, they are also one of the most important, as they are a powerful measure of long-term financial commitment to a program or department We offer the following data and analysis as a contribution to current conversations about GWSFQS in the corporatized US university and an invitation to others to collect data that will deepen our understanding of GWSFQS as an institutionalized field.