Hostile workplace climate pushing women out of academia

Women leave academia at higher rates than men at every career stage, with those employed at less elite institutions especially likely to quit, a study has found.

Authors of a paper that also found particularly high rates of attrition among tenured faculty and women in non-STEM fields warned that a “silver bullet does not exist” to address gender inequality in the workplace.

With previous research having typically focused on early career faculty at higher prestige institutions, the research team wanted to discover how attrition varies across career stages, fields and institutions.

The paper, published in Science Advances, analyses census responses from about 250,000 tenured and tenure-track professors across the US between 2011 and 2020.

The findings showed that women at all career ages, from one to 40 years after obtaining a PhD, were less likely to be promoted than men and left academia at higher rates than men.

A 10,000-strong survey from the same census revealed that middle- and late-career academics most frequently cited workplace climate as their main reason for quitting – pointing to factors including discrimination, harassment and feeling that they did not fit in with their department.

For them, workplace climate issues outweighed work-life balance or feeling “pulled” towards better work opportunities, as was often the case for early career faculty and male faculty.

Lead author Katie Spoon, from the University of Colorado Boulder, told Times Higher Education that looking at the rates at which women and men leave their jobs was not sufficient, and said it would be a mistake to observe equal rates of attrition and conclude that gender parity had been reached.

Instead, she said, administrators needed to investigate the reasons why academics were leaving their departments and institutions, and to examine how those reasons differed by gender, race and career age.

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“A silver bullet does not exist, and gender inequity can likely only be addressed through a long-term commitment to implementing concrete, meaningful change,” she said.

“In response to our study, we hope that administrators will more deeply investigate their workplace climates by directly asking their faculty which suggestions would improve their climates, listening and responding with meaningful action.”

The study, which examined academics across 111 fields and 391 universities, did not identify any particular mechanism as to why prestige correlates with greater attrition, but Ms Spoon said the survey might provide some hints.

“Faculty at the least prestigious institution had 27 per cent higher odds of reporting feeling pushed out of their jobs and 48 per cent lower odds of reporting feeling pulled towards better opportunities than faculty at the most prestigious institution, and these reports of feeling pushed or pulled are strongly gendered,” she said.

“We hope future work can investigate these effects more directly.”

patrick.jack@timeshighereducation.com