Gender and Academic Rank in the UK

Abstract

This paper fills in a research gap in what concerns gender and academic rank at UK universities, where women are not far from reaching the 50% share of all academic and research staff, but not even close to reaching such a share at (full) professorial level. Using an ordered logit model and the results of a survey conducted in 2013 with 2270 responses from academics from all fields of knowledge at the 24 Russell Group universities, we find three consistent results. First, being a woman has a negative and significant association with academic rank, except for the case when parenthood is timed with career considerations in mind. Second, the percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities has a negative and statistically significant association with academic rank. This association is more pronounced in the case of women, who spend a higher percentage of their working time on teaching and teaching-related activities than men, as do those in lower academic ranks. Since women tend to be in lower ranks, the percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities may be considered both a cause and a result of the gender gap. Third, we find a positive and significant association between the number of children under the age of 18 years and the academic rank of both men and women, as long as babies were timed with career considerations in mind, and a non-significant association when they were not. A possible explanation for this is unlikely to be that children have a positive impact on academic rank, but rather that they arrived after a certain rank had been secured. We conclude with some policy recommendations to help reduce the gender gap.

1. Introduction

In 2011/2012, 44.5% of all the academic staff employed at UK Higher Education Institutions were female, yet only 20.3% of professors, which is the highest academic rank in the UK, were women [1]. Focusing on the 24 Russell Group universities in the UK, which are research-intensive universities, in 2011/2012, 40.7% of all academic staff at these 24 universities were female (a share somewhat lower than that at all UK universities) and from all professors only 18.9% were women [2].

Although all universities in the UK value diversity and are committed to equality of opportunity, women are under-represented at senior academic grades. If current trends continue, it will be decades before gender equality at professorial level is reached.

Using an ordered logit model and a new rich and detailed data set, which we collected in 2013, with 2270 observations of academics of both genders at all levels in all fields of knowledge at the 24 Russell Group universities in the UK, we contribute to the literature by examining the association between gender and academic rank, controlling for a number of variables, including but not limited to, respondent’s year of birth, number of children, responsibility for household chores, academic degrees, number of publications, grants, percentage of working time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities, and main area of research. This is timely and relevant, given that the last empirical quantitative study to include UK-based academics of all fields of knowledge was conducted in the year 2000; the results of that study are reported in [3].

We find some results in line with previous work conducted for other countries or for specific fields of knowledge and some novel ones. First, being a woman has a negative association with academic rank, even after controlling for year of birth (i.e., age), marital status, responsibility for household chores, area of research, timing of babies, number of children under the age of 18 years, holding a PhD or not, percentage of working time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities, and a number of research productivity variables. The only case where the variable gender is not significant is when only men and women who timed their children with career considerations in mind are included in the sample. Importantly, we also find that the percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities, which is higher for women than for men, is negatively associated with academic rank. In addition, and this can be seen as our most important and novel finding, there is a positive association between the number of children under the age of 18 years and the academic rank of both men and women, as long as babies were timed with career considerations in mind. A possible explanation for this is unlikely to be that children help academic career progression, but rather that they arrived after a certain rank had been secured. Timing of children seems to be crucial.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 reviews the most recent and prominent literature on the topic, which, apart from [3], lacks any quantitative study specifically designed for the UK. Section 3 explains how the data were collected. Section 4 presents the model. Section 5 discusses the results. Section 6 concludes and gives some policy recommendations.

2. Previous Work

The potential explanations for the gender imbalance in academia tend to fall under two categories: (a) Women work fewer hours than their male counterparts because their time constraints are more stringent, and as a result progress at a slower rate than men, with a lower percentage making it to the grade of professor; and (b) Women are discriminated against, and inadvertently, denied opportunities that could give them access to high rank positions.

The time constraints hypothesis argues that women need to, want to, or choose to devote time to raising their children and/or taking responsibility for household chores, whilst their male counterparts devote this time to productive work or leisure. The idea is essentially that women with responsibilities for housework and childcare have less energy available for remunerated work than men have, and this affects their job opportunities and productivity [4]. Some authors argue that many high-end jobs require virtually complete commitment to work, and go on to assert that more men than women are prepared to devote themselves to work so fully [5,6]. As a side note, some also hold controversial views regarding innate cognitive and temperamental differences between men and women [5,6]. This topic, however, falls under the remit of sociology, psychology, biology, and related sciences, and is therefore not discussed in the present study.

It has also been argued that women, especially those with children, face more family-work balancing challenges than men [3,7]. A number of studies carried out in different Schools at MIT [8] and a European Commission report [9] also found that family and career tensions were greater for women than for men.

The association between marriage and children and academic rank, salary, and research productivity, however, is far from clear. One study finds that children have a negative effect on academic careers of women and a positive effect on academic careers of men [10]. On somewhat similar lines, another study finds that marriage and young children (under 6 years of age) reduce the probability that women get a tenure-track job [11]. Two further studies find a non-significant association between marriage and promotion, and a positive and significant association between children and male promotion but a negative, albeit non-significant, association between children and female promotion (in the humanities) (p. 400 [12]) and (p. 51 and p. 62 [13]). Another study finds a positive and significant association between young children and male economists’ promotion chances and a negative association between marriage and children and female economists’ tenure chances [14]. On the other hand, academics who have older children (aged 6 to 17 years) have been found to have a greater chance of getting tenure, relative to academics without children in this age range, regardless of their gender, probably because children trigger the need to secure ongoing employment [11]. There may also be selection effects because these children were under the age of six years when their parents were completing their doctorates or securing tenure-track positions, and academics, especially women, who manage to do all that whilst simultaneously caring for young children may be especially good at managing their time and the demands of work and family or may have received more support from their partners (p. 400 [11]).

Another study, in turn, finds that having children and having a spouse or partner employed at the same institution are unrelated to tenure and rank among women faculty but having children has a positive association with both tenure and rank for men, who also benefit from being married in terms of their academic rank (p. 301 [15]). Other research finds a positive association between being married or living with a partner and salary [16].

One point that a number of studies find is that academic women are less likely to be married with children, relative to academic men [3,10,13,14,15], or they are more successful if they delay or forgo marriage and children [11]. It is not clear, however, whether this is a decision women make because they fear that by having children they will jeopardize their careers, even though in reality having children may have made no difference, or whether thanks to the decision of not having children they were able to progress, something they would have not been able to do had they had children. Although intuition would point towards a negative impact of children on the academic progression of women, and this is supported by solid microeconomic theory such as that presented in [4], the evidence, as shown above, is far from conclusive.

Publications are typically considered a key factor for academic progression. In general, publications have a positive association with rank and promotion [13,14,17,18,19,20], although there is also some evidence that male economists on tenure-track positions get tenure regardless of their publications (p. 203 [14]). At the same time, on average men produce more publications than women, and this is found across different disciplines [12,14,17,21,22,23,24,25,26,27,28], although the results reported in [13] suggest very small differences.

Women spending more time with their children than men do, especially when they are of preschool age, could potentially be linked to lower publication rates [7,25]. One study, for example, concludes that untenured male economists become substantially more productive after having a first child but female economists with two and three children have, on average, a research record reflecting a loss of two and a half years and four years of research output, respectively, by the time all of their children have reached their teens [28].

On the other hand, a review examining the relationship between marriage, children, and research productivity concludes that there is no evidence of a negative effect of family factors on the research productivity of women (p. 18, p. 99 and p. 189 [29]), in line with [14,27,30,31]. Interestingly, though, another study finds a positive relationship between having children and research productivity for female economists but no relationship for male economists [32]. This same study also finds that women with children are more productive than women without children, as well as some evidence of self-selection that may explain this counterintuitive result: only the most productive women dare to pursue an academic career and have children at the same time [32].

Grants are also typically considered important for promotion, and indeed there is a positive association between grants and promotion [18]. Blake and La Valle [3], whose study actually focuses on grant applications, find that in the five-year period prior to their survey, from those who were eligible to apply, women were less likely than men to have applied for grants, with 56 per cent applying in contrast to 67 per cent of men (p. 36), and women with children were also less likely to have applied for grants than men with children, with 50 per cent applying in contrast to 62 per cent of men (p. 104). Having said all that, Blake and La Valle find that the success rate for grant applications is virtually the same for men and women and conclude that there is no gender bias in the awarding processes (p. 37 [3]). The main difference between men and women, they argue, “lies in application behaviour rather than in success once applications have been made” (p. 37 [3]). This finding of no gender differences in the outcomes of grant applications is in line with [33,34,35], but in contrast with [36,37,38,39].

Notwithstanding all of the above, lower grant application activity and lower number of publications in absolute and relative terms may be explained not just by time constraints due to housework or childcare but also by time constraints imposed in the very workplace, for example, with higher teaching or administrative workloads [3,18,20,22,23,25,27]. Higher teaching or administrative workloads on women could be the result of subtle discrimination. Needless to say, very rarely is there any blatant open discrimination in academia but a theme that emerges from the literature is that there may be forms of (sometimes unconscious) discrimination that are concealed, almost unnoticeable, and therefore harder to identify. Examples of studies which point towards this unconscious bias against women include [10,11,12,13,15,17,19,40], all of which find a gender gap in academic rank or salary, which remains unexplained after controlling for credentials, productivity and/or family circumstances, amongst other variables. One study, however, finds unexplained differences in promotion to tenure in some disciplines, but discrimination in favour of women in engineering [14]. Bias in grant awarding has also been found, as mentioned above, in [36,37,38,39].

Given the importance that the hypotheses of time constraints and workplace discrimination have received in the literature, we concentrate on these two perspectives as prime suspects to help explain the low representation of women in higher academic ranks. Despite the rich literature on gender and academic progression, this is the largest quantitative study to have been carried out for the UK case since Blake and La Valle’s in 2000 [3].

3. Data

We conducted a questionnaire amongst male and female academics, which can be found in Appendix A, and is virtually the same as that conducted by Blake and La Valle in 1999/2000 [3]. After piloting it, it went live and was open for responses from 29 May to 1 July 2013.

The sample was drawn from the 24 Russell Group universities in the UK, which were arranged in alphabetical order. The Research Excellence Framework (REF) in the UK is the system used for assessing the quality of research in UK higher education institutions. Submissions to the REF in 2013 were made in 36 units of assessment, or fields of research. Up to ten out of the 36 REF areas, which are listed in Appendix B, were randomly chosen for each of the 24 universities. The departmental websites representing the randomly selected REF areas were then used to identify all members of academic and research staff. In some cases, REF areas include more than one area, which meant a number of departments were contacted. For example, REF area 4 includes Psychology, Psychiatry and Neuroscience. If that area was randomly selected for a university, staff at all three departments were contacted if all three were represented at the institution in question. If not all departments were represented, then those that were, were the ones contacted. If an area was randomly selected for a university but had no presence at that university, another number between 1 and 36 was randomly selected. Typical cases include the London School of Economics and Political Science and Imperial College London, which are institutions with some degree of specialization where many of the 36 REF areas are missing.

A total of 13,556 names and e-mail addresses were manually collected. No scraping software of any sort was used at any point. These potential participants were then contacted by e-mail and invited to complete a survey online. Due to a number of people having left the departments in question but still being listed on their websites 886 mails were returned with a delivery failure notice. From the remaining 12,670 individuals, 2270 responded to the survey. The response rate was therefore 17.9%, but we still achieved our target of at least 2000 responses.

The response rate may have varied according to a number of reasons, and in order to correct for self-selection bias the data from the sample was weighted using post-stratification survey weights. Appendix B gives details of how weights were estimated to make our sample of 2270 respondents representative of the whole population of 62,637 individuals employed as academic and research staff at all 24 Russell Group universities in 2012, following the methodology proposed in [41,42].

4. Model

We use an ordered logit model to explore the variables that may be associated with the probability of a member of academic staff being appointed at a certain level. A member of staff’s appointment is characterized as being separated into five ordered levels, which we call grade 6, grade 7, grade 8, grade 9, and grade 10, with different terms of contract (open-ended, on probation and fixed-term for grades 6, 7, and 8, and open-ended and fixed-term for grades 9 and 10). Grade 6, for example, is typically the entry level for a tenure-track academic member of staff, but it is also the level at which a postdoc on a fixed-term contract may be hired. Grade 10, at the highest end of the spectrum, is that of full professor. Most appointments at grades 9 or 10 are open-ended, although occasionally some are fixed-term. Very rarely, however, do they involve a probation period, and we only had two observations of grade 9 and two of grade 10 on probation, which we merged with those on open-ended contracts. This is not controversial because at UK universities those on probation are typically confirmed on open-ended contracts. The grading system across UK universities is fairly similar, as is the associated salary scale. Because each grade has an associated salary scale, grade and salary are virtually interchangeable at most departments and universities. The actual number given to a certain grade (6, 7, etc.) does not matter in itself as long as it is clearly defined.

In the survey we did not ask what grade respondents were appointed at, but rather, we asked for the title of their posts, so that these could be linked to a consistent grade scale which we defined as shown on

Table 1. Grades.

Grade	Posts
6	Assistant Lecturer, Junior Lecturer, Research Assistant, Researcher, Research Fellow, Teaching Fellow
7	Researcher, Lecturer, Clinical Lecturer
8	Senior Lecturer, Senior Researcher
9	Reader, Associate Professor, Senior Researcher
10	Professor

.

Depending on personal preferences, an academic may prefer to be appointed at grade 9 on a fixed-term contract rather than at grade 7 on an open-ended contract, or vice versa. In other words, when grade and type of contract are combined, it is not possible to order all the possible combinations. Thus, an order can be established for:

(a)

Grades 6 to 10 on probation and open-ended (i.e., excluding all fixed-term contracts);

(b)

Grades 6 to 10 on fixed-term contracts (i.e., excluding all probation and open-ended contracts);

(c)

Within each grade, fixed-term, probation and open-ended contracts.

Furthermore, fixed-term appointments, by definition, almost never lead to appointments at the professorial level. Thus, given that the aim of this study is to examine the association between gender and academic rank, which we also call grade, we exclude respondents on fixed-term contracts, which represent 26% of our sample, and focus on those either on probation or on open-ended contracts.

Having excluded the fixed-term contract cases, our dependent variable is grade, which ranges from grade 6 to grade 10, taking values 1 to 5 correspondingly. The type of contract can be either probation or open-ended and these two are not discriminated within this categorical variable.

We consider a number of independent variables detailed in Section 5 and use an ordered logistic model:

$$Grad{e}^{*}=X^{\prime }\times \beta +\epsilon$$

where X is the column vector of individual characteristics and β is the column vector of coefficients to be estimated by the ordered logistic regression, with ε assumed to follow a logistic distribution.

5. Results and Discussion

All our results were computed with STATA.

Table 2. Categorical variables and their descriptive statistics (unweighted sample).

Categorical Variables		Description	Frequency
Grade	1	Grade 6	50
	2	Grade 7	538
	3	Grade 8	428
	4	Grade 9	153
	5	Grade 10	477
		Missing values	624
Gender	0	Male	1210
	1	Female	1060
Marital status (defined as Dummies)		Partner (Married or Living with partner)	1736
		No partner (Separated, Widowed, Single or Other)	534
Household chores	1	Respondent does most of them	767
	2	Respondent shares them equally with someone else	1115
	3	Someone else does most of them	372
		Missing values	16
Area of research (defined as dummies)		Area 1: Science (Mathematical, Physical and Computer Sciences, Engineering, and Chemistry)	489
		Area 2: Medicine and Life Sciences (Medical Sciences, Other allied to medicine, and Life Sciences)	674
		Area 3: Social Sciences (Social Sciences, Economics and Econometrics, Law, Business and Management Studies, Architecture and the Built Environment, Education, Geography, Environmental Studies and Archaeology, Sport and Exercise Sciences, Leisure and Tourism)	626
		Area 4: Arts and Humanities (Arts and Humanities)	405
		Missing values	76
Maternity timing was influenced by promotion, tenure and/or job permanency concerns (This variable was only used to run models using two separate samples).		Yes	595
		No	936
		Not applicable	739

and

Table 3. Numerical variables and their descriptive statistics (unweighted sample).

Numerical Variables	Minimum	Maximum	Mean	Std Dev	Percentiles
Respondent’s year of birth	1931	1989	1969.55	10.7198	10%: 1954 25%: 1962 50%: 1971 75%: 1978 90%: 1982
Number of children under 18	0	6	0.67797	0.02007	10%: 0 25%: 0 50%: 0 75%: 1 90%: 2
PhD	0	2	0.82026	0.3965	10%: 0 25%: 0 50%: 1 75%: 1 90%: 1
Percentage of working time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities	0	100	32.6522	24.0227	10%: 0 25%: 10 50%: 30 75%: 50 90%: 65
Journal papers (number of papers published in peer-reviewed journals in the last five years)	0	500	11.3824	22.8158	10%: 1 25%: 3 50%: 6 75%: 13 90%: 25
Conference papers (number of papers published in conference proceedings in the last five years)	0	125	4.91454	10.3027	10%: 0 25%: 0 50%: 1 75%: 5 90%: 14
Number of grants obtained in the last five years	0	6	1.5493	1.8455	10%: 0 25%: 0 50%: 1 75%: 3 90%: 5

present all the variables we used and their descriptive statistics.

All the regressions we report were estimated with weights, which were computed as explained in Appendix B.

5.1. Baseline Model

Our baseline model includes gender, year of birth, number of children under the age of 18 years, and responsibility for the household chores (cooking, shopping, cleaning, washing/ironing). As it can be seen from the column reporting the results of the baseline model in

Table 4. Ordered logistic regression of grade on alternative model specifications.

	Baseline Model	With PhD and Research Productivity Variables	With PhD, Research Productivity Variables and a Teaching-Related Variable
Gender	−0.573 *** (0.126)	−0.500 *** (0.135)	−0.474 *** (0.133)
Respondent’s year of birth	−0.121 *** (0.008)	−0.131 *** (0.008)	−0.135 *** (0.008)
Number of children under 18	0.305 *** (0.063)	0.216 *** (0.064)	0.225 *** (0.065)
Household chores	0.130 (0.097)	0.124 (0.096)	0.080 (0.096)
PhD		0.306 * (0.159)	0.320 * (0.165)
Journal papers		0.020 (0.016)	0.016 (0.015)
Conference papers		0.003 (0.008)	0.003 (0.007)
Grants		0.276 *** (0.045)	0.277 *** (0.043)
Share time on teaching			−0.018 *** (0.004)
Area 1 (Science) Reference
Area 2 (Medicine and Life Sciences)		−0.028 (0.178)	−0.178 (0.178)
Area 3 (Social Sciences)		0.517 *** (0.173)	0.550 *** (0.173)
Area 4 (Arts and Humanities)		0.301 (0.215)	0.376 * (0.212)
Log pseudolikelihood	−41504.04	−39233.87	−38719.46
Number of obs	1280	1280	1280
Wald chi2	301.29	399.12	417.05
Prob > chi2	0.0000	0.0000	0.0000
Pseudo R2	0.14	0.19	0.20

Note: Standard errors are in parenthesis. * (**) (***) indicate statistical significance at the 10 (5) (1) % levels.

, being a woman has a negative and significant association with academic rank. This is not worrying because we are not controlling for research productivity at this stage.

We also find the usual and expected result that the younger a person is, the less likely he/she is to be high up on the academic ladder, an intuitive result in line with [12,13,17].

The number of children under the age of 18 years has a positive and significant association with grade. This result holds for the whole sample but also for the subsample of men and the subsample of women separately, although for brevity, the subsample results are not reported here. Previous research found that having children is positively associated with the academic rank of men, but found that either it has a negative association with the academic rank of women [10], or the association with the academic rank of women is not statistically significant [12,13,15].

Ours is therefore an interesting result. The problem with observational data is that it is not easy to determine causality. From an intuitive point of view, it is unlikely that having children under the age of 18 years has a positive impact on academic rank and it is more likely that academics wait to have their children until they have reached a certain grade. We further investigate this issue below.

The variable household chores has the correct sign but it is not significant. We also included a number of other variables, such as ethnicity, childcare responsibilities, and responsibility for looking after a disabled, sick or elderly friend or relative, none of which were statistically significant. On similar lines, another study finds that neither care of an elderly parent or relative nor time spent on household or childcare duties has a significant association with research productivity of faculty men or women (pp. 434–435 [30]).

We also tried marital status, but this was also non-significant, in line with (p. 400 [12]) and (p. 51 [13]). On the other hand, one study finds that having a spouse or partner employed at the same institution is unrelated to tenure and rank amongst women faculty but being married is positively associated with both tenure and rank for men faculty (p. 301 [15]), and another study finds a positive association between being married or living with a partner and salary [16].

5.2. PhD, Publications, Grants and Area of Research

Papers published in peer reviewed journals, papers published in conference proceedings, and number of grants obtained are typically seen as important for career progression in academia, and thus we included those variables in our model. We also included the variable PhD (no PhD degree, one PhD degree, two PhD degrees). In addition, we included research area in order to control for differences across different fields of knowledge. The results are reported on Table 4, under the column entitled PhD and research productivity variables. As in the baseline model, gender has a negative coefficient and is statistically significant. Given that we are controlling for research productivity, this result is very worrying and may be an indicator of discrimination against women. Being a woman per se has a negative association with grade. This is in line with findings in [10,11,12,13,15,17,19,40]. On similar lines, a study on faculty salaries, finds a negative association between being a woman and salary (p. 595 [16]).

The variables year of birth and number of children under 18 have the same sign as before and are significant. Again, the variable household chores is not significant.

Having a PhD, as expected, has a positive association with grade, although the variable is only significant at 10% in this specification. Another intuitive result, similar to that found in [18], is the positive association between the number of grants obtained in the last five years and academic rank. The reason that neither the number of papers published in peer-reviewed journals nor the number of papers published in conference proceedings in the last five years is statistically significant, even though both coefficients have the expected positive sign, is that these two variables are correlated between themselves and with the number of grants, as could have been reasonably expected. Importantly, all three variables are significant at least at a 5% level when they are included alone in the model. Another study finds that the number of publications is important for academic progression, but grants obtained are not [20], probably due to the two variables being correlated, although it does not consider this as a possible explanation for this counterintuitive result.

The reference (research) area in this and all specifications in this study is area 1 (Science). This is an arbitrary choice as any area could have been used as reference area.

The results show that for the models on Table 4 that take into account research area, relative to area 1 (Science), there are no significant differences, except for area 3 (Social Sciences), i.e., academics working in Social Sciences are likely to hold a higher rank, everything else being equal.

We also tried models which included marital status and ethnicity but none of these variables proved to be statistically significant.

In addition, we estimated a number of OLS regressions with journal publications, conference proceedings, and grants as dependent variables, and gender, area, grade, and number of children under 18 as independent variables. The results are presented in

Table A6. Linear regressions of research productivity variables on gender, area of research, grade and number of children under 18.

	Number of Journal Publications	Number of Conference Proceedings	Number of Grants
Gender	−2.241 * (1.172)	−0.197 (0.721)	0.199 (0.125)
Area 1 (Science) Reference
Area 2 (Medicine and Life Sciences)	−1.849 (2.365)	−4.584 *** (1.235)	−0.065 (0.182)
Area 3 (Social Sciences)	−12.653 *** (2.227)	−7.613 *** (1.028)	−0.938 *** (0.154)
Area 4 (Arts and Humanities)	−15.064 *** (2.315)	−9.092 *** (1.067)	−1.122 *** (0.155)
Grade	4.490 *** (0.660)	1.391 *** (0.343)	0.429 *** (0.050)
Number of children under 18	0.567 (0.616)	−0.090 (0.406)	0.213 *** (0.062)
Constant	9.259 ** (3.942)	7.144 *** (1.624)	0.495 * (0.253)
Number of obs	1380	1380	1380
F	F (6, 1373) = 40.03	F (6, 1373) = 17.63	F (6, 1373) = 29.47
Prob > F	0.0000	0.0000	0.0000
R-squared	0.1026	0.0912	0.1408
Root MSE	25.847	11.94	1.839

Note: Standard errors are in parenthesis. * (**) (***) indicate statistical significance at the 10 (5) (1) % levels.

of Appendix C. The coefficient for gender was negative and significant, albeit at 10%, for journal publications, i.e., women publish less, in line with [14,17,21,22,23,24,25,26,27]. For conference proceedings and for grants, the coefficient for gender was not significant. The coefficient for grade was positive and significant in all three regressions. A higher grade may “provide the level of resources and job security that serve to bolster one’s level of productivity” (p. 436 [30]) or academics with higher grades may be simply more experienced and therefore more productive. The coefficient for the number of children under the age of 18 years was not significant in the journal publications or the conference proceedings regressions, in line with [27,29,30,31]. One study finds a positive relationship between having children and journal publications for female economists but no relationship for male economists [32]. Our coefficient for the number of children under 18, however, remained not significant even when we ran separate regressions for men and for women, although for brevity, these are not reported. The coefficient for the number of children under 18 was positive and significant in the grants regression.

5.3. Percentage of Time Spent on Teaching and Teaching-Related Activities

The percentage of working time allocated to different activities during the working day can have an impact on academic rank. Thus, we specified a model which includes the percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities, as reported by respondents. The last column of Table 4 shows the results. Gender, year of birth, and number of children all have the same signs as before and are statistically significant. The variable household chores continues to be not significant and having a PhD has the same sign as before and continues to be significant at a 10% level. The variables on research productivity have the same signs and significance as before. For the area of research, relative to area 1 (Science), there are positive differences for area 3 (Social Sciences), at a 1% level, and for area 4 (Arts and Humanities), at a 10% level, i.e., academics working in Social Sciences or in Arts and Humanities are likely to hold a higher rank than academics working in Science, with everything else constant.

The coefficient for percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities is negative and statistically significant, in line with [18]. On similar lines, another study finds that “involvement in teaching negatively affects salary” (p. 886 [43]). Either teaching does not help career progression or those in lower academic ranks are given a heavier teaching workload, or both, potentially making this a vicious circle.

We also estimated the OLS regressions of Table A6 again, adding the percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching related activities as an independent variable. The results are reported in

Table A7. Linear regressions of research productivity variables on gender, area of research, grade, number of children under 18 and percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities.

	Number of Journal Publications	Number of Conference Proceedings	Number of Grants
Gender	−1.724 (1.156)	−0.053 (0.722)	0.220 * (0.124)
Area 1 (Science) Reference
Area 2 (Medicine and Life Sciences)	−2.821 (2.431)	−4.854 *** (1.229)	−0.105 (0.180)
Area 3 (Social Sciences)	−12.253 *** (2.175)	−7.501 *** (1.030)	−0.921 *** (0.155)
Area 4 (Arts and Humanities)	−13.973 *** (2.206)	−8.789 *** (1.083)	−1.077 *** (0.159)
Grade	4.023 *** (0.663)	1.262 *** (0.354)	0.410 *** (0.051)
Number of children under 18	0.566 (0.605)	−0.090 (0.406)	0.213 *** (0.062)
Share time on teaching	−0.128 *** (0.028)	−0.036 * (0.018)	−0.005 * (0.003)
Constant	14.860 *** (4.490)	8.702 *** (1.814)	0.727 *** (0.280)
Number of obs	1380	1380	1380
F	F (7, 1372) = 35.83	F (7, 1372) = 15.81	F (7, 1372) = 25.74
Prob > F	0.0000	0.0000	0.0000
R-squared	0.1110	0.0943	0.1435
Root MSE	25.735	11.924	1.8367

Note: Standard errors are in parenthesis. * (**) (***) indicate statistical significance at the 10 (5) (1) % levels.

of Appendix C. The coefficient for gender ceased to be significant in the journal publications regression, remained not significant in the conference proceedings regression, and was positive and significant, albeit at 10%, in the number of grants regression. This is a key result because it reveals that once we control for the share of time spent on teaching, women publish as many journal papers as men and get more grants than men.

The coefficient for grade continued to be positive and significant in all three regressions. The coefficient for the number of children under the age of 18 years continued to be not significant in the journal publications and in the conference proceedings regressions, and positive and significant in the grants regression.

Crucially, the coefficient for percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching related activities was negative and significant at a 1% level in the journal publications regression. It was also negative and significant, albeit at a 10% level, in the conference proceedings and grants regressions. Although we cannot establish causality this is a very important result.

In order to understand whether the percentage of time spent on teaching affects the academic rank of women and men differently, we estimated the same model for men only and for women only, but this time we dropped the variable household chores, which was consistently not significant in Table 4.

Table 5. Ordered logistic regression of grade for men and women subsamples.

	Men Only	Women Only
Respondent’s year of birth	−0.146 *** (0.010)	−0.114 *** (0.012)
Number of children under 18	0.267 *** (0.084)	0.198 ** (0.094)
PhD	0.510 ** (0.223)	0.049 (0.244)
Journal papers	0.010 (0.013)	0.043 *** (0.010)
Conference papers	0.001 (0.008)	0.007 (0.017)
Grants	0.301 *** (0.054)	0.250 *** (0.050)
Share time on teaching	−0.016 *** (0.005)	−0.019 *** (0.004)
Area 1 (Science) Reference
Area 2 (Medicine and Life Sciences)	−0.200 (0.216)	−0.290 (0.295)
Area 3 (Social Sciences)	0.752 *** (0.215)	0.264 (0.294)
Area 4 (Arts and Humanities)	0.302 (0.259)	0.435 (0.342)
Log pseudolikelihood	−25619.11	−12969.67
Number of obs	730	556
Wald chi2	241.30	182.72
Prob > chi2	0.0000	0.0000
Pseudo R2	0.20	0.18

Note: Standard errors are in parenthesis. * (**) (***) indicate statistical significance at the 10 (5) (1) % levels.

shows the results. The variables year of birth and number of grants have the same sign as before and are significant. Number of children under 18 also has the same sign as before and is significant, but only at a 5% level for women. The coefficients for journal and conference publications continue to be positive and not significant, except for journal publications in the case of women, which is now significant. PhD is not significant any longer in the case of women. For areas of research, relative to area 1 (Science), there are no significant differences, except for area 3 (Social Sciences) in the case of men. Percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities is still negative and statistically significant in both cases but with a slightly lower coefficient for men.

In order to understand how correlated teaching is to gender, as well as to area of research and academic rank we estimated an OLS regression.

Table 6. Linear regression of percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities on gender, area of research, grade, and gender × grade.

	Without Interaction Term	With Interaction Term
Gender	3.408 *** (1.271)	9.799 *** (3.311)
Area 1 (Science) Reference
Area 2 (Medicine and Life Sciences)	−7.962 *** (1.643)	−7.938 *** (1.644)
Area 3 (Social Sciences)	3.864 *** (1.450)	3.776 *** (1.450)
Area 4 (Arts and Humanities)	8.712 *** (1.563)	8.668 *** (1.560)
Grade	−3.680 *** (.484)	−0.896 (1.407)
Gender × Grade		−2.165 ** (0.928)
Constant	44.634 *** (2.698)	36.200 *** (5.214)
Number of obs	1597	1597
F	F (5, 1591) = 48.71	F (6, 1590) = 45.22
Prob > F	0.0000	0.0000
R-squared	0.1469	0.1499
Root MSE	19.416	19.389

Note: Standard errors are in parenthesis. * (**) (***) indicate statistical significance at the 10 (5) (1) % levels.

shows the results.

As it can be seen on Table 6, the coefficient for area 2 (Medicine and Life Sciences) is negative and significant and the coefficients for area 3 (Social Sciences) and 4 (Arts and Humanities) are positive and significant, implying that the percentage of time spent by faculty on teaching is lower in Medicine and Life Sciences relative to Sciences, and higher in Social Sciences and Arts and Humanities, relative to Science. Although counterintuitive at first sight, many teaching contact-hours in courses falling under the remit of Medicine, Life Sciences, and Science tend to rely on lab and class work, usually led by teaching assistants, demonstrators, and PhD students, who are on casual and fixed-term contracts, rather than on faculty. Faculty in the Arts and Humanities and in the Social Sciences, on the other hand, tend to bear most of the contact-hours with students, and hence the difference in coefficients.

Importantly, the coefficient for gender is positive and significant. According to these results, the women in our sample tend to spend a higher percentage of their working time on teaching and teaching-related activities than their male counterparts. This result is in line with findings in [25,27,44].

We also find that the lower the academic rank, the higher the percentage of time spent on teaching. Since women tend to have lower academic ranks than men, the two effects may have some synergy and become an obstacle for academic progression. With that in mind, we present the results of a second regression, where a statistical interaction term, gender × grade, is also included as an explanatory variable. The coefficient of the interaction term is the difference in the effect of grade between men and women. The fact that the interaction is significant, albeit at a 5% level, indicates that the effect of grade is different for men and for women. It should be noted, however, that the variable grade is now not statistically significant, which is not a problem because adding an interaction term drastically changes the interpretation of all the coefficients, i.e., the effect of grade is now conditional on the value of gender (and vice-versa). The effect of grade is now −0.896 for men and −3.061 for women. This is obtained as −0.896 − 2.165 × 0 = −0.896 and −0.896 − 2.165 × 1 = −3.061, respectively. Put more simply, going up one grade (say from lecturer to senior lecturer or from senior lecturer to reader) reduces the percentage of time spent on teaching by a factor of 0.896 for men and by a factor of 3.061 for women. Women going up the academic ladder see the percentage of time they spend on teaching and teaching-related activities decrease more than men going up the academic ladder, everything else being equal.

The effect of gender is now 9.799 − 2.165 × grade, with grade taking values between 1 and 5. It is easy to check that this effect decreases as grade increases, and becomes negative for the highest grade, 5, which is that of professor.

To summarize, the results from the second regression on Table 6 indicate that, for any given research area, 1, 2, 3 or 4, the percentage of working time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities is higher for women than for men at all grades, except for that of professor, when it is finally slightly lower, thanks to the more rapid decrease they experience, relative to men, as they progress on the academic ladder.

A higher percentage of working time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities may be an indicator of a heavier teaching load. Since we did not ask any question about the total number of hours effectively worked per year (rather than contracted), we cannot discard the possibility that men and/or those in higher academic ranks work many more hours than women and/or those in lower academic ranks, in which case the percentage of working time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities could potentially be lower even if the actual teaching load (measured for example by contact hours and number of students) were the same or higher.

Heavier teaching loads on women could be the result of subtle, probably unintentional, discrimination, which arguably, becomes less obvious as women progress academically and the percentage of time they spend on teaching and teaching-related activities decreases more than that of their male counterparts, for each grade they progress.

5.4. Timing of Children

The most puzzling result in this study is that the variable number of children under the age of 18 years has a positive association with the academic rank for both men and women, and not just for men, as previously found in [10,12,13,14,15]. Our results are more in line with [11], which finds that although young children (under the age of 6 years) reduce the chances of women getting a tenure-track job, older children (aged 6 to 17 years) have a positive association with women getting a tenure-track job and with both men and women getting tenure. Interestingly, in contrast with us, the authors find no effect of children, young or old, on men or women being promoted to full professor [11]. They argue that the need to provide for their children motivates academics to get tenure-track jobs and tenure, but once tenure is secured there is no motivation to get a full professorship on economic grounds as they have already ensured that their children will be provided for [11].

The answer to the puzzle of this positive association between the number of children under the age of 18 years and academic rank in our results seems to be linked to the timing of children. One of the questions in the survey asked if the respondent’s timing with regard to having a child had been influenced by promotion/tenure/job permanency concerns. Therefore, we estimated two regressions, one for those whose timing was influenced by career concerns and one for those whose timing was not.

Table 7. Ordered logistic regression of grade for those who timed their children with career considerations in mind and those who did not.

	Subsample that Timed Children with Career Considerations	Subsample that Did not Time Children with Career Considerations
Gender	−0.305 (0.282)	−0.733 *** (0.182)
Respondent’s year of birth	−0.213 *** (0.022)	−0.127 *** (0.012)
Number of children under 18	0.457 *** (0.149)	0.100 (0.089)
PhD	0.054 (0.358)	0.204 (0.228)
Journal papers	0.046 *** (0.009)	0.015 (0.021)
Conference papers	−0.026 * (0.015)	0.002 (0.011)
Grants	0.425 *** (0.075)	0.161 *** (0.058)
Share time on teaching	−0.010 (0.009)	−0.022 *** (0.005)
Area 1 (Science) Reference
Area 2 (Medicine and Life Sciences)	0.462 (0.371)	−0.436 * (0.253)
Area 3 (Social Sciences)	1.113 *** (0.380)	0.399 * (0.234)
Area 4 (Arts and Humanities)	1.497 *** (0.450)	0.057 (0.301)
Log pseudolikelihood	−6911.27	−19625.55
Number of obs	307	617
Wald chi2	166.26	164.60
Prob > chi2	0.0000	0.000
Pseudo R2	0.34	0.16

Note: Standard errors are in parenthesis. * (**) (***) indicate statistical significance at the 10 (5) (1) % levels.

shows the results.

The coefficient for year of birth in Table 7 continues to be negative and significant. Having a PhD is not significant any longer. Journal and conference publications have the expected sign and are now significant for the subsample of respondents who timed their children with career considerations but are still not significant for the subsample of those who did not. The coefficient for number of grants continues to be positive and significant. The percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities continues to be negative but is now not significant for the subsample of respondents who timed their children with career considerations.

For the subsample of respondents who timed parenthood, the results for area of research are as follows. Relative to area 1 (Science), there are positive differences for area 3 (Social Sciences) and for area 4 (Arts and Humanities), both at a 1% level. For the subsample of respondents who did not time parenthood, relative to area 1 (Science), there are negative differences for area 2 (Medicine and Life Sciences) and positive differences for area 3 (Social Sciences), albeit both only significant at a 10% level.

Moving on to the variables gender and number of children under 18, both of which have been consistently significant in all our models, Table 7 shows what could be regarded as the most important findings in this study. The coefficient for the variable number of children under the age of 18 years, which was positive in all our previous regressions, remains positive and significant when only those whose timing was influenced by career considerations are included in the sample. However, when only those whose timing was not influenced are included in the sample, the coefficient for the variable number of children under 18 becomes not significant. Another interesting result is that the coefficient for gender, which was consistently negative and significant in all our models, becomes not significant for those who timed their babies with career considerations, and we discuss this further below.

A caveat that needs to be highlighted is that the samples are rather small in both cases because: (a) 54% of all those on open-ended contracts and 71% of those on probation did not have children under the age of 18 years at the time of the survey, (b) the already small group of respondents who did have children under the age of 18 years was split into those who timed and those who did not time parenthood with career considerations, and (c) the sample of those who timed their children would have been 27% larger and the sample of those who did not time their children would have been 22% larger if all respondents with children under the age of 18 years had disclosed their age. Dropping the variable year of birth would make the samples larger but an important control variable, significant in all our models, would be lost in that case.

The association between number of children under the age of 18 years and higher grade does not equal causality. Given that the variable number of children under 18 is significant for the sample who timed their children with career considerations in mind but not significant for the sample who did not, there would appear to be some evidence to suspect that rather than children having a positive impact, children arrived after a certain grade had been secured.

The fact that the variable gender, which was negative and significant in all our models, becomes not significant for the sample who timed their babies, could also be seen as evidence that women who timed their children secured a certain grade first, thus protecting themselves from discrimination, or at least discrimination after having children.

Timing seems to be key. This important finding implies that women may find the decision of when to have a baby excruciating because postponing motherhood could cost them not ever having children at all, as fertility declines with age. There is evidence that “women are more successful in obtaining academic careers if they delay or forsake marriage and children” (p. 401 [11]) and that academics who did not have children often regret the decision later in life when it is too late, as do those who wish they had had more children (p. 69 [10]). A qualitative study also finds that “women academics have been tailoring their personal lives to fit their professional lives” (p. 223 [45]).

The fact that men and women may need to time their reproduction per se reflects that academia is not women friendly. Furthermore, it is worth highlighting that although 50% of our (unweighted) sample of respondents were of childbearing age (42 years old or younger) at the time of the survey (i.e., 2013), 60.7% did not have any children under the age of 18 years. In England and Wales, about 20% of women are childless at the age of 45 years [46], compared to 53% in our sample. Furthermore, 15.9% reported that their decision on whether to have or not to have children had been based on career considerations, and 57% from those whose decision on whether to have children or not had been based on career considerations did not have children of any age.

For comparison purposes, 66% of the surveyed academic women in [3] did not have children under the age of 18 years even though 80% of them were 50 years old or younger, 53% of academic women in the sample in [27] did not have any children, and 42% of academic women with tenure in the sample in [10] did not have any children. In our sample 48% of women on open-ended contracts did not have children of any age.

Figure 1 shows the percentage of respondents in our sample who did not have children of any age at the time of the survey by gender and type of contract.

Figure 1 supports our finding about timing of children with career considerations, and is in line with [45], who finds that academic women tend to time having babies for after they have secured permanency. In our sample, this conclusion also applies to men. However, for every type of contract, the percentage of men who do not have any children is lower than the percentage of women who do not have any children. For the whole sample the difference (50% versus 59%) is statistically significant at 1%.

Figure 1 also shows that the percentage of respondents that do not have any children decreases as the terms of their employment become more secure. This can be explained by two logical, intuitive reasons. One reason could be simply responsible parenthood, which concerns the consideration of the factors that have a bearing on whether to start a family and also, on family size. Potential parents may decide that in order to provide for the basic and also other needs of their children they would rather have a permanent job, or at least, be on the track to one. Another reason could be simply that the average age of all respondents on open-ended contracts at the time of the survey was 48 years, and so most of those respondents wanting to have children would have already had them. This age-related explanation, however, does not seem to apply fully to our sample because the average age of those on probation was 35 years, three years younger than the average age of those on fixed contracts. Despite those on fixed contracts being older, on average, than those on probation, the percentage of those with no children was higher.

Despite the caveat of “responsible parenthood” the statistics from Figure 1 are somewhat worrying and tell a story of the kind of working environment that academia is, or at least is perceived to be. This is surprising given that all universities have written policies on work-life balance, which at least on paper, support family life. Clearly, perceptions need to be changed, so that structural change can be brought about. We discuss some policy recommendations regarding this issue in the last section.

5.5. Other Variables

It is worth noting that we estimated many alternative specifications of the model, including a number of other variables. For example, as well as papers in peer-reviewed journals and papers in conference proceedings included in some of our tables, we also tried guest-edited journal volumes, chapters in books, authored books, and edited books. None of these variables was significant. We also tried variables on availability of flexible working arrangements, part-time opportunities, good career guidance, influential role models and/or mentors, support from senior colleagues, support from other colleagues, knowing the “right people” within the respondent’s institution and/or outside, availability of good childcare, and support from partner/spouse. In addition, we tried variables on academic activities which respondents had to reduce involvement in and/or attendance to because they were pregnant/expecting a child and/or had preschool age children, such as committees/boards memberships, refereeing and peer reviewing, guest-editing journal volumes, being main editor of a journal, being on Editorial Boards of academic journals, invitations to present keynote speeches, lectures or chair sessions at conferences, presenting other papers at conferences, amongst others.

The variables that consistently proved to be significant in our regressions were gender, number of children under 18, percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities, and number of grants obtained.

6. Policy Recommendations

The 24 Russell Group universities have a number of policies in place already to support work-life balance and family life, including flexible working arrangements and part-time opportunities. In the UK, all employers also offer unpaid parental leave schemes to care for children under the age of 18 years. In addition, the biological father or the mother’s partner (regardless of gender or marital status) is typically entitled to one or two weeks of paternity leave following the birth or adoption of a child, with at least statutory pay, and in some cases, full pay. Most Russell Group universities also offer generous maternity leave packages, with new mothers being entitled to up to 52 weeks of maternity/adoption leave, with at least the first 18 weeks being paid at 90% of their salary. Some universities have even more generous packages. In 2015, the UK government also introduced shared parental leave, which allows parents to share up to 50 weeks of leave and 37 weeks of statutory pay after their child is born. All 24 universities offer this. The uptake of shared parental leave in the UK has been low mainly due to workplace culture as well as parents’ views, which see the mother as the primary caregiver, especially in the first year, and the complexity of the shared parental leave policy [47]. Another factor for the low uptake may also be financial, as in many cases the combined income is lower with shared parental leave than with the traditional maternity leave.

Many of the Russell Group universities offer subsidized childcare within campus, others offer subsidies for childcare off campus, and the UK government also offers tax-free childcare, albeit with a cap. In addition, most universities offer career guidance through appraisal schemes for men and women, and in some cases, through workshops designed by and for women specifically. As explained in Section 5.4, we tested all of these variables but they were not statistically significant, which does not necessarily imply that these policies and benefits are not important. If they were not in place, the gender gap would probably be wider. Despite all these policies and benefits, our results show that women tend to hold lower grades than men. In order to achieve structural change at the institutional level and facilitate the advancement of women in academia, we propose the following two policies, following up from the variables that were found to have an association with academic rank: transparent workload models and promotion on the basis of clear and transparent criteria.

Universities should have systems in place to allow a fair and equitable distribution of teaching (and administrative) loads amongst faculty as well as continuous monitoring of such distribution. This could be actioned through, for example, a transparent workload model where everyone can see everybody else’s teaching loads, including number of courses taught, contact hours, number of students, marking, dissertation supervision, etc. Some British universities, including some in the Russell Group, have already adopted or are in the process of adopting workload models. Some are university-wide workload models and others are designed within Schools or Departments. The tariffs used vary across institutions, and sometimes, across Schools or Departments within the same institution, and are at present the subject of much debate. The tariffs of any workload model meant for academics should be set by academics, as academics know the time it takes to prepare a lecture, mark an exam, supervise a student project, write a journal paper, prepare a research proposal, etc. In addition, promotion should be based on clear and transparent criteria. Although there are typically three criteria by which candidates for promotion are judged (research, teaching, and administration), these criteria are not equally weighted (p. 2 [7]), (p. 47 [22]). The decisive factor for promotion is research, i.e., if a candidate’s research is deemed inadequate, no amount of teaching or administration will compensate for this (p. 48 [22]). If this is the path that the Russell Group Universities want to stick to then this should be made crystal clear and no claims of the possibility of promotion on the basis of teaching (or administration) excellence should be made. Guidelines should be communicated to all staff so that everyone is clear that the most important criterion for promotion is research. However, if universities are going to continue with their current (written) policies for promotion, many of which include excellence in teaching, then, these policies should be implemented in practice. Excellence in teaching, however, is difficult to demonstrate. Student evaluation, for example, could be one of the metrics, although this is frequently positively correlated with faculty evaluation (higher grades on average) of students and small class sizes [22]. Peer and other evaluations may also be controversial, so careful thought would need to be given to how excellence in teaching can be established.

Adopting these two policies will help reduce the discriminatory teaching loads on women, which is a contributor to their lack of progression, and will make promotions fairer and more transparent, with a probable outcome of having more women climbing up the academic ladder.

7. Conclusions

Using an ordered logit model and the results of a survey, which we conducted in 2013, with 2270 observations of academics of both genders at all levels in all fields of knowledge at the 24 Russell Group universities in the UK, we have examined the association between gender and academic rank, controlling for a number of variables, including but not limited to, respondent’s year of birth, number of children, responsibility for household chores, academic degrees, number of publications, grants, percentage of working time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities, and main area of research.

One caveat that should be highlighted is that this study only finds associations with models that use observational data. Causal relationships cannot be identified with the current dataset. Still, the associations found are very important and can guide policy.

Our findings can be summarized as follows.

A negative association between being a woman and academic rank is indeed observed in all our models but one, when run for a small subsample of male and female academics who timed their children with career considerations in mind. In general, however, women are less likely to hold a higher academic rank even after controlling for individual characteristics using variables like respondent’s year of birth, marital status, responsibility for the household chores, area of research, number of children under 18, holding a PhD or not, percentage of working time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities, and a number of research productivity variables. This result is in line with [10,11,12,13,14,15,17,19,40], all of whom also find that women tend to progress at a lower rate than men, even after accounting for variables that would capture family formation and/or academic/research achievements. We call this the gender effect. Put simply, two people who have similar, or even identical credentials and personal circumstances except for one being a man and the other being a woman, are likely to have different academic ranks, with the man having a higher rank than the woman. One explanation for this phenomenon may be discrimination against women.

Another important finding is that the percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities has a negative and statistically significant association with academic rank, in line with [18]. On similar lines, another study finds a negative association between teaching and salary [43]. Furthermore, our results show that women spend a higher percentage of their working time on teaching and teaching-related activities than men at all academic grades, except for that of professor. This is in line with [25,27,44], which also find that women tend to spend either more time or a higher percentage of their working time on teaching and teaching-related activities, but in contrast with [3,7], which do not find differences between the genders related to absolute or relative time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities.

In addition, we find that going up one grade (say from lecturer to senior lecturer or from senior lecturer to reader) reduces the percentage of time spent on teaching more for women than for men, and so eventually, female professors spend a lower percentage of their working time on teaching and teaching-related activities than male professors.

If a higher percentage of working time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities is to be taken as an indicator of a heavier teaching load, then we can conclude that women at all ranks, except for that of professor, are being discriminated against. At the same time, relative to men, women experience a higher reduction in the percentage of time spent on teaching and teaching-related activities by going up one grade.

Another important result, which is new and has not been quantified before for the UK, is a positive and significant association between number of children under the age of 18 years and the academic rank of both men and women, as long as babies were timed with career considerations in mind. In line with [11], the reason for this is very unlikely to be that children have a positive impact on academic rank, other than triggering their parents’ eagerness to achieve a certain level of job stability and income in order to provide for them. What this result is probably showing is that children arrived after a certain rank (for example, an open-ended contract) had been secured. Importantly, for the subsample of academics who timed their children, the variable gender ceases to be significant.

These findings pose a dilemma for women because the 30 s is the decade when they have two competing goals in their lives: establishing themselves in their careers having finished their doctorates, and having children. Delaying pregnancy can mean that these women are left childless as fertility declines with age, especially after the age of 35 years. Some further inspection of our data confirms our finding about timing of children with career considerations: the percentage of respondents that do not have children (of any age) decreases as the terms of their employment become more secure. This state of affairs is especially biased against women.