New Study Examines Gender Differences in Faculty Attrition Rates

A new study by Katie Spoon, a Ph.D. student in computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder, finds that women leave academia overall at higher rates than men at every career age, in large part because of strongly gendered attrition at lower-prestige institutions, in non-STEM fields, and among tenured faculty.

The study examined employment records for nearly 250,000 U.S. faculty. They found that within the first 20 years of a faculty member’s career post-Ph.D., overall attrition rates range from approximately 2 percent to 5 percent. At all stages that number is higher for women. The data shows that attrition rates rise as women move up the academic ladder. Women full professors are 19 percent more likely than men at the same career stage to leave academia. For faculty at assistant professor levels, women are 6 percent more likely to leave academia.

A followup survey of 10,000 faculty found that women are more likely than men to feel pushed from their jobs and less likely to feel pulled toward better opportunities. Researchers also found women leave or consider leaving because of workplace climate more often than work-life balance.

The researchers conclude that “these findings illustrate that individual faculty often experience academia differently depending on their gender, career stage, field, and institution. Leaving an academic job, hypothetically or in practice, can encompass a complicated mix of pushes and pulls, and our results show that as their career progresses, all faculty are more likely to report feeling pushed out of their jobs. However, independent of career age, women are substantially more likely to report feeling pushed out, while men are more likely to report feeling pulled toward an attractive opportunity when they leave.”

The full study, “Gender and Retention Patterns Among U.S. Faculty,” was published in the journal ScienceAdvances. It may be accessed here.