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Abstract

In STEM fields, women tend to leak out of the pipeline to the professoriate. In archaeology, however, robust databases and chronological control reveal that there is no leakage from earning a PhD to tenure-track positions. Nor is there a leak from assistant professor to associate professor. Nevertheless, men get hired as faculty in PhD programs more often than women. This is important because PhD programs are research-intensive and train future leaders. Furthermore, women PhD students have women as advisers more than often men and report advantages to this arrangement. Yet with fewer women faculty in PhD programs, women mentors are in short supply. Potential solutions to these problems target areas where bias can intervene. Specifically, job search committees should (1) wait until late in the process before consulting letters of recommendation, (2) standardize the valorization of coauthorship for both men and women, and (3) prioritize applicants who match the job description when creating long lists. Finally, implicit bias training is critically important, and mentoring should be continuous and enthusiastically positive.

Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2026

Notes/Citation Information

© The Author(s), 2025. Published by Cambridge University Press on behalf of Society for American Archaeology. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution and reproduction, provided the original article is properly cited.

Digital Object Identifier (DOI)

https://doi.org/10.1017/aap.2025.10117

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