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

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.

Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty.

Women remain underrepresented among faculty in nearly all academic fields. Using a census of 245,270 tenure-track and tenured professors at United States-based PhD-granting departments, we show 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. A large-scale survey of the same faculty indicates that the reasons faculty leave are gendered, even for institutions, fields, and career ages in which retention rates are not.

Labor advantages drive the greater productivity of faculty at elite universities.

Faculty at prestigious institutions dominate scientific discourse, producing a disproportionate share of all research publications. Environmental prestige can drive such epistemic disparity, but the mechanisms by which it causes increased faculty productivity remain unknown. Here, we combine employment, publication, and federal survey data for 78,802 tenure-track faculty at 262 PhD-granting institutions in the American university system to show through multiple lines of evidence that the greater availability of funded graduate and postdoctoral labor at more prestigious institutions drives the environmental effect of prestige on productivity.

Quantifying hierarchy and dynamics in US faculty hiring and retention.

Faculty hiring and retention determine the composition of the US academic workforce and directly shape educational outcomes, careers, the development and spread of ideas and research priorities. However, hiring and retention are dynamic, reflecting societal and academic priorities, generational turnover and efforts to diversify the professoriate along gender, racial and socioeconomic lines. A comprehensive study of the structure and dynamics of the US professoriate would elucidate the effects of these efforts and the processes that shape scholarship more broadly.