I have a graduate degree from an R1 University. Perhaps you should back off a little on the personal attacks and substantiate your rebuttal with more than insults. My point was on the overall US University system, not R1 Universities , not that it matters all that much.
In both you can see that there are more people in the Administrative staff than in the faculty. As to discrimination based admission, Harvard and Yale were sued for that, I am sure you know about it. As for discrimination in hiring, here is a Cornell study :
Thanks for the datapoints and level-headed reply, and apologies for the snark.
I didn't know about the Cornell study, although I am not at all surprised to hear that. How do you suggest representation imbalance in CS faculty gets somewhat closer to 50/50 without having some kind of bias towards hiring women, though? As someone of Asian descent, I totally understand where the lawsuits against Harvard/Yale were coming from, but at the same time I see no way to fix representation in undergrad/grad-school/faculty outside of some kind of "discriminative" hiring procedures (outside of fixing much broader and challenging systemic issues).
I think the problem is this belief that there is something to fix at all. It goes without saying that there should be no barriers to anyone doing anything they want, but we have that already. Why is 50/50 in CS a goal at all? Who cares? Do we also want 50/50 in nursing? on oil rigs? or in prison? Why? Seriously, WTF? Are we so stupid that we discount millions of years of evolution and chalk any difference in outcome to cultural norms? It is all so, so stupid, and we all know it.
I agree that in principle anyone can do what they want, and I hope that in our long term our society can actually realize this ideal, but in practice an individual's decisions are informed by the mores and attitudes of the culture they find themselves in. So the conflating factor is our society's history of discouraging women from pursuing technical paths, the (older) insistence that they be homemakers and take on more traditionally feminine roles (like K-12 teachers). Yes, we no longer overtly say such things, but the effects of these attitudes persist across large subpopulations and ethnic groups. It seems very likely to me that traditional gender roles and attitudes about what jobs a women is capable of doing has caused fewer women to pursue math/physics (e.g., see the statistics here: https://math.mit.edu/wim/2019/03/10/national-mathematics-sur...).
Also consider the very recent history of breakthrough results coming from female mathematicians like Lisa Piccirillo and Urmila Mahadev. How much human potential are we leaving on the table, untapped?
I see no "easy fix" for improving representation in higher education other than affirmative action. It's one of the few knobs that we have to turn without much more significant changes to society like implementing UBI or making the average work week much shorter. While it may hurt people like me who happen to be well represented, and prevent me from joining the institution "I deserve" to be in, well maybe that's better for society in the long run.
For R1, on administrative bloat:
https://oir.harvard.edu/fact-book/faculty_and_staff
https://web.mit.edu/facts/faculty.html
In both you can see that there are more people in the Administrative staff than in the faculty. As to discrimination based admission, Harvard and Yale were sued for that, I am sure you know about it. As for discrimination in hiring, here is a Cornell study :
https://news.cornell.edu/stories/2015/04/women-preferred-21-...