A glass ceiling smashed? Reflecting on gender equity in the discipline of history

Women hold between 40 and 50 per cent of all academic appointments in the discipline of history in Australia. Even among the social science disciplines, which are seen as more welcoming to women than STEM disciplines, this fact makes history a ‘success’ in terms of gender equity. Measures of success, however, go beyond the presence of women. In taking a deeper dive into data I found a more complicated picture of ‘success’, where women’s increased participation in the discipline is concurrent with men’s continued dominance in ‘hard’ disciplinary fields such as political history, a decline in the overall numbers of historians, and increased questioning of the authority of the discipline.