Sally Shaywitz.

Women faculty members in science, maths and engineering are climbing the academic ladder at top US research universities, according to a report released on 2 June by the US National Research Council. The study finds that women do well once they are in the pipeline for academic opportunities, but that they are still under-represented in the top ranks.

“There's great equity in terms of job interviews, hiring and promotion,” says Sally Shaywitz, co-chair of the committee that wrote the report and co-director of the Yale Center for Dyslexia and Creativity in New Haven, Connecticut.

Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty looks at how women fare at key points in their academic careers compared with men. The congressionally mandated study surveyed almost 500 departments and more than 1,800 faculty members at 89 research-intensive universities in 2004 and 2005. It focused on six disciplines: biology, chemistry, civil engineering, electrical engineering, maths and physics.

A higher percentage of women applying for their first job at major research universities get interviews and receive offers for tenure-track positions than their representation in the candidate pool would predict. But many women PhDs are not applying for these positions. Between 1999 and 2003, women earned 45% of biology PhDs, but comprised 26% of the applicants for faculty positions at the universities surveyed.

Men and women faculty members spent similar amounts of time on teaching, research and service, and there was little difference in the number of refereed publications, grant funding or award nominations between the two groups. The salaries of male full professors averaged about 8% higher than female full professors', but that disparity could be the result of differences in seniority, says the report.

Representatives of women researchers are more critical. “If you're only looking at elite research universities with the very top women being recruited, you will see relatively few gender-specific inequities in appointments and promotions. To conclude that there are no problems is unwarranted,” says Phoebe Leboy, president of the Association for Women in Science and professor emerita of biochemistry at the University of Pennsylvania in Philadelphia.

That point was made by physicist Claude Canizares, committee co-chair and vice-president for research at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology in Cambridge. He called for longitudinal studies on why women do not apply for faculty positions at research-intensive universities. “We studied a subset of women — the ones who do make it,” he says. “We don't know anything about the women who left.”