PurposeThe purpose of this study was to examine the effects of gender on the job satisfaction of US academics.Design/methodology/approachThe population for this study consisted of full‐time college and university teachers listed in the “Brain Track University Index Directories of the United States Colleges and Universities”. A sampling technique was used to select the respondents surveyed for this study. A total of 1,100 questionnaires were administered to respondents chosen from 80 universities. A total of 560 usable questionnaires were returned, giving a response rate of 51 percent.FindingsThe findings of this research show that there are gender differences apparent in the job satisfaction levels of university teachers surveyed for this study. Female faculty were more satisfied with their work and co‐workers, whereas, their male colleagues were more satisfied with their pay, promotions, supervision, and overall job satisfaction. Results also indicated that ranks were significant in explaining gender differences and job satisfaction of the respondents.Research limitations/implicationsThis research is delimited to 4 year colleges and universities. Thus, the results of this study cannot be generalized to 2 year and community colleges.Practical implicationsFindings of the study provides institutional leaders, university and college administrators, and human resources professionals with key information that would enable them to recruit, reward, promote, and retain women faculty. The finding would also enable the government address the issues concerning female academics.Originality/valueThis paper offers practical recommendations to higher education administrators and human resources professionals on how to enhance job satisfaction of female faculty. It also offers suggestions to how to maintain more balanced gender equity in higher education.

Testing is, for most, a necessary evil in the software life cycle. One very important form of testing is the evaluation of software products according to mandated criteria or guidelines such as those that specify level of accessibility. Such evaluations can be quite tedious, especially if they must be done manually and applied consistently to each and every component of an application. The use of assistive technologies like screen readers to demonstrate the compliance of a software product to a set of regulations is time-consuming, error-prone, and expensive. Validation tools that can perform such evaluations are becoming more popular as integrated development environments become more sophisticated but, in the area of accessibility validation, they are sorely lacking if not nonexistent. This paper introduces the IBM Rule-based Accessibility Validation Environment, an Eclipse-based tool for inspecting and validating Java rich-client GUIs for accessibility using non-invasive, semi-to fullyautomatic, rule-based validation and inspection.