Published: Nov. 3, 2023 • By Grace Wilson

Aaron Clauset, a professor in the Department of Computer Science, is the first computer science faculty member to be recognized with the Dean's Award for Research since the category began in 2005.

"It's a great honor to represent our department in this way," Clauset said. 

The award for Clauset's research recognizes his outstanding contributions to the 'science of science', which combine advanced computational techniques with rich empirical data to shed new light on the origin and consequences of inequalities within the academic workforce, and how those inequalities shape who makes what scientific discoveries.

In 2022, he and his co-authors, including 4 CU doctoral students, published a string of high-impact studies examining: 

  • The high socioeconomic backgrounds of academic faculty, particularly at elite universities

  • The role of social networks in shaping the productivity and prominence of scholars

  • The way labor advantages at elite universities allow them to dominate scientific discourse

  • How prestige dominates the hiring networks for academic faculty,

  • How Clauset’s field of computer science tends to devalue computing subfields with greater proportions of women researchers.

These studies received substantial national and international attention, reflecting the broad interest in understanding how to make science more inclusive and more efficient, including coverage in Nature, Science, and The Chronicle of Higher Education.

But how do you find evidence for these claims? This is where Clauset and his co-authors use computational modeling to draw out evidence from large data sets.

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Clauset's work

Subfield Prestige and Gender Inequality among U.S. Computing Faculty,

Subfield Prestige and Gender Inequality among U.S. Computing Faculty, published in Communications of the ACM, analyzed 6,882 tenured or tenure-track faculty from 2010 to 2018. It revealed a significant underrepresentation of women and people of color in computing faculty roles. 

Notably, the most popular subfields in top-tier institutions lag about a quarter-century behind their counterparts at less prestigious institutions when it comes to gender diversity. This gap underscores the effect that the selection of a subfield can have when searching for new faculty, and the resulting impact on the gender diversity of a department.

Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty

Socioeconomic roots of academic faculty, published in Nature Human Behavior used a survey of 7,204 US-based tenure-track faculty across eight disciplines in STEM, social science and the humanities to show that faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D, and this effect is even stronger at elite universities.

Highly educated parents tend to provide their children with greater opportunities to cultivate cultural and social capital, such as STEM summer camps, AP courses with fee-based testing and tutoring resources, and these socioeconomic advantages appear to influence who becomes faculty, and how prestigious a university employs them.

A man teaching a child

Untangling the network effects of productivity and prominence among scientists

A cubist illustration of someone in a small box next to someone with more room

In Untangling the network effects of productivity and prominence among scientists, published in Nature Communications, Clauset's team examined the publications of 198,202 academic authors and showed that well-known gender differences in productivity and prominence could be largely attributed to differences in the composition of men and women scientists’ co-authorship networks.

These collaboration networks appear to act like a kind of “social capital,” which can be inherited from senior to junior researchers. The research shows that such social networks significantly influence inequalities in science, suggesting that interventions to enhance young scientists’ collaboration networks may help accelerate scientific discovery.

Labor advantages drive the greater productivity of faculty at elite universities

Labor advantages drive the greater productivity of faculty at elite universities, published in Science Advances, combined employment, publication, and federal survey data for 78,802 tenure-track faculty at 262 PhD-granting institutions in the American university system to show that the greater availability of funded graduate student and postdoctoral labor at more prestigious institutions can explain the dominance of elite universities in scientific knowledge production.

This prestige-labor advantage has a cascading effect, allowing the institutions to run larger research groups which provide greater opportunities for collaboration, continuing the cycle of higher productivity. 

Labor Advantages represented as many people in a building

Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention

A small building casting a long shadow

Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention, published in Nature, studied the training backgrounds, demographic trends, and retention patterns of 295,089 faculty across 10,612 departments at all PhD-granting institutions in the U.S., revealing that in nearly every field, roughly 80% of tenured and tenure-track faculty were trained by only 20% of institutions, with fully 20% of all faculty being trained by only 8 institutions.

The study also revealed that more women faculty leave academia mid-career than men, as do faculty with PhDs from outside of the United States. Faculty hiring and retention are essential to the development of research priorities and the spread of ideas throughout academia. Self-hiring in particular was found at higher rates in prestigious institutions, who seem to shut themselves off from less-prestigious candidates at higher rates.

As more prestige equates to more power, both through research funding and paper publishing rates, these are concerning findings for the flow of ideas through the academic ecosystem.