Making It at the Top: Women and Minority Faculty in the Academic Labor Market

In this article, we argue that the small number of women and minority faculty in tenured and tenure-track positions in elite research universities is not simply the result of overt racism and sexism. Nor is it simply the result of a relatively small pool of qualified candidates. Rather, significant barriers to women and minority faculty are found in the character of the academic market itself. We focus on the academic market as an internal labor market; the ways in which most faculty jobs are filled in that market; the reliance on custom and precedence in the market; the nature of the competition for faculty in the market; important ignorance problems in the market; the absence of explicit job descriptions and formal evaluation mechanisms; and the ways in which considerations of cost advantages to management and the structure of allocation in the academic internal market may work against women and minority faculty.