Faculty hiring and retention determine the composition of the US academic workforce and directly shape educational outcomes1, careers2, the development and spread of ideas3 and research priorities4,5. However, hiring and retention are dynamic, reflecting societal and academic priorities, generational turnover and efforts to diversify the professoriate along gender6–8, racial9 and socioeconomic10 lines. A comprehensive study of the structure and dynamics of the US professoriate would elucidate the effects of these efforts and the processes that shape scholarship more broadly. Here we analyse the academic employment and doctoral education of tenure-track faculty at all PhD-granting US universities over the decade 2011–2020, quantifying stark inequalities in faculty production, prestige, retention and gender. Our analyses show universal inequalities in which a small minority of universities supply a large majority of faculty across fields, exacerbated by patterns of attrition and reflecting steep hierarchies of prestige. We identify markedly higher attrition rates among faculty trained outside the United States or employed by their doctoral university. Our results indicate that gains in women’s representation over this decade result from demographic turnover and earlier changes made to hiring, and are unlikely to lead to long-term gender parity in most fields. These analyses quantify the dynamics of US faculty hiring and retention, and will support efforts to improve the organization, composition and scholarship of the US academic workforce.

Faculty at prestigious institutions dominate scientific discourse, producing a disproportionate share of all research publications. Environmental prestige can drive such epistemic disparity, but the mechanisms by which it causes increased faculty productivity remain unknown. Here, we combine employment, publication, and federal survey data for 78,802 tenure-track faculty at 262 PhD-granting institutions in the American university system to show through multiple lines of evidence that the greater availability of funded graduate and postdoctoral labor at more prestigious institutions drives the environmental effect of prestige on productivity. In particular, greater environmental prestige leads to larger faculty-led research groups, which drive higher faculty productivity, primarily in disciplines with group collaboration norms. In contrast, productivity does not increase substantially with prestige for faculty publications without group members or for group members themselves. The disproportionate scientific productivity of elite researchers can be largely explained by their substantial labor advantage rather than inherent differences in talent.

webweb is a package for creating interactive and portable visualizations of complex networks in the web browser that can be easily shared. With webweb, users of MATLAB, pure Python, and Python's networkX (Aric A. Hagberg & Pieter J. Swart, 2008) are able to write complex network data directly to a dependency-free html file. When opened in a browser, this file's embedded javascript functions render both an interactive network visualization and a lightweight user interface, allowing solo users to visualize and explore their data, or easily share their visualizations with collaborators with a single file.

A study of the intersections of gender, race, socioeconomic status, prestige, and subfield structure in computing.

Women and people of color remain dramatically underrepresented among computing faculty, and improvements in demographic diversity are slow and uneven. Effective diversification strategies depend on quantifying the correlates, causes, and trends of diversity in the field. But field-level demographic changes are driven by subfield hiring dynamics because faculty searches are typically at the subfield level. Here, we quantify and forecast variations in the demographic composition of the subfields of computing using a comprehensive database of training and employment records for 6882 tenure-track faculty from 269 PhD-granting computing departments in the United States, linked with 327,969 publications. We find that subfield prestige correlates with gender inequality, such that faculty working in computing subfields with more women tend to hold positions at less prestigious institutions. In contrast, we find no significant evidence of racial or socioeconomic differences by subfield. Tracking representation over time, we find steady progress toward gender equality in all subfields, but more prestigious subfields tend to be roughly 25 years behind the less prestigious subfields in gender representation. These results illustrate how the choice of subfield in a faculty search can shape a department's gender diversity.