Welcome to the Broad Experience, the show about women, the workplace and success.

I'm Ashley Milne Tite.

This time we take a look at life in academia.

To an outsider, being a professor can look very attractive.

The interaction with the students, all those enlightened colleagues, the flexibility, long holidays.

But of course, it's more complicated than that.

It turns out being a successful academic is much more of a man's game, even today.

The idea of being a scholar, a true scholar, is very much predicated on a traditional male model

of a professor thinking lofty thoughts and having a stay-at-home wife who takes

care of all of the sort of mundane ordinary details. Coming up on the broad experience,

recently I've been intrigued by a few little things friends and listeners happen to mention about

their jobs in academia, information that made me want to delve further into life in the ivory tower.

But before I got to the personal stories, I wanted to get some statistics.

So I called John Curtis.

He's Director of Research and Public Policy for the American Association of University Professors.

He says the state of women in academia today isn't as advanced as it should be.

They are more likely to be in part-time faculty positions rather than full-time faculty positions.

If they are in a full-time faculty position, they're more likely to be in one that is not on the tenure track.

In other words, that does not lead to a permanent position.

And if they do get into one of those tenure track, in other words, that does not lead to a permanent position. And if they do get into one of those tenure track positions, the percentage of women faculty who actually achieved tenure is lower

than that for men. About 35% of women have tenure versus 48% of men. This might not be so surprising,

but he says there's been a 40-year push to get women academics on an equal footing with their male colleagues. He has a daughter

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