CSI’s Inequality Discussion Groups bring together Cornell faculty and graduate students from around campus to discuss and improve their in-progress research.

Title:A Feminized Field? Gender Disparities in Sociology Doctoral Career Trajectories, 1981-2020 

Abstract: Over the past several decades, policy initiatives and scholarly debates have emphasized increasing women’s representation at the lower stages of academic pipelines as a pathway toward gender equality in science. Yet it remains unclear whether rising female representation has led to sustained changes in gender equality in faculty placement, particularly in fields with growing shares of women among PhD recipients. We examine this question in sociology by assembling a comprehensive dataset of U.S. sociology PhD recipients, drawing on the American Sociological Association’s Guide to Graduate Programs from 1981 to 2020 alongside OpenAlex and ProQuest. We find that women sociology PhDs face significant disadvantages in securing faculty positions, even after accounting for graduate program ranking, research productivity, research areas, and methodological approaches. These disparities have remained largely stable over time, narrowing briefly in the 1990s before widening again in the 2000s. The gender gap is most pronounced among scholars with limited publication records. Together, these findings suggest that gender inequality in academic labor markets persists even in feminizing fields and cannot be fully captured by representation-based metrics alone.