I have data on 715 candidates who have been placed in tenure-track, postdoctoral, VAP, or instructor positions between late 2011 and mid 2014 (ending today), drawn from ProPhilosophy (2011-2012 and 2012-2013) and PhilAppointments (2013-2014). I aim to make the spreadsheet with this data available by around July 1st (I will add any new data available by that date). Until then, I will report some initial findings, starting with gender.
Once I removed duplicate placement records, I found there to be 777 placements and 715 placed candidates. 30.91% of the placed candidates are women, which is very close in number to the percentage of women who earn doctorates in philosophy in the United States: 30.47% in 2009, according to one source.
Looking at all placements, and not just placed candidates, women make up 34.8% of tenure-track placements and 23% of postdoctoral/VAP/instructor placements. I should note that very few instructor placements are included so far and that this data was not collected prior to this year–I count 6 instructor/lecturer placements of 257 placements in that category.
Breaking this down by year, we have 30.5% tenure-track placements in 2011-2012, 34.1% tenure-track placements in 2012-2013, and 39.3% tenure-track placements in 2013-2014 going to women, versus 20.3% postdoctoral/VAP placements in 2011-2012, 29% postdoctoral/VAP placements in 2012-2013, and 18.1% postdoctoral/VAP/instructor placements in 2013-2014 going to women.
Thus, my initial findings on placement and gender in 2011-2012 look to hold steady: around the same proportion of women achieve job placement as earn doctorates in philosophy, but a smaller proportion obtain postdoctoral and VAP appointments, whereas a somewhat larger proportion obtain tenure-track appointments (Update: this latter difference does not appear to be statistically significant. See below). It will be interesting to see if this trend continues as more information on instructor and lecturer placements becomes available.
Update, June 13th, 2014: In order to answer some questions from a commentator (below), I gathered more data and ran a couple of extra tests. First, I gathered the available data on the number of women graduate students in each PhD-granting instutition in 2013, as reported in the 2013 APA Guide to Graduate Programs. Institutions varied on whether they reported only graduating students or the total number of students in the department at that time. I thus calculated the percentage of women in each department, rather than looking at raw numbers. I then consolidated the information on women hirees by department, looking at both tenure-track hirees and postdoctoral/VAP/instructor hirees, finding the percentage of women hirees for each department. Finally, I ran a t-test between these percentages of women graduate students versus women hirees for each department. For tenure-track hirees, there was no significant difference between the sets, but there was a highly significant difference for postdoctoral/VAP/instructor hirees. That is, the mean percentage of postdoctoral/VAP/instructor placements per department that went to women is 20.53%, whereas the mean percentage of PhD students per department in 2013 who were women is 32.58%, and these means have a difference that is highly statistically significant (p<0.005 for a two-tailed, two-sample, equal variance t-test).
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