WOMEN, MEN, AND THEIR ATTRIBUTIONS FOR SUCCESS IN ACADEME

In such a visibly hierarchical and success-oriented arena as academe, attributions for success are highly salient. These attributions represent explanations of, and often justifications for, social inequality. We employ data from a national survey of academics in four major fields to analyze the explanations by academics to account for the success of the best-known people in their fields. More specifically, we analyze the way in which those explanations vary between academic women and academic men. We find that women make weaker internal attributions than do men. Although significant, that overall sex difference is modest, and it does not persist with controls for social locations and conditions (occupational settings, status, networks and roles, and major departments). The sex difference in external attributions is greater: women make significantly stronger external (structural) attributions than do men, a sex difference that does not owe to women's and men's comparative social locations and conditions. We offer two possible explanations for this sex difference: 1) women's greater awareness of external barriers and 2) the noncomparability of social locations for women and for men, even when they are reported to be the same. In conclusion, we discuss the significance of attributions for macro-level, organizational responses, including equal opportunity policies and solutions to increase rates of faculty members' success.