Why a Forum for underrepresented groups?
Anica Waldendorf
Presentation at INAS 2025
Background
The first Women’s Forum @ INAS was held in 2024 in Leipzig. It received strong positive feedback, yet some people asked: why do we need a women’s forum? Haven’t we reached equality between women and men in academia? In reaction, we included a short introduction on why we need a Women’s Forum at the start of the second Women’s Forum in New York in 2025. This document is a written summary of the presentation I gave, providing a very brief overview of some facts and figures about women’s position in academia to highlight why this women’s forum was established.
The focus was on women, but of course, we also want to open the space for other underrepresented groups in academia as many of the inequalities that I mention also apply to other underrepresented groups. Going forward, we actively invite all members of the Analytical Sociology community to engage with the Forum and help shape a space that is inclusive and welcoming to all. We are currently planning to make changes to make it clear that we are inclusive towards all underrepresented groups. Ultimately, our hope is that there will come a time where such a forum is not needed by anyone.
While some of the data might seem a little discouraging, we show these empirical findings to highlight that what we may feel as individual experiences have stronger roots, and that these inequalities by gender and race/ethnicity exist in almost all fields of academia and in many countries. We also hope that for those with more advantaged positions, these facts and figures act as an invitation to reflect on gendered and racialized processes and on what you can maybe do to help make academia a more welcoming space for everyone, independent of their identity or gender.
Representation of women in academia
As a point of departure, I looked at the representation of women at INAS by looking at the gender composition of first authors of papers presented at INAS conferences. I went through the programmes and coded first names by assumed gender. This wasn’t always possible and it involved a lot of googling, but it does give us a rough estimate. Women’s participation at INAS has historically been consistently below 50%, about 30% in 2022 and 2023. In 2024, the first year of INAS with a Women’s Forum, the share of women was around 35%. In 2025, we are nearly at parity, at 48% women. Something to keep in mind is that even if the share of women seems to be increasing, it is worth keeping an eye on whether women’s representation is evenly spread across academic seniority.
Moving beyond INAS, we can also look at the representation of women in academia. Figure 1 shows data for Europe from 1991 to 2016. Here you can see the so-called leaky pipeline: Women are overrepresented at the student level, with decreasing representation with each subsequent career stage. At the highest career level of senior researcher, women make up just under 25%.
Looking at Sociology specifically, women are underrepresented as faculty in many countries, but especially in tenured faculty. For example, in Germany, women make up 40% of faculty, but only 22% of tenured faculty (Nakagawa, Wotipka, and Buckner 2024, data from 2014).
Sticking with Germany for a moment, we see a further difference concerning rank: women hold 30% of professorships, but only 12% of the highest-ranking professorships, despite earning 46.2% of doctoral degrees (Statistisches Bundesamt (Destatis) 2025). There are differences by country, and in some cases, women are overrepresented, for example, in Turkey, yet this remains the exception. In Sociology, at research universities in the US, 78% of women versus 85% of men receive tenure (Weisshaar 2017:539).
So where does this gap come from? Weisshaar (2017) argues that it is not sex segregation across departments. Even when taking productivity and contextual differences into account, women remain disadvantaged in receiving tenure. When women do receive tenure, it is in lower-prestige departments than men. Instead, gendered processes in tenure evaluation likely play a role (Weisshaar 2017). Two examples are the content of letters of recommendation as well as identification with those who are similar to oneself.
Letters of recommendation for women tend to be more communal than agentic, yet agentic letters of recommendation are seen more positively in hiring situations (Madera, Hebl, and Martin 2009). Moreover, the notion of ‘mobilizing masculinities’ suggests that men gatekeepers identify with other men in their networks and that there is a preference for male candidates because they “resemble the proven masculine success model” (Van Den Brink and Benschop 2014: 483). Women on hiring committees can choose to mobilise their femininities, for example by actively searching for women and encouraging them to apply, yet this is only partially successful.
Representation by ethnicity and race
The underrepresentation is even more visible if we look at ethnicity or race rather than gender. Not all countries collect data on ethnicity/race; In the UK, 89% of professors are white (AdvanceHE 2024). Moreover, 29% of Black, Asian and other minority groups are on fixed-term contracts, compared to 23.3% of White academics.
Data from the U.S. show that compared to the baseline of who receives a doctoral degree, women and non-white professors are well or even overrepresented at the assistant professor level, yet underrepresented as full professors (Schneider and Bichsel 2024:5). White men are the only group where representation increases with each academic rank.
The work environment
I would also like to talk about another sphere, which is the general working environment. Now, this is not specifically about academia, but about general work environments, but there is no reason to assume this would be any different for academia.
Doering, Doering and Tilcsik (2023) investigated experiences of gender discrimination at work, especially ambiguous incidents of discrimination using a combination of interviews, a survey, and an experiment. First, they conducted 31 interviews with professional women to talk about “women’s experiences in the workplace”. During the interview, they were asked about experiences of discrimination and many of them talked about the uncertainty surrounding potential experiences of discrimination. It seemed that ambiguous events were more likely than outright discrimination. These ambiguous incidents included “many minor incidents, such as colleagues interrupting them or ignoring their contributions, excluding them from social activities, or making patronizing remarks that questioned their competency.” (p. 508)
The authors conducted a follow-up survey with 600 working women in the US about incidences of discrimination and ambiguous events to determine the frequency of these two types of events. 64% of respondents experienced obvious discrimination in 2019. 74% reported ambiguous incidents, which they also reported to find more troubling. This pattern holds across different professions, age groups, political leanings, sexual orientations, and racial groups. Finally, they use a vignette experiment to show that respondents are less likely to take action against ambiguous incidents and more likely to change their own behaviour instead.
Women and men are evaluated differently
Finally, one last area where women face discrimination is student evaluations, which are important for promotion and hiring decisions. Research shows that women and men are evaluated differently, even when they behave the same (Arbuckle & Williams 2003; MacNell, Driscoll and Hunt 2015).
One striking example is an experiment where students rate a lecture given by a stick figure, with a voice-over by a voice that is perceived as female vs. male (as well as old vs. young). The male voice receives higher evaluations than the female voice, despite identical content (Arbuckle & Williams 2003). Further research has shown that students hold different expectations for how women and men should behave and what they expect of them. Women receive lower evaluations when they do not conform to gendered expectations, such as being nurturing and caring in their teaching capacity (Adams et al. 2022).
However, a small change can already make a big difference: Rivera and Tilcsik 2019 show that simply changing the scale used in teaching evaluations from a 10-point to a 6-point scale can significantly reduce the gender gap in evaluations for male-dominated fields. The authors argue that one reason is that men are associated with being brilliant, which is signified by a 10/10 score. Women are not as likely to be perceived as brilliant, and thus less likely to receive a 10/10 score. This is in line with research that shows a shift in gender stereotypes, whereby the word “genius” has become a masculine word. Just to highlight how strong this association is: word embeddings based on US media text reveal that genius is as masculine as “estrogen” and “motherhood” are feminine (Boutyline, Arseniev-Koehler & Cornell 2023).
Conclusion
To sum up, women’s and men’s experiences in academia are very different. Women remain underrepresented at the highest levels of academia and face discrimination, whether in everyday activities, student evaluations, or tenure decisions, to name just a few points.
The aim of the Forum
The forum aims to raise awareness about inequalities and implicit prejudices in academia. We want to work towards creating a culture that is more inclusive and provide a safe space of support for women and other underrepresented groups and minorities. A further mission is to create networking opportunities for underrepresented groups. We hope that with this women’s forum we can contribute to retaining more women in academia but also at INAS specifically.
Literature
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AdvanceHE. 2024. Equality in higher education: staff statistical report 2024. 14.11.2024. Available at:
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Statistiches Bundesamt (Destatis). 2025. Institutions of higher education. Proportion of women at various stages of academic career. Available at: https://www.destatis.de/EN/Themes/Society-Environment/Education-Research-Culture/Institutions-Higher-Education/Tables/frauen-anteile-akademische-laufbahn.html; last accessed 01.06.2026.
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