Communications - November 2011

Due to the increase
in the overall number
and proportion,
the number of females
receiving a Ph.D. has
more than doubled
since 2002.

groups, 1–12, 13–24, and 25–36. The remaining departments belonging to the CRA, some ranked and some unranked by the NRC, form one group (referred to as 37+).

To refine the 127 departments in Taulbee’s group “ 37+” and to provide insight into trends of public versus private institutions, our study uses a different partitioning of the 163 U.S. CS and CSE Ph.D.-granting departments. Groups had to be large enough to ensure no department could be identified and we wanted to retain some ability to compare our groupings against Taulbee Survey results. The underlying eight groups are formed as follows.

˲ ˲ The 36 top-ranked institutions are
partitioned into four groups. They are
first partitioned into public and private
institutions ( 19 and 17 institutions,
respectively). The 1995 NRC rankings
are used to partition the private insti-
tutions into two groups by rank.

Group sizes and response rates.

Group Public Ranks 1–36 (1st) Public Ranks 1–36 (2nd) Private Ranks 1–36 (1st) Private Ranks 1–36 (2nd) Public Ranks 37+ (large) Public Ranks 37+ (Medium) Public Ranks 37+ (Small) Private Ranks 37+

trends in faculty Demographics

Since 1999, the number of faculty in CS and CSE departments in the U.S. has increased. For the 163 departments considered, the average number of faculty increased from 22 in 1999 to 28 in 2009. The number of female tenure-track and tenured faculty has also increased. In proportion, it increased from 11% to 14.8%. Looking at the eight groups, the average numbers for female faculty range from a minimum of 1. 13 (for departments in group Public 37+ Medium in 2001) to a maximum of 7. 57 (for Public 1–36 2nd in 2009). The next two figures provide insight into the increases for female faculty for the eight groups, one for proportions and one on average numbers for female faculty in the three academic ranks.

Figure 1 shows that each group has seen an increase in proportion in fe-

Number of Departments 10 9 8 9 36 26 34 31 163

Response Rate 100% 84% 95% 98% 84% 92% 74% 73% 87%

figure 1. Proportion of female faculty tenured and tenure-track faculty in the eight groups (lines) and the difference from the overall average across all departments (bars).