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The Gender Breakdown of the Applicant Pool for Tenure-Track Faculty Positions at a Sample of North American Research Astronomy Programs

The demographics of the field of Astronomy, and the gender balance in particular, is an important active area of investigation. A piece of information missing from the discussion is the gender breakdown of the applicant pool for faculty positions. For a sample of 35 tenure-track faculty positions at 25 research universities advertised over the last few years in astronomy and astrophysics, I find that the ratio of female applicants to the total number of applicants is ~0.2, with little dispersion and with no strong dependence on the total number of applicants. Some discussion is provided in the context of the fraction of women at the graduate student, postdoctoral researcher, and assistant professor levels, but strong conclusions are not possible given the limitations of the study. Current and future faculty search committees will likely be interested to compare their numbers to this distribution to decide whether or not they could be doing more to attract an applicant pool that is representative of the community.