To the Editor:

The recently released report from the American Federation of Teachers ("Who's Teaching at American Colleges? Increasingly, Instructors Off the Tenure Track," The Chronicle online, May 12) offers one more startling set of statistics about the radical change in the profile of the American professoriate. One issue that hasn't been sufficiently addressed is: Who is relegated to those lower-paying, less-secure contingent-faculty slots?

Our recent report, A Measure of Equity: Women's Progress in Higher Education, provides an answer: Women are the majority in the contingent faculty. Women are 10 percent to 15 percent more likely than men to be there, and earn 27 percent less per course than their male colleagues. Having such a high proportion of contingent faculty threatens the quality of higher education; having women disproportionately represented as contingent faculty members threatens equality for women. We need to protect both.

Caryn McTighe Musil

Senior Vice President

Association of American Colleges and Universities

Washington