Statistics on gender ratios

[lkjpoi]

Does anyone know of any good research on gender ratios in the field of history? I would also be curious to see studies on gender stats in different specializations within history. Just for fun. I made a calculation at a conference on early modern art history and found that of the speakers there 26% were women. 

[dr. t]

The Medieval Academy of America (which is admittedly interdisciplinary) said at its annual meeting in February that 46% of its membership was women.

[Danger_Zone]

For PhDs awarded, women comprise about ~40% of History PhDs, which is actually lower than other humanities programs and the average of all disciplines together (humanities, sciences, etc.)

[fuzzylogician]

This is not first hand experience, but my field's society (the Linguistic Society of America) has a committee on the status of women in our field, and one of the (many) things it does is monitor things like student/alumni ratios, hiring, conference presentations, journal publications, and more. Informally, there's even been some numbers circulating about who is asking questions in conference Q&As. Maybe there is something similar in your field that you could look into. They might even have a website with at least some relevant information. 

[TakeruK]

If you haven't already found this, I think this calculator is really interesting: http://aanandprasad.com/diversity-calculator/?groupName=women&numSpeakers=20&populationPercentage=10

I find that probabilities aren't always intuitive, and sometimes people will argue that "oh the reason we had no invited speakers that are women this year is just luck of the draw, only 25% of senior PhDs are women, you know" (just making up numbers here). But if you say there are 8 invited speakers at a conference and if the 25% number is true, the probability of having zero women is only 10%. And when you go to one conference after another and hear again and again that "oh we didn't even realise there are no invited speakers who are women, must just be unlucky" then you know that there is a problem with the way invited speakers are chosen.

[maelia8]

In my department the ratio is around 35% female across all Ph.D. cohorts and professors/postdocs, but in some years the proportion of women is much higher and others lower (for example, my cohort is 42% female, but there's a cohort a few years above me that is only 15% female. 40% seems to be about normal overall though, and I think our numbers will creep up as more of the oldest professors (who are mostly male) retire. 

[Quickmick]

This has stats on % of female faculty as well as student data (as well as a bunch of other stuff). Pretty handy, if a bit outdated

http://www.nap.edu/rdp/

[AP]

Probably the AHA has those numbers. History departments have to submit some stats to them at the end of each academic year. I don't recall if there is gender information but you should look there.