The current status of women and minority faculty is briefly reviewed, and alternative explanations for patterns of differences that exist are identified. Although female faculty have gained in their proportionate representation during the 1970s, they still lag behind their strength of a half century ago. In addition, female scholars tend to be segregated by discipline, and are disproportionately represented at the lower ranks, reflecting the recent infusion of new hires during the 1970s. Compensation for female scholars has been at a rate averaging 20 percent below their male colleagues. The current status of black faculty is characterized by the following: blacks as a group have made considerably less progress than women in infiltrating the academic profession, although they began in the 1970s to infiltrate predominately white institutions on a larger scale than before; black faculty are concentrated chiefly in education and several areas of the social sciences; they have tended to be concentrated in the lower ranks and isolated from a major role in institutional administration and governance; and in the area of compensation, black faculty, especially females and the most prolific publishers, began to do well by the early 1970s. Three principle sources of evidence are available to test the thesis that overdiscrimination is responsible for the differential status of women and black professors in comparison to that of white males: studies on hiring decisions, studies of discriminatory attitudes on the part of majority males, and studies of inequity in the distribution of salary. A second thesis to account for status differences based on differential levels of performance and productivity is examined. A bibliography is appended. (SW)