Are Women Changing the Nature of the Academic Profession?

Abstract

Without question, as labor economists Richard Layard and Jacob Mincer have observed, the tremendous rise in the number of women entering and remaining in the labor force over the last twenty years is of the most profound social changes of our time [19]. Nowhere has this trend been more significant than in the traditionally male-dominated professions, such as law, medicine, and university teaching. Consider the fact that less than a quarter of a century ago about one-fifth of all university faculty members, fewer than one-tenth of all physicians, and about one-twentieth of the nation's lawyers were women. Today about one out of three college teachers, almost one out of four lawyers, and one out of five medical doctors are female. Such trends recently provoked economist John B. Parrish [34] to ask: Are women taking over the professions? Professor Parrish proceeds to answer his question by summarizing the impressive gains women have made in professional and graduate school enrollments since the 1960s and especially during the 1970s. Based on his review of this primarily supply-side evidence, he concludes that there is no indica-