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Job-Market Reporting Thread (2025-26)
Job-Market Discussion Thread (2025-26)

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Some Facts About This Year’s Hires (so far)

**Updated**

For those who might be curious, I have collected the following data based on Leiter's annual hiring thread (I tried my best to not make any errors in collecting this data, but I cannot promise none were made):

  • Total TT hires (Assistant Professor level only): 94
  • Hires w/at least 1 publication in a top-20 journal: 23 (24.4%)
  • Hires w/more than 1 publication in a top-20 journal: 10 (9.4%)
  • Hires w/at least 1 publication in a non-top-2o journal: 59 (62.7%)
  • Hires w/more than 1 publication in a non-top-2o journal: 36 (38.3%)
  • Hires w/no publications (PhD from Leiter top-25 dept): 22   (23.4%)
  • Hires w/no publications (PhD from outside Leiter top-25): 12  (12.7%)
  • Hires directly from graduate school: 45  (47.9%)
  • Hires from post-doc or VAP: 49 (52.1%)

Publication rates were:

  • Mean publications of those hired: 2.2
  • Median publications of those hired: 1

Finally, for those who might be interested in gender equity:

  • Men hired: 60 (63.8%)
  • Women hired: 34 (36.2%)
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16 responses to “Some Facts About This Year’s Hires (so far)”

  1. T.M.

    Would be nice to know percentages, rather than doing them in my head each time

    Reply
  2. Marcus Arvan

    Done — and I’ve now included average publication #’s per hire.

    Reply
  3. T. Cunningham

    Making sense of the gender demographics would require some sense of the total numbers of male and female applicants this year, which I presume is unavailable. But we might reasonably suppose that this number mirrors the larger percentage of women in the field, absent other assumptions. Looking at a 2012 study by Paxton et al in Hypatia suggests that women make up about 1/3 of the total population of graduate students. Assuming they also make up the same percentage of job market candidates, the data points given in this post suggest that from this population-based perspective there is no evidence of gender discrimination in this year’s hiring, whether FOR female candidates or AGAINST them, given simply that the share of women hires is roughly proportionate to the share of women in the graduate student population.
    For comparison, It would be interesting to know similar demographic information for female candidates in other positions in this year’s job market, including VAPs, PostDocs, adjunct positions, semi-stable teaching positions, etc. This might reveal a trend toward hiring female candidates in more prestigious positions or the opposite.
    If data like Paxton et al present continues to be gathered and reported it will be important to compare whether, over the long run, the proportion of women hired each year mirrors the proportion of women in the candidate pool and whether the proportion of female graduate students trends toward parity.

    Reply
  4. Sydney Penner

    A quick perusal of the hiring thread suggests that the gender ratio varies significantly by specialty. Whether those variances reflect variations in the job candidate population or reflect search committee biases is hard to tell, of course. Either way, it looks like this year’s hiring will do its little bit to reinforce the association of some specialties with women and others with men, e.g., history with women.

    Reply
  5. Alex

    Does anybody know how many TT jobs were (are) available this year?

    Reply
  6. Susan G Sterrett

    First, thanks very much for doing this compilation.
    Second, I agree with Sydney Penner’s comment that you cannot look at totals to draw conclusions about the absence of discrimination. There is a name for that phenomenon: occupational segregation.
    Thirdly, I don’t think studies on gender inequity in academia have identified tt hiring as the place where gender discrimination is the most marked. Rather, it is the entry into tenured and full professor positions. We have no numbers for that in philosophy, and to do it right one has to do longitudinal studies to follow each tt hire and see which turn into tenured, then full. Since you’ve made a list with names, maybe this is a good place to begin doing that! I assure you that you would be
    doing something unprecedented, and highly informative, were you to follow through on it.

    Reply
  7. Rob Gressis

    Is the information from past Leiter threads available? If so, we could, right now, start doing a longitudinal study with many years of data!

    Reply
  8. Marcus Arvan

    Susan: Thanks, and great idea! I’ll try to do a longitudinal study at some point (maybe this summer).
    Rob: I’m pretty sure everything is archived over at Leiter’s blog, so past hiring threads should still be there.

    Reply
  9. x

    One thing that does seem relevant to the gender issue is mean publications by gender, which is not listed, though important.
    Imagine, for example, that the mean publication rate for newly hired women was 3 and men was 1, all other things being equal, it suggests that women have to publish three times more to have equal representation. If it were reversed and mean for men was 3 and women were 1, it suggests that departments are making an active effort to hire women despite lower publication records.
    (This of course assumes that publication record is relevant, which I take it MA does assume, otherwise why bother listing them in the first place.)
    Interpreting the findings are a different story, but it does seem very relevant to determine bias.

    Reply
  10. anonymish

    There was good data compiled last year, primarily by C. Suchy-Dicey. This year’s thread is still very incomplete: some hires haven’t been made, and many more haven’t been reported. What we have now is something less than half of this year’s TT hires, judging by the number of TT ads there have been.

    Reply
  11. Roman

    Does anyone else think it’s a little insane that almost half of TT hires continue to be straight out of grad school?
    Also, I can’t access the link to the Leiter post right now (appears to be broken), but I’m wondering if the “post-doc or VAP” category includes adjuncts, or if adjuncts are just officially unemployable. As an adjunct, I am curious if there’s data on the adjunct/post-doc/VAP breakdown. My guess would be that these are not equal: that on average post-docs make people more employable, VAPs a tiny bit more employable (unless they include 4-4 loads), and adjuncting not at all.

    Reply
  12. Marcus Arvan

    I think it’s insane. Going to write a post about it!

    Reply
  13. elisa freschi

    I am really surprised by the amount of people with NO PhD and NO publications who get a TT position. Given that, if I am not wrong, philosophy is hardly if ever studied in high school in the US, this means that 50% of the beginning assistant professors have only been studying philosophy for, say, 3 to 5 years. Am I right? And why does one expect them to be familiar enough with philosophy to be able to teach it?

    Reply
  14. Moti Mizrahi

    I share the puzzlement expressed by Roman, Marcus, and Elisa regarding the number of ABDs and newly-minted PhDs getting TT jobs. Marcus sort of touched on this before here: http://philosopherscocoon.typepad.com/blog/2013/01/a-peculiar-job-market-trend.html
    And there are interesting comments, too.

    Reply
  15. Anon Graduate Student

    Elisa:
    your numbers strike me as quite off for the American system. I spent 4 years as a philosophy undergraduate and have already been in graduate school 7 years. I will enter the job market next year ABD. Assuming I manage to get a job immediately, I will already have been studying philosophy for more than a decade and teaching for more than four years. You could even decide not to count undergraduate study, and the average ABD job applicant will still have been doing philosophy for at least six years, longer in most cases. Three years experience is an impossibility, five is extremely unlikely. Others should correct me if I’m wrong.

    Reply
  16. elisa freschi

    Thank you, Anon Graduate Student. As you rightly notice, I do not know how the system works in America. Still, would you expect one who has studied biology for 6 years to be able to teach biology at university level (I am not talking about teaching philosophy at high school)?

    Reply

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