Male tenured professors outnumber females by a three to one margin at Iowa State, an imbalance that officials say they are working to correct.

“This is an issue we’ve been battling for the last couple of years, and there’s a definite discrepancy,” said Sanjeev Agarwal, Faculty Senate president.

Agarwal said identifying the factors causing the discrepancy has been difficult.

“We’ve only come up with anecdotal reasons,” he said. “For example, the amount of work before achieving tenure interferes with balancing a professional life with a family life,” he said.

Women may choose to raise a family, he said, rather than aggressively pursuing tenure.

According to the ISU provost office, Iowa State employed 1,007 tenured professors for the 2004-05 school year. Of those, 237 are female and 770 are male.

Brenda Behling, assistant to the provost, said the total number of faculty dropped from 1,751 in the 2003-04 school year to 1,707 this school year, while the number of female faculty remained at 565 from year to year.

With women’s employment holding steady in a decline of faculty numbers, the proportion of female faculty has increased from 32.3 to 33.1 percent.

“The total number of faculty has dropped since last year,” Behling said. “But the proportion of females in the faculty has increased. The female representation has grown the last two years.”

Faculty Senate President-Elect Claudia Baldwin said increasing the female representation in the ISU faculty played a major role in this year’s Faculty Spring Conference held April 1 and 2.

Baldwin said at the conference ISU faculty members could discuss both causes of and solutions to the low number of women professors compared to men.

“It’s difficult to recruit women, but it’s even more difficult to retain those female professors,” she said.

“Women are certainly involved in a work-life balance. We need to be looking at who will be teaching our children at universities. Women represent a huge pool of talent.”

Baldwin said she is especially concerned with the low representation of women in certain fields.

“We would like to see more women in science technology, engineering and math,” she said.

To combat this shortage of women, she said the university is working to secure grants to help with professor recruitment.

She said a new family leave policy that has been accepted by the ISU President Gregory Geoffroy should attract more women to the ISU faculty.

“This new leave policy, which includes both men and women, will make for a more friendly environment in the faculty,” she said.

Iowa State has made improvement during the past few years by expanding faculty diversity, she said, but she’s not satisfied.

“The percentage increase of women and minority professors the last two years has not been what we’d like,” she said. “It’s going to take awhile for that to change.”