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SYDE: Symposium Diversity and Equality in Physics

SYDE 1: Diversity and Equality in Physics

SYDE 1.5: Hauptvortrag

Dienstag, 19. März 2024, 11:45–12:15, PTB HS HvHB

Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty — •Aaron Clauset — University of Colorado Boulder, USA

Women remain underrepresented among faculty in nearly all academic fields in the U.S. Despite broad interest in measuring, explaining, and mitigating gendered attrition in faculty careers, the scale and heterogeneity of American higher education has impeded a full understanding of its magnitude and variation, and whether men and women leave academia for similar or different reasons.

Using a census of 245,270 tenure-track and tenured professors at U.S.-based PhD-granting departments, including all PhD-granting Physics departments, we show that women leave academia overall at higher rates than men at every career age, largely because of strongly gendered attrition at lower-prestige institutions, in non-STEM fields, and among tenured faculty. These results contrast with the historical focus of studies on high-prestige institutions, on STEM fields, and on pre-tenure faculty. A large-scale survey of the same faculty indicates the reasons faculty leave are gendered, even for institutions, fields, and career ages in which retention rates are not. Specifically, women are more likely to feel pushed from their jobs and less likely to feel pulled towards better opportunities, and women leave or consider leaving due to workplace climate issues more often than work-life balance issues, which is the most popular explanation of gendered faculty attrition. These results highlight the importance of understanding the gendered reasons for attrition rather than focusing on rates alone.

Keywords: gender; equity; faculty; attrition; climate