The "pipeline" metaphor is used to explain why the gender balance at the tenured level is so different from what it is at the undergrad level, and it has its ba

The "pipeline" metaphor is used to explain why the gender balance at the tenured level is so different from what it is at the undergrad level, and it has its basis on the reality that most people with tenure got it by following basically the same overall career progression. Here they point out that "most" doesn't mean all, some people do get into PhD programs or tenure track without necessarily going the conventional route of undergrad in subject, grad in subject, post docs in subject, etc. And they raise an interesting point that the talk of a rigid pipeline risks constraining the mindset of candidates and reviewers such that it excludes many potential applicants with more diverse backgrounds from applying. Instead they suggest using a "lattice" metaphor to emphasise that there are more than one path open. At the same time, they report that women aren't actually leaving academia at a higher rate than men but are instead more likely to end up in non-tenure track positions, so the pipeline metaphor ends up being fairly useful anyway from the perspective of its use to summarise why there is so few female tenured professors. So I get this vague sense that much of this interview, and possibly the work itself, was really about boosting the respect of academic work done outside universities and is not really that interested in why there are representation imbalances at the tenured level.