The Wiley Handbook of Gender Equity in Higher Education

19Gendered Divisions of Labor in the Twenty‐First‐Century Academy: Research, Teaching, and Service

Shelley M. Park and Dakota Park‐Ozee

The twenty‐first century has witnessed substantive increases in the participation of women in higher education in a multitude of roles, but particularly as educators and learners. In addition to steadily increasing numbers of female students enrolled in post‐secondary institutions in the United States, Canada, the European Union, Australia, and elsewhere across the globe, the numbers of female faculty working at colleges and universities as teachers and researchers has continued to climb. In the United States, the percentage of full‐time university and college faculty who are female rose from 36.2% in 1998–1999 to 47% in 2013–2014 (Sax et al. 1999; Eagan et al. 2014). According to the U.S. National Center for Education Statistics (2017), the percentage of all faculty who are female was 49% in 2015. Canada, Australia, and Western Europe lag somewhat behind the United States in their achievement of faculty gender parity, while most Eastern European countries report a percentage of female faculty exceeding 50% (Statistics Canada 2017; UNESCO Institute for Statistics n.d.). Nations outside of North America and Europe reporting more than 50% of their tertiary faculty as female include select countries from North and South Asia, the Caribbean, and Africa.

This chapter suggests that such statistics should not be taken at face value. As geopolitical ...