NSF Award
1823479
While women have earned nearly 45% of the past decade's doctoral degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields, they comprise less than 25% of full professors in STEM departments. Although historical underrepresentation will persist mechanically at the top levels due to the gender composition of cohorts in previous decades, recent work shows a within-cohort gender gap in tenure and promotion, even among younger graduates. Hence, women are unequally represented in STEM in academia, and are on track to remain so. The consequences of underrepresentation are numerous, both for women in those fields -- such as reduced mentorship for female graduate and undergraduate students -- and for the fields themselves, as the research is conducted by less diverse perspectives. Not engaging otherwise capable female STEM Ph.D.s. could lead to less innovation and reduced overall research productivity. This innovative study of the STEM Ph.D.-holder pipeline identifies factors that lead female Ph.D.s to be less likely than their male counterparts to enter into, and remain in, tenure-track academic positions. It applies novel methods to identify and explore personal and professional factors that contribute to women with STEM Ph.D.s selecting out of academia at various stages of the pipeline. This project supports the goals of the National Science Foundation (NSF) and National Center for Science and Engineering Statistics (NCSES) to better understand the science and technology (S&T) workforce and to improve the methodologies for assessing indicators of S&T activities. It focuses on issues facing an under-represented group: female doctorates in STEM. This research will highlight the differences in research engagement, compensation, and professional outcomes for a researcher who remains compared to one who departs either academia or STEM altogether, all of which have broader societal impact. The findings from this work will potentially reshape infrastructure for research and education by encouraging employers to craft policies that attract female doctorates, as such policies may allow employers to cream-skim highly qualified female doctorates from alternate employment. <br/><br/>Using data from the Survey of Earned Doctorates (SED) and the Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR), the project uses cutting-edge trajectory analysis to classify all observed job sequences among STEM Ph.D. holders into a typology of STEM career paths. Using the rich data from the SED and the SDR, the project produces descriptive analysis of individual characteristics that correlate with sorting among these typologies. In addition, the project also compares among the identified STEM career typologies objective and subjective measures of job attributes, including compensation, engagement with the research community, and job satisfaction, separately for men and women. Hence, the project defines the set of "career pipelines" of Ph.D. holders (of which academia is one), which are associated with women, and which are associated with better or worse job outcomes for men and women within those pipelines. The project answers to what extent the observed transitions out of academia are in fact beneficial to female Ph.D.s. in terms of pay, research time, and job satisfaction.<br/><br/>This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.
