3. A relatively stable oligarchy

Most individuals working in the field of linguistics have an intuitive sense of who the “major players” are amongst PhD-granting linguistics departments. Our analysis demonstrates that the frequently-perceived hierarchy of linguistics programs is indeed correct. Following Speakman et al. (Reference Speakman, Hadden, Colvin, Cramb, Jones, Jones, Kling, Lulewicz, Napora, Reinberger, Ritchison, Rivera-Araya, Smith and Thompson2017) and Speakman et al. (Reference Speakman, Hadden, Colvin, Cramb, Jones, Jones, Lulewicz, Napora, Reinberger, Ritchison, Edwards and Thompson2018), we frame the total number of faculty positions in an academic sphere as an economic market. Graduates compete in this market for a finite number of academic jobs, and linguistics PGIs can be ranked according to their market share, a metric we adopt from Speakman et al. (Reference Speakman, Hadden, Colvin, Cramb, Jones, Jones, Kling, Lulewicz, Napora, Reinberger, Ritchison, Rivera-Araya, Smith and Thompson2017), defined as the percentage of TT academic positions a PGI's graduates attain over a certain period of time.

One method of visualizing patterns in the linguistics job market is to use social network (chord) diagrams. Circles (nodes) in our analyses represent individual programs and their outgoing arrows demonstrate where, within the linguistics PGI market, their graduates have obtained jobs. Figure 1 shows the complex web of all “source” and “destination” programs, while Figure 2 narrows the set to those with the highest all-time market share. With no clear natural breakage line, we chose the somewhat arbitrary standard of schools with fifteen or more placements (coincidentally totalling fifteen schools), a group which comprises about a quarter of the total programs in the US and Canadian market (15/63, 23.8%).Footnote ¹ In both figures, node and text label size as well as relative arrow thickness all correlate to the number of placements a department has made. Self-referential links correspond to placements of alumni who return to their own PhD-granting institution as TT faculty.

Figure 1:

Chord diagram of PhD programs with size of node, text label and arrow width all proportional to their total number of placements into current TT positions at linguistics PGIs in the US and Canada.

Figure 2:

Source and destination of faculty in the top fifteen market-share programs. Note that some smaller, lighter-coloured links overlay larger, darker ones, e.g., the light arrow pointing from the University of Arizona toward MIT overlays the dark arrow that flows in the opposite direction.

Kawa et al. (Reference Kawa, Clavijo Michelangeli, Clark, Ginsberg and McCarty2018) invite us to think about links between nodes in terms of reciprocity. Links that flow both ways between two institutions indicate a reciprocal relationship, and when these links are same-sized, the relationship is also symmetrical. Links that flow in only one direction, or differ greatly in the size of flows between two schools, however, indicate a relationship that is non-reciprocal and/or asymmetrical. In the latter case, the difference in arrow size indicates the degree of asymmetry. Figures 1 and 2 demonstrate that the patterned relationships that have built up over time between PGI programs are far from reciprocal. Instead, graduates of top market-share programs have been hired at both other top-share programs and at lower-share programs, while the lowest-share programs are primarily consumers, rather than producers, of faculty from higher-share programs.

Our second visualization, Appendix A,Footnote ² is a heat map indicating each program's percent of the overall market share from highest (darkest) to lowest (lightest), including “Foreign” institutions, which are grouped in aggregate.Footnote ³ Here the distribution is broken down by decade to show temporal trends; the most recent span under study (2010–2019) may be of particular interest to readers who are prospective graduate students in linguistics. One particularly striking pattern is that a majority of linguistics programs have produced just a handful of PGI academics, or none at all.Footnote ⁴ Conversely, the all-time top ten programs (MIT through Cornell, excluding “Foreign”) represent an oligarchy of sorts, together placing half (50.3%, n = 369) of all US- and Canada-sourced faculty members, and one department alone, MIT, has placed 11% of all current US and Canadian faculty (87/733). Many top schools, including MIT, have also recruited heavily from their own PhD graduates, as shown by the reflexive arcs in Figure 2.

While the cadre of dominant departments has remained relatively stable over time, there are a few notable fluctuations. The University of Maryland and New York University, for example, show dramatic recent gains in overall market share, while the University of Chicago, University of California-San Diego, and Yale show recent declines. Whether these recent shifts represent a more sustained trend toward greater democratization of market share in linguistics programs is yet to be seen.

4. Gender imbalance, and leading the way

Most linguistics programs place few to no graduates in the PGI market, while a select number of programs place a majority of TT job holders in this market. This is perhaps a sobering portrait of the current academic job market, but one that is important for current and prospective graduate students to understand. However, our data also point to ways that the top programs might effect positive change in the discipline. As a brief example, we examine some facets of gender representation in linguistics placements, one of a number of problems of diversity and representation that the field must continue to address (see e.g., LSA 2019, Namboodiripad et al. Reference Namboodiripad, Hou and Occhino2019, Charity Hudley et al. Reference Charity Hudley, Mallinson and Bucholtz2020).

In its 2021 annual report, the LSA provides data showing that women outnumber men in both undergraduate and graduate linguistics programs (Figure 3), and that the rate at which women have received linguistics PhDs has eclipsed that of men over most of the past 25 years (Figure 4). Nonetheless, LSA data also suggest that in the average linguistics department, men have a small numerical lead over women at both the (Full) Professor and the Assistant (untenured) levels, even though the latter is where we might expect to see the greatest recent expansion of women hires (Figure 5).

Figure 3:

Average number of students by gender (adapted from LSA 2021: 25)

Figure 4:

Earned doctorates in linguistics 1966–2017 (adapted from LSA 2021: 24; data from NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates, 1966–2019)

Figure 5:

Average department composition 2020 (adapted from LSA 2021: 15)

Reporting rates to the LSA departmental directory from which the Figure 3 and Figure 5 numbers are gleaned, however, are inconsistent from year to year (LSA 2021). Significantly, the number of reporting departments dropped precipitously from 102 in 2018 to only 47 departments in 2019, and 43 in 2020 (LSA 2021). In contrast, our data capture a complete snapshot of PGI academic programs (n = 63), albeit at one moment in time (Winter/Spring 2019), and hence permit a more reliable investigation into gender distributions by rank, including at the scale of individual departments.

Figure 6 demonstrates that women indeed still trail at the Full and Assistant ranks at PGIs. Further, while it is not surprising that the (inferred) male-to-female faculty ratio varies greatly between departments, faculty of several of the all-time top 15 market-share programs (Figure 7) exhibit jarring male-to-female imbalances, especially Harvard (7:2), MIT (13:4), and UPenn (11:4).

Figure 6:

Gender distribution at different TT ranks in linguistics PGIs

Figure 7:

Gender breakdown of faculty in the top fifteen programs

We recognize that department composition can be slow to change given the infrequent opportunities to make new tenure-track faculty hires at most institutions. Hiring outcomes also reflect numerous factors including the annual demographics of the candidate pool itself, so a complementary take on gendered rates of academic job obtainment is provided by asking where the men and women who now hold TT jobs in linguistics PGIs received their degrees. Here again we focus on the all-time top 15 market-share programs. The source PhD programs of all current faculty are tallied in Figure 8, while Figure 9 shows only the most recent graduates (faculty who earned their PhD degrees in the most recent two-decade span, i.e., 2000–2019).Footnote ⁵

Figure 8:

Gender breakdown of faculty who are graduates of the top fifteen programs (all-time)

Figure 9:

Gender breakdown of faculty who are recent graduates of the top fifteen programs (2000–2019)

These figures underscore that it is possible to undo problems of the past. UPenn, for example, is a male-dominated department (Figure 7) that has nonetheless succeeded in stewarding female graduates on to PGI jobs in numbers that are cumulatively consistent with and now far exceed women's overall rate of PhD obtainment in the field, as seen in Figures 8 and 9 respectively. A market behemoth, MIT's linguistics program has undergone a major shift over time. Its gender record appears dismal when tracking its faculty graduates across all years (Figure 8): 57 current male PGI faculty have received their degree from MIT, compared to only 30 women, or a rate of nearly two to one. However, in the past roughly two decades (2000–2019) the program has changed course, producing nearly equal numbers of current male and female PGI faculty (Figure 9). Other leading market-share programs, by contrast, including Harvard, the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC), and the University of Maryland (UMD), continue to produce very few female graduates who go on to achieve faculty positions, a concerning trend given that the ripple effects of any gender imbalance found in the discipline's few dominant programs are likely to circulate widely across the field.Footnote ⁶

Viewed another way, the tremendous sway that the top market-share programs have within the job market as a whole affords these programs the ability – indeed, the responsibility – to take the lead in effecting positive change in the field's hiring patterns more broadly. We conclude by urging those working in the field of linguistics, but especially those privileged to hold tenure-track positions within its most influential programs, to seek the benefits of diversity in myriad forms when it comes to hiring new colleagues, and to enrolling, mentoring, and graduating Ph.D. students who, after all, represent the future of the discipline.