Although there are no statistics readily available on how many faculty have children at Yale, the WFF has made some rough calculations. Access to this information is especially useful in age of the coronavirus, as faculty are planning remote coursework, research, and service while managing at-home responsibilities.
The WFF considered two ways to estimate this number:
(1) Faculty with children receiving the college tuition benefit
(2) Faculty taking teaching relief for child rearing
(1) As of January 1, 2015: Yale had 1,985 full-time faculty (with 6 or more years of service) who were eligible for the college tuition benefit benefit, university-wide. Of those 1,985 faculty, 301 were taking advantage of the benefit on that date. Of those 301 faculty, there were 354 children receiving the scholarship during the academic term that started on or after that date. So, roughly 15% of the faculty (301/1985) had college-age kids in 2015; assuming they are distributed across 4 years of college, 3.75% of the faculty have kids born in any given year. This is an underestimate.
(2) We received five years of aggregated data on this, from Fall 2012 – Spring 2017. The average is 18 faculty a year (or about 1%) of all benefits-eligible faculty are taking parental leave for kids. We don’t know how many of those leaves are for 1st kids (so would be over-counting for the question ‘faculty with kids’), but we also know that not all parents take leave, so this is probably also under-counting). Given how relatively few junior faculty we have (in FAS; it’s about 75% senior), we can assume that this is a substantial underestimate. Furthermore, since parental leave is more likely to be to junior faculty, that means the comparison is more like 92 leaves as a proportion of 25% of all benefits-eligible, non-Medical School faculty (i.e., more like 4%).
If we assume a number like 4% per year for say, 16 years, that would give us an estimate of approximately two-thirds of the faculty have kids that are school-age or younger. The US general estimate is more like 90%, but we know that the the rate is a lot lower for PhDs.