Pipelines, Pathways, and Institutional Leadership: An Update on the Status of Women in Higher Education

In 2009, The White House Project: Benchmarking Women’s Leadership was released. This groundbreaking report examined the leadership roles of women across 10 sectors of the workforce in the United States. Key findings illustrated that women in academia make up more than half of all college students, but only slightly more than a quarter of all full professors and less than 15 percent of the presidents at doctoral degree-granting intuitions. It also documented that female faculty members have not made progress in closing the salary gap—women made 83 percent of what male faculty made in 1972 and only 82 percent of what male faculty made in 2009. In 2013, the Colorado Women’s College at the University of Denver released the follow-up report Benchmarking Women’s Leadership in the United States, expanding the depth and breadth of the original report. The information presented in this infographic brief includes updated data on women in higher education leadership to a previously published version. It seeks to continue the conversation and offers updated key descriptive statistics on women in higher education in an effort to promote dialogue on how to move the needle and increase the number of women leaders.