Women STEM Faculty Less Satisfied
This month during AAUW week, I am going to write specifically about the research covered in Why So Few on female faculty in STEM fields, a subject close to the heart for many of you.
The number of women faculty in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) disciplines has increased over time, but as you all know, women remain underrepresented. Job satisfaction is key to retention, and women report that they are less satisfied with the academic workplace and are more likely than men to leave academic jobs earlier in their careers.
Cathy Trower is the research director of the Collaborative on Academic Careers in Higher Education (COACHE) at Harvard University. Trower and Richard Chait, also at Harvard, founded COACHE in 2002 to help improve the academic environment for junior faculty and to assist colleges and universities in recruiting, retaining, and increasing the satisfaction of early-career faculty, who are most at risk for leaving academia.
COACHE includes more than 130 colleges and universities that participate in the Tenure-Track Faculty Job Satisfaction Survey, which is administered annually to all full-time, tenure-track faculty at member institutions.
For both female and male STEM faculty, the researchers at COACHE found that the nature of the work and the departmental climate were the most important factors predicting job satisfaction, and the two factors were equally important for both groups. Within the climate category, survey results showed that female STEM faculty were significantly less satisfied than their male peers with three factors: sense of fit, opportunities to collaborate with senior colleagues, and the perception of fair treatment of junior faculty in their departments.
Do these findings ring true to you? In your department, do female faculty seem less satisfied than male faculty?
