Most higher education faculty positions in the U.S. are for teaching and not research. Most STEM graduates have minimal training in teaching. If one goes sole

Most higher education faculty positions in the U.S. are for teaching and not research. Most STEM graduates have minimal training in teaching. If one goes solely by education level or achievement in the field as a means of determining qualification then this whole discussion is about the wrong thing. I’ve been on hiring committees for a math department at a community college. This is the truth of the matter in my corner of the world. If we have two equally qualified candidates, and by qualified I mean at least a Master’s degree, and two candidates that perform equally well in teaching then a female candidate will slightly be more likely to get the job over a male candidate. If the male candidate is a person of color they will likely get the job. What you can’t measure when looking at a resume is how good the teaching will be. I’ve had female applicants with outstanding resumes come in for the interview and be absolutely terrible at teaching. We want people who are good at teaching. The problem is that a Ph.D. in math does not make you more likely to be better at teaching than a Master’s degree and male and female candidates appear to have roughly the same probability of doing a good job at the teaching portion of the interview. So women have an edge in the hiring decision but not at the expense of “qualification”. I could not find the NRC study but suspect that study was for tenure track positions at research universities. I have no experience in this area but I do know that even at research universities adjuncts and graduate students do most of the teaching. Qualified women do have an edge over men when it comes to graduate admissions but they make up a much smaller percent of the applicant pool (at least in math). The long term thing that really needs to be addressed is the poor performance of men in terms of higher education. Women are dominating in terms of going to college and getting a degree. It’s generally not good for a society to have lots of young, under educated, under employed men.