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This article investigates recent data on the prevalence of women in the field of sociology in order to understand whether or not the discipline has become a female preserve. Data on the top sociology departments in the USA were collected in 2007. For each university, we document the number of full time, tenured and tenuretrack faculty members and present the gendered makeup of the department. Our data present mixed findings with regard to the question of whether the field is tipping toward female. Women, overall, are underrepresented in the sociology programs sampled, but a larger percentage of women occupy tenured positions within the top liberal arts programs than at the top graduate programs. And, women occupy a slim majority of assistant professor positions but have lower numbers at higher academic ranks. We can say with reasonable certainty that, while the proportion of women doctorates and assistant professors indicate a feminization of sociology, the entire discipline has not yet tipped toward female.

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Ever since Berger and Luckmann published their treatment of the sociology of knowledge in 1966, older versions of the subfield have languished, been forgotten, or misrepresented, as if The Social Construction of Reality ( SCR) eliminated the need to study its predecessors in Wissenssoziologie. By considering Berger’s subsequent statements about the book, along with remarks recently made by Luckmann, and then returning to the text itself, this article shows that some of the main suppositions on which SCR rests are foreign to the sociology of knowledge in its original forms, and that a number of these premises do not seem as plausible in today’s social world as they may have in the early 1960s when their authors formulated them. The unintended scholarly results of SCR’s surprising publishing success are evaluated.

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