Estimate the percentage of female full professors nationwide. You probably guessed about 40 or 50 percent — and if you did, you’re wrong.

Make no mistake about it — academia is still a boys’ club, and the outlook for change is remarkably grim.   

Despite the fact that more women are earning more college degrees than ever before, the sex differences in the demographics of academia are growing larger. LSU is no exception.

According to a 2011 report from the National Center for Education Statistics, women earn the majority of bachelor’s degrees in the U.S.  For the class of 2019, women are projected to earn 62 percent of master’s degrees and about 55 percent of doctorate degrees nationally.

But just like in corporate America, the percentage of women in positions of power drops off the higher they climb in the academy, according to the 2006 American Association of University Professors (AAUP) Faculty Gender Equity Indicators.

The EAP 2010, as defined by IPEDS Human Resources Survey, shows the ratio of male to female faculty members at LSU is 155 to 81. And the ratio of men to women serving executive, administrative, or managerial positions is 46 to 25, according to the 2012 Louisiana State University and Agricultural and Mechanical Institutional Research Trend Data on Personnel, Headcount.

Michelle Massé, founding director of the LSU Women’s and Gender Studies program and author of the first book on gender and academic service, has been studying sex and gender differences in academia for more than 20 years. 

She believes there are many complex reasons — economic, cultural, political and psychological — for why these differences persist.

“It’s not just in the university,” she said. “Women still make 78 cents on the dollar to men nationally … And with gender issues in academia, things have gotten astonishingly worse.”

According to Massé, societal expectations play a large role in shaping women’s career decisions and how women themselves are perceived. She argues that women are frequently — and mistakenly — viewed as being natural caretakers and are consequently expected to take on caretaking roles.

Caretaking, then, is seen as a “feminine” behavior, she said, and women who choose to strive for personal success over service are regularly thought to be displaying masculine behavior.

“It’s very complicated,” Massé said. “When women say, ‘I am going to be a neurosurgeon and not a nurse,’ people might often say, ‘You’re acting kind of masculine, and you’re not really being likeable’ … It’s the same phenomenon when men are called unmanly if they pursue caregiving roles.”

Exemplifying women’s lower societal status, Massé argues that jobs such as nursing or caring for children are low-paying and looked down upon.

Massé said academic service work, such as advising students and serving on committees, is often “relegated to a gendered form of institutional caregiving.”  This means that, just as women are expected to take on service roles outside of academia, so too are female professors disproportionately taking on the university’s service responsibilities and consequently, not advancing as quickly in their careers.  

For example, Massé herself devoted a great deal of her time and effort to starting the Women’s and Gender Studies program at LSU in 1991, writing grants and course proposals.  The project wasn’t beneficial to her from a professional standpoint, but she chose to take it on because of her commitment to serving the University and her students.

“We were the 50th flagship university in the country to have a gender studies program, which was incredibly late,” Massé said, noting the first programs were started in the early 1970s. “But I thought it was something we needed as scholars and researchers.”

In fact, scholarly work and research are crucial, since Massé notes that would-be tenured professors must excel in their academic research — while also fulfilling their required teaching and service duties.

Michelle Zerba, associate professor of English, foreign languages, and comparative literature, outlined ways in which the current tenure system is at odds with the years in which women are often pregnant and having children.

“What lies behind the institution of tenure is basically two things: faculty members cannot be dismissed without just cause and they have protection of freedom of speech,” she said. “But looking at tenure from our point of view now, we can see some of the problems that stem from the fact that males were the model on which tenure was based.”

In order to obtain tenure, Zerba said a faculty member must be hired in a tenure-track position and then undergo a probationary period, lasting around seven years, before being evaluated by their peer faculty.  During this probationary period, she said, these professors have little job security and are expected to fully commit themselves to their work.

“Women got caught in the crosshairs because they began to live with the consequences of the fact that if they wanted to have a family, this would typically be in the probationary seven-year period when the tenure clock was ticking,” she said.

To resolve this problem, universities around the country began changing their policy statements around the 1970s to allow for what is referred to as “stopping the clock,” allowing women a way to pause the tenure clock for a year if necessary so that pregnancy wouldn’t hurt their chances of earning tenure. However, Zerba argues the system is still flawed.

“The intention behind it is a good one, but you often find that there is considerable conflict between individuals and administration about stopping the clock,” she said. “The rules should have transparent criteria — women shouldn’t have to bear the additional burden of having to argue their case, but they often do.”

The problem is also an economic one. Zerba pointed out that stopping the clock for a year means that a woman would take a year longer to earn tenure than a man, making it potentially more expensive for universities to hire women for tenure-track positions.

“Universities, because of economic reasons, are moving toward hiring individuals who are not tenure track, and that’s why there are more instructors now at LSU,” she said. “For these same reasons, if you have to keep in the tenure track position a woman who’s going to be with you eight years rather than seven years, that’s going to have an economic impact … There are people who will try to put a finite monetary value on an institution keeping faculty in the tenure track for even just one more year.”

In the sciences, things are even worse.

Ravi Rau, alumni professor of physics and president of the LSU chapter of the AAUP, has worked at the University for 38 years. During that time, he said he has noticed a distinct discrepancy in the numbers of men and women faculty in the physics department — but he believes that progress has been made over the past fifteen years.   

“In the physics department, we are now much better in terms of having women faculty,” he said. “About 10 or 15 years ago, the faculty was in the low 30s and at that time we had maybe two women in the tenure track side in our department. Now, we have about six out of 45 tenured faculty who are women.  And it’s not a large number, but I think it has improved a lot [from what it used to be].”

Even though the numbers of women in physics are higher, Rau acknowledged they are still nowhere near the numbers of women in the humanities. He said across the sciences at LSU, men far outnumber women — especially in computer science and engineering.  

“There is somehow a discouragement that the young women themselves feel about going into these [scientific] fields. I’m not sure why that is so,” he said. “I’m married to a woman scientist, so of course we discuss this a lot … there are many sort of subtle or not so subtle discouragements.”  

For all of these reasons, women’s progress in the academy is devastatingly slow. According to a 2011 report by the American Council on Education, women made up just 26.4 percent of all college presidents — up from 23 percent in 2006.  Therefore, if this exact rate of progress were to continue on a straight-line projection into the future, it would take 35 years for women to be equal with men in college president positions.

LSU has never had a female president or chancellor, Massé said. The highest position held by a woman has been the Vice Chancellor and Provost, held by Astrid Merget until 2010.

Like Zerba, Massé agrees that budget concerns have a major impact on the advancement of women in academia and argues the University’s budget cuts are effectively negating much of the progress that has already been made.

The March 2012 issue of Academe, the journal of the AAUP, listed figures for the median salary for full time professors at LSU are 111.1 for a male and 102.3 for a female.

“We are at the bottom — there’s not much further for us to fall,” she said. “Women and minorities tend to be under impact disproportionately when these cuts occur, so it’s very hard to talk about advances. To use the Titanic analogy, if the whole boat’s going down, it doesn’t make much difference that women are getting better deck chairs.”

But perhaps the greatest problem facing women in academia is that most people don’t realize there’s a problem at all.

Both Massé and Zerba said before any real progress can occur, the problem must be widely acknowledged — until there is a widespread recognition of the inequity that still exists in the system today, it is unlikely that any meaningful change will happen.

“Though we believe that the women’s liberation movement has done the brunt of the work that it was supposed to do, it really hasn’t. But people think it has,” Zerba said.  “I think there’s a misperception about the rights that people have in the aftermath of the civil rights era and in the aftermath of the feminist movement, that we’ve already achieved equality somehow and the work is done. But it’s not done — it’s far from being done.  And I think that’s difficult to acknowledge publicly.”