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

  1. Nicholas LaBerge
  2. K. Hunter Wapman
  3. Aaron Clauset
  4. Daniel B. Larremore

  • Curated by eLife

    eLife logo

    eLife assessment

    Efforts to increase the representation of women in academia have focussed on efforts to recruit more women and to reduce the attrition of women. This study - which is based on analyses of data on more than 250,000 tenured and tenure-track faculty from the period 2011-2020, and the predictions of counterfactual models - shows that hiring more women has a bigger impact than reducing attrition. The study is an important contribution to work on gender representation in academia, and while the evidence in support of the findings is solid, the description of the methods used is in need of improvement.

Reviewed by

Read the full article See related articles

Listed in

Log in to save this article

Abstract

Despite long-running efforts to increase gender diversity among tenured and tenure track faculty in the U.S., women remain underrepresented in most academic fields, sometimes dramatically so. Here we quantify the relative importance of faculty hiring and faculty attrition for both past and future faculty gender diversity using comprehensive data on the training and employment of 268,769 tenured and tenure-track faculty rostered at 12,112 U.S. PhD-granting departments, spanning 111 academic fields between 2011–2020. Over this time, we find that hiring had a far greater impact on women’s representation among faculty than attrition in the majority (90.1%) of academic fields, even as academia loses a higher share of women faculty relative to men at every career stage. Finally, we model the impact of five specific policy interventions on women’s representation, and project that eliminating attrition differences between women and men only leads to a marginal increase in women’s overall representation—in most fields, successful interventions will need to make substantial and sustained changes to hiring in order to reach gender parity.

Article activity feed

  1. Version published to 10.1101/2023.10.13.562268v2 on bioRxiv
  2. Version published to 10.7554/elife.93755 on eLife
  3. Version published to 10.7554/elife.93755.1 on eLife
  4. eLife

    eLife assessment

    Efforts to increase the representation of women in academia have focussed on efforts to recruit more women and to reduce the attrition of women. This study - which is based on analyses of data on more than 250,000 tenured and tenure-track faculty from the period 2011-2020, and the predictions of counterfactual models - shows that hiring more women has a bigger impact than reducing attrition. The study is an important contribution to work on gender representation in academia, and while the evidence in support of the findings is solid, the description of the methods used is in need of improvement.

  5. eLife

    Reviewer #1 (Public Review):

    Summary and strengths
    This is an interesting paper that concludes that hiring more women will do more to improve the gender balance of (US) academia than improving the attrition rates of women (which are usually higher than men's). Other groups have reported similar findings but this study uses a larger than usual dataset that spans many fields and institutions, so it is a good contribution to the field.

    Weaknesses
    The paper uses a mixture of mathematical models (basically Leslie matrices, though that term isn't mentioned here) parameterised using statistical models fitted to data. However, the description of the methods needs to be improved significantly. The author should consider citing Matrix Population Models by Caswell (Second Edition; 2006; OUP) as a general introduction to these methods, and consider citing some or all of the following as examples of similar studies performed with these models:
    Shaw and Stanton. 2012. Proc Roy Soc B 279:3736-3741
    Brower and James. 2020. PLOS One 15:e0226392
    James and Brower. 2022. Royal Society Open Science 9:220785
    Lawrence and Chen. 2015. [http://128.97.186.17/index.php/pwp/article/view/PWP-CCPR-2015-008]
    Danell and Hjerm. 2013. Scientometrics 94:999-1006

    The analysis also runs the risk of conflating the fraction of women in a field with gender diversity! In female-dominated fields (e.g. Nursing, Education) increasing the proportion of women in the field will lead to reduced gender diversity. This does not seem to be accounted for in the analysis. It would also be helpful to state the number of men and women in each of the 111 fields in the study.

  6. eLife

    Reviewer #2 (Public Review):

    Summary:
    This important study by LaBerge and co-authors seeks to understand the causal drivers of faculty gender demographics by quantifying the relative importance of faculty hiring and attrition across fields. They leverage historical data to describe past trends and develop models that project future scenarios that test the efficacy of targeted interventions. Overall, I found this study to be a compelling and important analysis of gendered hiring and attrition in US institutions, and one that has wide-reaching policy implications for the academy. The authors have also suggested a number of fruitful future avenues for research that will allow for additional clarity in understanding the gendered, racial, and socioeconomic disparities present in US hiring and attrition, and potential strategies for mitigating or eliminating these disparities.

    Strengths:
    In this study, LaBerge et al use data from over 268,000 tenured and tenure-track faculty from over 100 fields at more than 12,000 PhD-granting institutions in the US. The period they examine covers 2011-2020. Their analysis provides a large-scale overview of demographics across fields, a unique strength that allows the authors to find statistically significant effects for gendered attrition and hiring across broad areas (STEM, non-STEM, and topical domains).

    LaBerge et al. find gendered disparities in attrition-using both empirical data and their counterfactual model-that account for the loss of 1378 women faculty across all fields between 2011 and 2020. It is true that "this number is both a small portion of academia... and a staggering number of individual careers," as ." - as this loss of women faculty is comparable to losing more than 70 entire departments. I appreciate the authors' discussion about these losses-they note that each of these is likely unnecessary, as women often report feeling that they were pushed out of academic jobs.

    LaBerge et al. also find-by developing a number of model scenarios testing the impacts of hiring, attrition, or both-that hiring has a greater impact on women's representation in the majority of academic fields in spite of higher attrition rates for women faculty relative to men at every career stage. Unlike many other studies of historical trends in gender diversity, which have often been limited to institution-specific analyses, they provide an analysis that spans over 100 fields and includes nearly all US PhD-granting institutions. They are able to project the impacts of strategies focusing on hiring or retention using models that project the impact of altering attrition risk or hiring success for women. With this approach, they show that even relatively modest annual changes in hiring accumulate over time to help improve the diversity of a given field. They also demonstrate that, across the model scenarios they employ, changes to hiring drive the largest improvement in the long-term gender diversity of a field.

    Future work will hopefully - as the authors point out - include intersectional analyses to determine whether a disproportionate share of lost gender diversity is due to the loss of women of color from the professoriate. I appreciate the author's discussion of the racial demographics of women in the professoriate, and their note that "the majority of women faculty in the US are white" and thus that the patterns observed in this study are predominately driven by this demographic. I also highly appreciate their final note that "equal representation is not equivalent to equal or fair treatment," and that diversifying hiring without mitigating the underlying cause of inequity will continue to contribute to higher losses of women faculty.

    Weaknesses
    First, and perhaps most importantly, it would be beneficial to include a distinct methods section. While the authors have woven the methods into the results section, I found that I needed to dig to find the answers to my questions about methods. I would also have appreciated additional information within the main text on the source of the data, specifics about its collection, inclusion and exclusion criteria for the present study, and other information on how the final dataset was produced. This - and additional information as the authors and editor see fit - would be helpful to readers hoping to understand some of the nuance behind the collection, curation, and analysis of this important dataset.

    I would also encourage the authors to include a note about binary gender classifications in the discussion section. In particular, I encourage them to include an explicit acknowledgement that the trends assessed in the present study are focused solely on two binary genders - and do not include an analysis of nonbinary, genderqueer, or other "third gender" individuals. While this is likely because of the limitations of the dataset utilized, the focus of this study on binary genders means that it does not reflect the true diversity of gender identities represented within the professoriate.

    In a similar vein, additional context on how gender was assigned on the basis of names should be added to the methods section.

    I do think that some care might be warranted regarding the statement that "eliminating gendered attrition leads to only modest changes in field-level diversity" (Page 6). while I do not think that this is untrue, I do think that the model scenarios where hiring is "radical" and attrition is unchanged from present (equal representation of women and men among hires (ER) + observed attrition (OA)) shows that a sole focus on hiring dampens the gains that can otherwise be addressed via even modest interventions (see, e.g., gender-neutral attrition (GNA) + increasing representation of women among hires (IR)). I am curious as to why the authors did not include an additional scenario where hiring rates are equal and attrition is equalized (i.e., GNA + ER). The importance of including this additional model is highlighted in the discussion, where, on Page 7, the authors write: "In our forecasting analysis, we find that eliminating the gendered attrition gap, in isolation, would not substantially increase representation of women faculty in academia. Rather, progress towards gender parity depends far more heavily on increasing women's representation among new faculty hires, with the greatest change occurring if hiring is close to gender parity." I believe that this statement would be greatly strengthened if the authors can also include a comparison to a scenario where both hiring and attrition are addressed with "radical" interventions.

  7. eLife

    Reviewer #3 (Public Review):

    This manuscript investigates the roles of faculty hiring and attrition in influencing gender representation in US academia. It uses a comprehensive dataset covering tenured and tenure-track faculty across various fields from 2011 to 2020. The study employs a counterfactual model to assess the impact of hypothetical gender-neutral attrition and projects future gender representation under different policy scenarios. The analysis reveals that hiring has a more significant impact on women's representation than attrition in most fields and highlights the need for sustained changes in hiring practices to achieve gender parity.

    Strengths:
    Overall, the manuscript offers significant contributions to understanding gender diversity in academia through its rigorous data analysis and innovative methodology.

    The methodology is robust, employing extensive data covering a wide range of academic fields and institutions.

    Weaknesses:
    The primary weakness of the study lies in its focus on US academia, which may limit the generalizability of its findings to other cultural and academic contexts. Additionally, the counterfactual model's reliance on specific assumptions about gender-neutral attrition could affect the accuracy of its projections.

    Additionally, the study assumes that whoever disappeared from the dataset is attrition in academia. While in reality, those attritions could be researchers who moved to another country or another institution that is not included in the AARC (Academic Analytics Research Centre) dataset.

  8. Version published to 10.1101/2023.10.13.562268v1 on bioRxiv