SWS has released our 2014 REPORT CARD ON THE STATUS OF GENDER EQUITY AND
SCHOLARSHIP in sociology departments across the nation.
In 2010 women earned 67% of the doctorates in our discipline and their numbers are
increasing among the faculty. In 2004 only 33% of graduate departments had 40% or
more women faculty. By 2012, that number had climbed to 64%. The departments
who meet that criterion receiving our SEAL OF APPROVAL FOR GENDER EQUITY
are listed here.
Scholarship on gender, race, class, and how they interact in shaping people’s lives has
flowered in sociology over recent decades and has made important contributions to our
understanding of how the social works. However, many departments have failed to
incorporate this scholarship in their research and teaching. In 2012, only 22% of
departments had more than a quarter of their faculty working on gender scholarship,
including how gender interacts with other social statuses. Those departments
receiving our SEAL OF APPROVAL FOR GENDER SCHOLARSHIP are listed
here.
We award our SEAL OF EXCELLENCE to those departments that have shown a
commitment to both the presence of women faculty and importance of
gender/inequality scholarship. In 2012, 22% of departments earned this distinction (up
from 11% in 2004). These are likely to be the most gender-and-women-friendly in our
discipline. We congratulate these departments for their hard work in generating an
inclusive scholarly community.
Because of the transformations in such a short time, SWS is hopeful that our discipline is on a path to realizing the promise of gender equity and recognizing the importance of intersectional scholarship. A related report, The SWS fact sheet on Intersectionality in Sociology (2012), examines in which journals and how frequently, intersectional research is published.
The full report, including a description of the methodology, appears here