Women feel driven out by problems with workplace culture more often than by lack of work–life balance

Toxic workplaces are the main reason women leave academic jobs

Women feel driven out by problems with workplace culture more often than by lack of work–life balance

A survey of thousands of US academics has found that the number one reason that women leave faculty positions is poor “workplace climate”, which can encompass discrimination, dysfunctional leadership, a feeling of not fitting in and other problems¹. Even work–life balance was less important than workplace climate for many respondents.

Work on academic retention has tended to focus on individual institutions, but the latest study provides a rare view of who leaves and who stays throughout the United States, says sociologist Kimberlee Shauman at the University of California, Davis, who was not involved in the research. For this reason, she says, the analysis “gives us a much more reliable and accurate picture of what the trends look like”.

The study appears on 20 October in Science Advances.

Quarter of a million strong

To explore attrition rates at US institutions, the authors analysed employment records for 245,270 people who held tenured or tenure-track academic posts between 2011 and 2020. They found that women were at greater risk of leaving their positions than men at all career stages, but the retention gap between men and women began to increase about 15 years after academics finished their PhDs. At that point, many of the faculty members would be expected to have received tenure, the authors say.

“I was expecting to see larger gaps for assistant professors, who haven’t gotten tenure yet” than for more senior academics, says co-author Katie Spoon, a computational social scientist at the University of Colorado Boulder. “But we actually found the reverse.”

It’s “surprising and sort-of depressing” that even after achieving tenure, women are at increased risk of leaving academia, Shauman says.

To understand why academics leave, Spoon and her colleagues also surveyed 7,195 current faculty members, 433 people who had left academia but had not retired, and 954 who had retired. Compared to men, women had 44% higher odds of feeling pushed out of academia — rather than pulled towards a better opportunity elsewhere. The authors did not include gender-diverse people, such as non-binary people, in their analysis.

Workplace atmosphere was the most common reason women cited for leaving academia (see ‘Why women leave faculty jobs’). Men, by contrast, were most likely to cite professional reasons, such as low salary or pressure to publish. Desire for a better work–life balance has sometimes been thought to drive women out of academia more frequently than men, but it actually had a similar effect on both.

“To me, that’s not surprising,” said Thema Monroe-White, an education and workforce development researcher at Berry College in Mount Berry, Georgia. Her work focuses on the experiences of minoritized people in science, technology, engineering and mathematics, for whom climate has long been known as a driver of attrition.

Monroe-White notes that the researchers did not describe how race and ethnicity influence academic careers. “If we collapse all race/ethnicity categories for women into one group, we’re missing nuanced differences,” she says, adding that, too often, “when we say female, we mean white women”.

Spoon says that the decision not to study the effects of race and ethnicity stemmed from a lack of data. Especially when it came to former faculty members, she and her colleagues lacked the responses to do a granular demographic analysis, she says. Monroe-White says that other researchers have succeeded in describing the experiences of minoritized faculty members and that the current study’s authors could have done more to investigate.

A shared responsibility

The definition of workplace climate is another limitation of the work, Shauman says. The researchers focused on climate at respondents’ institutions, but academic experiences are also shaped by external factors such as the attitudes of journal editors.

The widely shared responsibility for setting workplace climate means that academics in all positions should heed the analysis, Shauman says. “Many faculty are expected to just keep going, no matter what is expected of them,” she adds. “There needs to be a real, concerted effort to think about what the workplace looks like and what needs to be in place to support faculty.”

doi: https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-023-03251-8

This story originally appeared on: Nature - Author:Saima Sidik