Women are the majority in Brazil’s academic environment—according to data from the Ministry of Education (MEC), they made up 55% of Brazilian postgraduate students last year. After beginning a university teaching career, however, many women encounter obstacles to advancement: the closer they get to the top, the greater the presence of men, who continue to dominate prestigious and leadership roles. A recently published report, the “Índex da igualdade de gênero nas universidades públicas do estado de São Paulo” (Gender equality index in public universities in the state of São Paulo), presented a robust and updated diagnosis about the barriers to female inclusion in academia. The document compares data on male and female participation as researchers and employees of the University of São Paulo (USP), the University of Campinas (UNICAMP), São Paulo State University (UNESP), and the federal universities of São Paulo (UNIFESP), São Carlos (UFSCar), and ABC (UFABC). At the level of an assistant professor with a PhD, the first rung on the academic teaching career ladder, women make up 44.8% of the faculty in the six institutions. However, this percentage drops to 40.6% at the next level, associate professor, and to just 29.4% at the level of full professor.
This overall figure is an average that masks the existing disparities between the universities. UNIFESP, which has tradition in healthcare, a field with more women, has the least inequality of all—women represent 51.1% of the total faculty and 48.2% of full professors. At the opposite extreme is UFABC, which has a higher concentration of staff in fields that, according to current trends, are more male dominated, such as exact sciences and some areas of engineering. Women represent only 32.7% of the faculty and just 18.8% of full professors. Another striking piece of data from the report is the one combining gender and race. The rate of Black men and women among the professors at these universities is very low and varies little between genders: among male faculty members, 1.2% are Black and 4.4% are mixed race, while 1.1% of the female faculty members are Black and 3.9% are mixed race.
“The report is like a report card on gender for the universities in the state of São Paulo,” says one of the coordinators of the “Index,” sociologist Maria Arminda do Nascimento Arruda, vice dean of USP, who highlights the value of the document in reaffirming the commitment by the six institutions to promoting equality. The dean of UNESP, chemist Maysa Furlan, believes it will serve as a benchmark for guiding inclusion policies and monitoring their effects in the future. “We are creating a memorial to female participation in São Paulo State universities that raises awareness of the issues and encourages reflection on careers and where progress can be made,” she says.
The vice dean of UFABC, economist Mônica Schröder, says that the document is an instrument of reflection for the universities. “It offers us concrete data that confirm challenges we were already aware of and also help identify aspects that require attention and effort.” In her opinion, the results are leading UFABC to strengthen policies that were already being implemented, such as the requirement for diversity on selection and promotion panels based on gender and race criteria, or the creation of faculty positions in the fields of gender studies and ethnic-racial relations at the university. The male predominance among the faculty at UFABC is a legacy from its creation in 2010. “Since then, we have faced a challenging period of budget restrictions, which has limited our hiring opportunities,” she says. Schröder notes that, despite this, women occupy half of the associate deans’ offices at the institution, and many administrative staff have moved into leadership roles.
The “Index” is the result of collaboration among researchers who have held executive positions as dean or vice dean at the six institutions. “The fact that women hold senior management positions in the six universities, all dealing with the impacts of the pandemic on female academic productivity, helped bring them closer together,” says Maria de Jesus Dutra dos Reis, vice dean at UFSCar. The starting point for the group’s work was a meeting at USP, in 2022, between Nascimento Arruda, who had just assumed the vice dean’s office at the university, the general coordinator of UNICAMP (second position in the hierarchy), infectious disease specialist Maria Luiza Moretti, and political scientist Rachel Meneguello. “During the conversation, a discussion came up about why women reach the position of vice dean, but the role of dean is almost always held by men,” says Nascimento Arruda, recalling that at USP, the exception was Suely Vilela’s term as dean from 2005 to 2009. In this meeting, the idea arose to create a network made up of the female managers from the universities, which transformed into the São Paulo State Forum for Gender Equality in Scientific and Academic Careers.
One of the forum’s first difficulties was gathering comparative data. It quickly became clear that the available information lacked coherence. “The state universities have a different career progression system than the federal universities and it was a real challenge to harmonize the data,” explains Moretti, of UNICAMP. The following step was carried out by a group of 18 technicians from the institutions who compiled data and produced standardized supplementary information for all the institutions. The formation of this working group was agreed on March 8, 2024, during the Women and Institutions seminar, held by the Forum.
Marina Sader
Unsurprisingly, the data showed that the number of men and women in technical and teaching roles at the start of their careers is fairly even, but the balance swings markedly in favor of men toward the top. At USP, women represent 42% of assistant professors and just 29.4% of full professors. It is true that this proportion has been changing: of the 196 new full professors that USP approved between 2022 and 2024, 76 were women, bringing the proportion of female faculty members who have reached the highest career level in the past three years to nearly 40%.
Nascimento Arruda observes that women progress in their careers later than men and that motherhood is a turning point. “Many female researchers become mothers when they are doing their PhDs,” she says. Between 2001 and 2019, a total of 2,180 female graduate students from USP took leave to have children. But this causes an impact on academic productivity—they stop publishing for a period of time—which comes at a cost to them. “Some graduate programs had a practice of suspending female students and researchers who took leave during pregnancy, so that their drop in productivity would not negatively impact the CAPES evaluation scores. During dean Vahan Agopyan’s term, an ordinance prohibited this practice,” recalls the vice dean.
Reis, of UFSCar, points to a change that allowed the increase of female faculty members at the top of their careers—45.5% of professors at the university are women, but the proportion among full professors is 33.1%. “Until the 1990s, a strict cost-cutting policy was adopted by the MEC, limiting the number of positions available for full professorships at federal higher education institutions. There were few selection processes and men generally had an advantage,” she explains. “In the 2000s, full professor became part of the career path. This allowed any faculty member who met performance and production criteria to apply for the position of full professor, helping to change the institutional profile and create greater gender equity.”
The data from UNESP reveals an almost equal gender balance among assistant professors (47% women and 53% men), but there is a large male concentration in the higher positions: men represent 74.4% of the full professors. “In the state universities, faculty members face an obstacle to advancement that they do not face at federal universities, the competitive selection process for associate professorship,” says dean Maysa Furlan. Among the difficulties faced by women, she highlights the challenge of juggling professional activity with looking after a family. “During the pandemic, male and female researchers had to work from home, but the impact on scientific research was greater for women, who assumed the majority of household responsibilities.”
In the case of UNICAMP, 43.2% of assistant professors are women and the proportion drops to 26.6% for full professors. Moretti observes that, although the fields of exact sciences and engineering have traditionally had more men among the students and faculty, the university has several departments where women have a strong presence. But she says that currently only four women hold executive positions in the 24 units of UNICAMP and it is the sole university from the state of São Paulo that has never had a female dean. She herself recently ran for the role but came in third place. “The winning candidate is male, and my successor will be a man.” She attributes the difficulties women have in gaining recognition to discrimination. “The norm is still to consider that men are better prepared and to not vote for women,” she says.
Pulmonologist Lia Azeredo Bittencourt, vice dean at UNIFESP, affirms that the university’s initial focus on healthcare has allowed for greater gender balance. “Additionally, for some time we have had an Associate Dean’s Office for Student Affairs and Affirmative Policies that handles matters related to sexual diversity and gender equality,” she says. It is the second time that the university has had a female dean (sociologist Raiane Assumpção) and vice dean, and there is a predominance of women in the highest positions. “But this happens because these positions, such as vice and associate deans, are appointed by the dean herself. When it is the role of a director, chosen by the community, male candidates are frequently the most voted,” she says.
Together, the six universities have been creating policies to increase the inclusion of Black and mixed-race male and female professors—the use of quotas in selection processes is one of them. At the federal universities, one practice has been to open selection processes to fill a certain number of grouped positions and draw lots to choose which of them will be reserved for Black candidates. This year, UNICAMP will hold a selection process to fill 24 faculty vacancies exclusively for Black and mixed-race candidates. USP also recently implemented a policy that recommends reserving one out of every three open faculty positions for Black and mixed-race candidates—when that is not possible, these candidates will receive a bonus in the scoring system of the selection processes. “Inclusion policies are only now beginning to be widely legislated at postgraduate level, and their implementation may be one of the most effective ways to increase faculty diversity at higher education institutions,” says Reis, of UFSCar.
Female authorship at UNICAMP
One study published in the journal Cogent Education analyzed gender representation in scientific publications from the Scopus database of researchers from the University of Campinas (UNICAMP) between 2019 and 2023. During this period, 58% of the publications had male authors from the university, while 42% had female authors. Women were ahead in studies in the interdisciplinary field (53% of the total), in health and life sciences (51%), and were a minority in social sciences (39%) and physical sciences (33%). “Although women accounted for only 27% of output in the subfield of physics, we observed that the impact of their articles, in terms of citations, is actually slightly higher than that of their male colleagues,” states Marilda Bottesi, advisor to the Associate Dean’s Office for Research at UNICAMP and lead author of the article. The study also investigated whether FAPESP approval rates for projects by male and female researchers from UNICAMP could indicate underfunding of women as a cause of gender inequality in the University’s academic output—and concluded that there was no basis for this hypothesis.
The story above was published with the title “Inequality in the mirror” in issue 351 of May/2025.
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