STATUS OF FEMALE PALEONTOLOGISTS AT BIG 10 UNIVERSITIES

In Big 10 universities (presently composed of 14 schools) male faculty in paleontology (including the subdisciplines of micropaleontology, paleobotany, palynology, vertebrate paleontology, invertebrate paleontology, paleobiology, and paleoecology) outnumber female faculty by a greater than 2-to-1 margin. Despite this disparity, current representation of women in tenure-stream positions in the Big 10 is significantly better now than during the 1980s and 1990s. In 1980 there were no female paleontologists in any of the Big 10 schools, in 1990 there were two. Data for 2017 show a positive trajectory for women. Four Big 10 schools have a 1:1 female to male paleontology faculty ratio but males outrank females at 2 schools. A survey of AGI Directories dating back to 1952 reveals that, pre-1980, only one woman attained tenured status in a paleontological discipline in a current Big 10 University: Dr. Jane Smith Elliott, of Michigan State University of Agriculture and Applied Science (now Michigan State University). Retrieving numbers for academic paleontologists is complicated by the interdisciplinary nature of the field; vertebrate paleontologists and paleobotanists, for example, are likely to be housed in departments of anatomy and botany, respectively, or more recently, together in departments of Integrative Biology. As field-based paleontology is augmented by interdisciplinary pursuits, tracking the status of academic “paleontologists” is increasingly challenging.