Women are more likely to leave academia than men at any point in their faculty career due to harassment and feelings of not belonging, according to research from the University of Colorado Boulder.
The research looked at gendered retention patterns among professors to understand if women and men leave academia at different rates.
“We found that women were more likely to leave at every career age, but it varied a lot across field as well as prestige and career age,” CU Boulder doctoral student Katie Spoon said.
The study analyzed employment records of 245,270 tenure-track and tenured professors from 391 universities that grant doctoral degrees, including CU Boulder.
The study found that the gender gap in retention grew for older faculty and faculty with tenure. Spoon said this finding was surprising because people tend to think “you’ve made it” when granted tenure. Instead, the study found more women were leaving at this career stage.
“It was surprising to us that there was a larger gender difference for older faculty,” Spoon said, adding, “We found that gender gaps were largest for full professors.”
Understanding the reason why, however, will require more research.
“It might not be as much about the job precarity of the appointment as people has thought about in the past,” CU Boulder Professor Aaron Clauset said.
To begin to answer the question of why, the team surveyed more than 10,000 current and former faculty members to understand the reasons why they’d leave their jobs.
The survey results showed women, especially tenured women, are more likely to feel pushed out of their positions due to harsh workplace climates, which can include dysfunctional leadership, harassment, discrimination and feelings of not belonging. In comparison, men are more likely to be pulled toward more attractive jobs elsewhere.
The study found leaving for work-life balance was not a major factor and women and men tended to leave jobs for that reason at about equal rates. Spoon said work-life balance is important, but not as gendered as the workplace climate, which could be a signal of shifting cultural norms.
“That was also another surprising result because most of the literature has emphasized work-life balance for women faculty in particular,” Spoon said.
The study also looked at retention in different fields, comparing STEM faculty retention to that of areas like business or social sciences.
In STEM fields, the study found, there’s less of a gendered retention gap. Gaps were larger in non-STEM fields which seems “counterintuitive,” Spoon said.
Clauset said this is one of the points where the study points to more work to understand the reason why the retention rate for women in STEM is more equal to men compared to other fields.
Additionally, CU Boulder was included as one of the institutions in the data set, Clauset said, because it is a large research university with lots of faculty.
He said the overarching results from the study would likely hold up when talking to women faculty at CU Boulder. One way to apply it is to dig deeper and ask questions to uncover why women are leaving the university.
“The data suggests that CU is not unlike the other institutions in our data set,” he said.
Spoon said it’s important to look at the reasons people are leaving rather than the rates to understand if gender equity exists in a department or university.
“It’s an unsatisfying answer, but our results show there’s not one single thing that needs to be done to solve gender retention,” Spoon said. “Instead it’s more of an approach to listening, including faculty and addressing the things they bring up.”
Clauset said workplace climate is understudied and underappreciated and he hopes the study will help change outcomes for women.
“The real question in the long run is whether something will change,” Clauset said, adding, “Our hope is that by providing a broad and detailed quantitative and qualitative analysis of this issue it provides new ways to tackle this problem.”
