Science Paper on Faculty Retention
Dear Friends of Women in Science,
Hiring practices seem to be resulting in a good supply of young women in faculty positions, yet the upper ranks seem to be still impoverished of women in many universities. Retention and promotion of women are processes that might well repay attention to make sure that women are not lost disproportionately, or if possible, are retained even if they consider leaving.
Deborah Kamiski and Cheryl Geisler recently published a paper in Science (vol 335, p 864, 2012) called "Survival Analysis of Faculty Retention in Science and Engineering by Gender." As usual, it has both good news and bad news for people who support women in science. The authors studied 2966 assistant professors hired since 1990 at 14 US universities. The survival rate does not speak well for the selection processes, since both men and women had a chance to survive that was less than 50%. Median departure time was 10.9 years overall, 11.05 for men and 10.04 for women. In Table 2, the median times for men and women appeared to favor men in several fields, for example in mechanical engineering men's survival was 16.19 years while women had 10.41 years. But in Computer Science, a field we have often discussed as having problems keeping women content, men had a median survival of 9.32 and women had 10.25, the reverse of expected. There was not a significant difference between promotion to associate professor for the men and women in the study overall.
The authors singled out one problem field for women: mathematics. There, faculty leave significantly earlier than in other fields regardless of gender, but there is a big difference between genders as well. Women leave significantly sooner than men, at 4.45 years on average, compared to 7.33 years for men. The other differences I pointed out in the previous paragraph did not reach the p<0.05 significance level.
Thus, it appears that in general women faculty in sciences and engineering, except in matnematics, progress similarly through the ranks.
sincerely,
Laura
This study was different from previous studies in its tracking of individual faculty members.
Hi Helen,
I agree. I was quite shocked to see how low the success rate is. Perhaps the departments pride themselves on being "selective" at tenure time, but why not just be that selective at hiring and save everyone a lot of trouble and misery? Doesn't industry do it that way? Why should academia be so proud of cutting off people they've mentored and worked with, losing all that expertise?
I found the math results surprising too. At Pomona College, math is a very fair department, not at all likely to use gender inappropriately in tenure decisions.
cheers,
Laura
What's fascinating is the high attrition rate. I wouldn't have thought it would be that bad, although I have to say many of my colleagues are leaving positions now in the time frame they describe. Fascinating and disturbing...
It's true that the stat tests adjust for N, but it's also true that a low N can prevent significance from being reached if a phenomenon is real. But they looked a many faculty, so it would be hard to go from here to significance if that's the problem.
ML
