Ginther and Kuhn Very interesting article by Ginther and Kuhn. However, I wish they had categorized the institutions at which tenure occurred. Not all tenured positions are created equal, at least in my opinion.

In mathematics departments, tenure-eligible college faculty members are 31% female, other full-time faculty members are 47% female, and tenured faculty members are 17% female (Lutzer, Maxwell, & Rodi, 2002). It’s certainly possible that some of the “other full-time faculty members” don’t have PhDs.)

In the “top 10” mathematics departments, there are approximately 300 tenured faculty members; 16 of them are female (Jackson, 2004).

Women do earn PhDs from “top ten” departments though. For example,

"In mathematics, UC hired 5.4% female faculty, the national Ph.D. pool is 22.1%, UC graduates 18.4% female Ph.D.s, our comparable institutions graduate 19.6% women Ph.D.s and even the postdoctoral pool (which in mathematics is highly competitive and is an indication of potential for future funding) has 13.2% females in it." Testimony of University of California Chancellor M. R. C. Greenwood on 1/31/01)

In particular, between 1993 to 2003 the mathematics department at Berkeley hired 28 faculty members. None was female. I haven’t checked recently, but after 2003, a woman got a joint appointment in physics and mathematics.

As of May 2006, there has never been a tenured or tenure-track female mathematician in the Harvard mathematics department (Silverberg, 2006)--and it may still be the case.

However, the situation at elite universities may be quite different in physics. The percentage of women getting PhDs in physics is much lower than in math, for example, 18% of physics PhDs went to women in 2003. (It's been around 30% for mathematics, I'm not sure where Greenwood's statistic came from in the quote above.) The American Institute of Physics survey seems to have gotten results similar to that of Ginther and Kuhn with respect to rate of tenure. The following comes from an (FAQ for this survey)[http://www.aip.org/statistics/trends/reports/womenfaq.htm]:

Q: What about women at the top physics departments? Perhaps women can get faculty jobs, but not at the elite departments.

A: Women can, and do, get jobs at elite departments. Among the top 20 departments (using NRC rankings), 6% of the full professors are women, 11% of the associate professors are women, and 12% of the assistant professors are women. These percentages are also consistent with degree production in the past, meaning that women are represented on the top 20 faculties at about the levels we would expect.

References

Jackson, A. (2004). Has the women-in-mathematics problem been solved? Notices of the American Mathematical Society, 51(7), 776–783.

Lutzer, D. J., Maxwell, J. W., & Rodi, S. B. (2002). *Statistical abstract of undergraduate programs in the mathematical sciences in the United States. Fall 2000 CBMS Survey.* Providence, RI: American Mathematical Society.

Silverberg, A. (2006). Women at Harvard. Association for Women in Mathematics Newsletter, 36(3), 17–19.