Last week, I posted about some of the AALS statistics on law teaching jobs. I noted that those statistics suggest that women have a slightly higher rate of success than men in getting law teaching jobs; although women make up only about 35-40% of the faculty candidates, they tend to land about 45% of the Assistant Professor and Associate Professor jobs.
A bit of digging around by a trustworthy source turned up an important caveat to those figures: these numbers cover both tenture-track and non-tenure track positions. The AALS calculated those figures only by comparing faculty candidates one year to faculty candidates listed in the AALS faculty book the next year. The book sometimes lists non-tenure-track faculty as well as tenture-track and tenure faculty, however. As a result, the apparent fact that female candidates have slightly more success than male candidates at landing some kind of teaching job doesn’t address the more important issue — success rates at landing a tenure-track position. Given anecdotal evidence that female candidates tend to obtain an unusually high percentage of non-tenure track positions, it seems quite possible that the answer to this question is quite different from the picture suggested by the existing statistics on the AALS website.
The AALS is apparently working on new statistics that address these issues, and I’ll post a link to those stats when they come out.
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