Only 16% of full-time SNU faculty are women

Less than one in five full-time faculty members at Seoul National University (SNU) were women, a report showed, Sunday.

According to the report by the school’s committee for diversity, 338, or 16 percent of 2,119 full-time professors, were women as of 2018.

This was 0.5 percentage points up from a year earlier, but lower than the average at national universities here, 16.8 percent, and the average of private universities, 28.5 percent.

Contrary to the number of women in full-time positions, 52.2 percent of the school’s 1,181 part-time lecturers were women.

Thirty-three departments, including economics, civil and environmental engineering, and some at medical schools, did not have a single female full-time professor. At the college of engineering, only 10, or 3.2 percent of the total 317 full-time professors, were women.

Against this backdrop, female professors were not largely involved in the school’s decision-making, with women accounting for only 12.5 percent of deans or other ranking positions.

For students, women took up 36.3 percent of total undergraduates. While the nursing, fine arts, human ecology and music colleges had high ratios of female students — with the nursing college at 82.5 percent — engineering and natural sciences had less than 20 percent.

The report said women professors make up around 30 percent of the faculty at many prestigious universities overseas, adding SNU needs to raise its ratio for more diversity.

A school official said the ratio has been slowly growing, and that of full-time female professors newly hired in the second semester of this year surpassed 30 percent for the first time. He said the school authority recommends each department hire more female professors where possible.