Leak or link? the overrepresentation of women in non-tenure-track academic positions in STEM

Abstract

This paper examines gender variation in departures from the tenure-track science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) academic career pathway to non-tenure-track academic careers. We integrate multiple data sources including the Survey of Earned Doctorates and the Survey of Doctorate Recipients to examine longitudinal career outcomes of STEM doctorate women. We consider three types of careers after receipt of a PhD: academic, academic non-tenure-track, and non-academic positions. We find that STEM women are more likely to hold academic non-tenure-track positions, which are associated with lower job satisfaction and lower salaries among men and women. Explanations including differences in field of study, preparation in graduate school, and family structure only explain 35 percent of the gender gap in non-tenure-track academic positions.

Distribution of Female and Male First and Last Authorship across Drug Delivery Related Journals with Respect to Year and Journal Impact Factor

“…Some of this difference in last authorship could be accounted for in the roles of female faculty as women are often overrepresented in non-tenure track academic positions . Faculty who have primarily teaching or clinical appointments may have less of a requirement for publishing than research centric faculty.…”

“…Some of this difference in last authorship could be accounted for in the roles of female faculty as women are often overrepresented in non-tenure track academic positions. 8 Faculty who have primarily teaching or clinical appointments may have less of a requirement for publishing than research centric faculty. The American Association of University Professors surveyed 996 universities and reported the roles of male and females in various appointments ( Table 3 A).…”

Women drive efforts to highlight concealable stigmatized identities in U.S. academic science and engineering

“…A higher percentage of women than men report having anxiety, depression, having struggled academically in college, having a disability, or being LGBQ+ ( Fig 1A ; full demographic information available in S1 Table ), with the largest differences in percent for reporting depression or anxiety. To better assess whether these differences may be specific to gender, we conducted a logistic regression controlling for other factors hypothesized to explain such differences, namely race, age, and appointment [ 89 , 90 ]. When race, age, and appointment are accounted for, women are more likely than men to report having depression (OR = 1.08, p < .001), anxiety (OR = 1.12, p < .001), and having a disability (OR = 1.04, p < .001) but less likely to report being a first-generation college student (OR = 0.95, p = .03) or transferred from a community college (OR = 0.98, p = .04; Fig 1B ).…”

“…Overall, women disclose CSIs to undergraduates more than men, specifically to some undergraduates rather than all undergraduates. While this could be due to appointment type–women are more likely to hold non-tenure positions [ 89 ]–or age–women are more likely to have been hired more recently and therefore may be younger on average [ 90 ]–neither of these factors appear to drive this difference in our dataset. We controlled for appointment type and age in the model, yet women were still more likely to reveal a CSI to some undergraduates than men.…”

Gender (in)equity in global mental health research: A call to action

“…Across the university sector, women are more likely to be in non-tenure-track academic roles than men, with lower job satisfaction and salaries, and fewer attain senior academic positions ( Rennane et al, 2022 ). This is borne out by the gender disparities in research funding ( Jebsen et al, 2022 ).…”