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Beyond Anecdotes: A Quantitative Examination of Black Women in Academe

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The Review of Black Political Economy

Abstract

Using data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates, the Survey of Doctorate Recipients, and the Integrated Postsecondary Educational Data System Completion Survey by Race, this paper provides a quantitative analysis of black woman as they progress through the academy as students, faculty or administrators. This paper will detail the number of bachelor’s, master’s and doctoral degrees awarded to black woman, the colleges and universities that are successful at conferring said degrees, and the professional outcomes of black women employed in academe. We find that black women earn twice as many degrees as black men and that younger black female professors seem to face fewer barriers to success in the academy than their predecessors.

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Notes

  1. See the foreword and introduction to Bush et al. (2009) for a list of the most influential works on black women in education.

  2. See Darity, Sharpe, Swinton, for a more detailed discussion that includes black males.

  3. The testing is done using probit regression if the dependent variable is a binary variable or linear probability regression if the dependent variable is continuous.

  4. Unknown institutions are defined as those that do not match up with institutions in the Higher Education General Information Survey, HEGIS.

  5. (Lynch et al. 2010)

  6. Contact authors for tables with degree distributions for Howard, Florida A&M, Nova Southeastern and the University of Phoenix.

  7. The use of NSF data does not imply NSF endorsement of the research methods or conclusions contained in this report. NSF does not allow results to be reported when the sample size is less than 5 or the weighted population size is less than 50. In cases where this occurs, the cell is left empty.

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Correspondence to Rhonda Vonshay Sharpe.

Additional information

We would like to thank the participants and attendees of the Invisible Woman Conference for comments and suggestions. We are especially grateful to Patrick Mason.

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Sharpe, R.V., Swinton, O.H. Beyond Anecdotes: A Quantitative Examination of Black Women in Academe. Rev Black Polit Econ 39, 341–352 (2012). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12114-012-9134-6

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s12114-012-9134-6

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