Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty

Abstract

Women remain underrepresented among faculty in nearly all academic fields. Using a census of 245,270 tenure-track and tenured professors at United States–based PhD-granting departments, we show that women leave academia overall at higher rates than men at every career age, in large part because of strongly gendered attrition at lower-prestige institutions, in non-STEM fields, and among tenured faculty. A large-scale survey of the same faculty indicates that the reasons faculty leave are gendered, even for institutions, fields, and career ages in which retention rates are not. Women are more likely than men to feel pushed from their jobs and less likely to feel pulled toward better opportunities, and women leave or consider leaving because of workplace climate more often than work-life balance. These results quantify the systemic nature of gendered faculty retention; contextualize its relationship with career age, institutional prestige, and field; and highlight the importance of understanding the gendered reasons for attrition rather than focusing on rates alone.

Gendered hiring and attrition on the path to parity for academic faculty

“…In this first analysis, we quantify the relative historical impacts of these processes via a descriptive analysis in which we decompose the overall change in women’s representation within each field into its hiring and attrition components (S1). Additionally, we measure aggregate differences between STEM and non-STEM fields, which makes our results more comparable to past studies of faculty retention [24].…”

“…S3) [8]. However, attrition in the early-or mid-career stages may have the opposite effect if it is gendered, e.g., when women comprise a greater proportion of those leaving academia at these career stages [23, 24]. The balance of these inflows and outflows, relative to a field’s current composition, determines whether women’s overall representation will increase, decrease, or hold steady over time.…”

“…In particular, faculty attrition rates rise over the early career period to peak around 5-7 years after earning PhD, and then decline steadily until around 15-20 years post-PhD, after which, attrition rates increase again as faculty approach retirement. This pattern holds for both men and women, but women’s overall rates are slightly higher than men’s at every career stage [24]. In our counterfactual model we make attrition gender-neutral by eliminating the gendered aspect of these patterns, while preserving the rises and declines in attrition rates across faculty career ages, defined as years since earning a PhD (see supplement S2 B).…”

“…This reality, paired with the relatively small differences in observed attrition rates between men and women faculty, makes it difficult to robustly identify when underlying attrition risks are gendered in smaller samples of faculty, e.g., within a single institution or department. As a consequence, the utility of employment-record based data is limited to revealing large-scale patterns only, and deeper, more qualitative studies are needed to understand gendered effects at smaller scales [24].…”

“…This number is both a small portion of academia (0.67% of the professoriate), and a staggering number of individual careers, being enough to fully staff 72 nineteen-person departments. Because women are more likely to say they felt “pushed” out of academic jobs when they leave [24], each of these careers likely represents an unnecessary loss, both to the individual and to society, in the form of lost discoveries [3, 5–7], missing mentorship [1, 2], and many other contributions that scholars make. Moreover, although our study focuses narrowly on gender, past studies of faculty attrition [26–28] lead us to expect that a disproportionate share of these lost careers would be women of color.…”