Modeling the Career Pathways of Women STEM Faculty (original) (raw)
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Women increasingly earn advanced degrees in science, technology, and mathematics (STEM), yet remain underrepresented among STEM faculty. Much of the existing research on this underrepresentation relies on “chilly climate” and “pipeline” theoretical models to explain this phenomenon. However, the extent to which these models follow women’s actual career pathways has been undertheorized. Further, alternative metaphors may more aptly describe the career pathways of women STEM faculty. In our broader research project, we examine the ways women’s career pathways into STEM faculty positions are similar to and/or different from chilly climate and pipeline models, and if they vary based on race and/or ethnicity. At present, we focus on the ways oral histories and participatory research methods allow us to model the career pathways of women STEM faculty. Our goal is to illustrate how oral history and participatory research are effective methods to: 1) identify women’s career pathways into STEM faculty; 2) compare and contrast career pathways to climate and pipeline metaphors as well as discover new metaphors; 3) identify critical points in women’s career pathways; and 4) discover new information about women’s paths into STEM faculty. We describe early results from a set of semi-structured interviews of women faculty in STEM disciplines collected as part of research done through an ADVANCE grant, a NSF- funded project intended to achieve improved career success for women faculty in STEM disciplines. Interviews begin with oral histories that give context, depth, and structure to women’s pathways into STEM faculty careers. Through participatory research methods, we tell participants the goals of the research and ask them to discuss, challenge, and suggest ways institutions may improve career success for women STEM faculty. Taken together, career pathways are modeled and compared with chilly climate and pipeline models. This innovative methodological approach will inform policy, recruitment procedures, and ways to retain women faculty.
Women and people of color continue to be underrepresented among engineering faculty. A diverse engineering faculty body is important because it increases the likelihood of equitable hiring practices and reduces the likelihood of a hostile workplace climate, among other reasons. In turn, research hypothesizes that a diverse engineering faculty body will attract, recruit, and retain diverse students to the engineering profession. While there are a bevy of research papers published every year to address this persistent concern, there are few new or innovative ideas informing our theoretical groundwork for understanding these underrepresentations. Institutional ethnography (IE) is a method used in sociology to understand the experiences of marginalized people in different kinds of institutions. Operationalized by sociologist Dorothy Smith, IE allows researchers to examine how institutions’ rules and regulations impact the lives and work experiences of people who work in those institutions. The main data collection processes for IE are interviews, discursive analyses of organizational texts and documents, and observations to study institutional members’ interactions with these same texts and policies. Researchers focus on how institutional participants understand, perceive, and negotiate institutional rules and how those understandings and negotiations affects their personal and professional successes. In this paper, we outline how IE is an effective method of investigating the experiences of women in STEM faculty positions. We describe IE’s use as a research method within the ADVANCE-Purdue project. ADVANCE-Purdue is a NSF-sponsored project that aims to improve the job success of faculty, with a particular focus on women of color, in the science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) disciplines of Purdue University. Using IE as a method to study the career-based experiences of the women faculty members of the STEM disciplines, we ask how institutionally generated texts (at the departmental, college, and university levels) shape their experiences as faculty members.
Culture, Climate, and Contribution: Career Satisfaction Among Female Faculty
Research in Higher Education, 2004
Retention of female faculty is an important issue for institutions of higher education aiming for excellence and diversity. However, an essential first step in understanding retention is to examine what contributes to career satisfaction for academic women. This study is based on data from a census survey of faculty conducted in 1996 at a Research I university located in the Midwest. Using Hagadorn's (2000) model for conceptualizing faculty job satisfaction, the study identifies domains of environmental condition, departmental climate, and demographics that play a role in female faculty's overall career satisfaction.
A Mixed Methods Study of Gender, Stem Department Climate, and Workplace Outcomes
Journal of Women and Minorities in Science and Engineering, 2013
The present study used a workplace climate survey (N = 252) and semi-structured interviews (N = 12) to investigate faculty perceptions of, and experiences in, their STEM departments across four diverse institutions in order to understand barriers to women's success. We found that although men and women are equally productive, women report that their department perceives them as less productive than men. Similarly, women believe they have less influence on, and experience less collegiality in, their departments than men. Women also perceive more sexism and discrimination than men. These quantitative findings are supplemented with qualitative data to more fully understand faculty perspectives. In addition, we found that workplace outcomes such as job satisfaction and turnover intentions are affected by the department climate for both men and women faculty members, which suggests that improving the climate serves all faculty members. Specific recommendations to improve STEM academic climates are discussed.
Gender Differences at Critical Transitions in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty presents new and surprising findings about career differences between female and male full-time, tenure-track, and tenured faculty in science, engineering, and mathematics at the nation's top research universities. Much of this congressionally mandated book is based on two unique surveys of faculty and departments at major U.S. research universities in six fields: biology, chemistry, civil engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics, and physics. A departmental survey collected information on departmental policies, recent tenure and promotion cases, and recent hires in almost 500 departments. A faculty survey gathered information from a stratified, random sample of about 1,800 faculty on demographic characteristics, employment experiences, the allocation of institutional resources such as laboratory space, professional activities, and scholarly productivity. This book paints a timely picture of the status of female faculty at top universities, clarifies whether male and female faculty have similar opportunities to advance and succeed in academia, challenges some commonly held views, and poses several questions still in need of answers. This book will be of special interest to university administrators and faculty, graduate students, policy makers, professional and academic societies, federal funding agencies, and others concerned with the vitality of the U.S. research base and economy.
2010
You may browse and search the full, authoritative version for free; you may also purchase a print or electronic version of the book. If you have questions or just want more information about the books published by the National Academies Press, please contact our customer service department toll-free at 888-624-8373. Assessing Gender Differences in the Careers of Science, Engineering, and Mathematics Faculty presents new and surprising findings about career differences between female and male full-time, tenure-track, and tenured faculty in science, engineering, and mathematics at the nation's top research universities. Much of this congressionally mandated book is based on two unique surveys of faculty and departments at major U.S. research universities in six fields: biology, chemistry, civil engineering, electrical engineering, mathematics, and physics. A departmental survey collected information on departmental policies, recent tenure and promotion cases, and recent hires in almost 500 departments. A faculty survey gathered information from a stratified, random sample of about 1,800 faculty on demographic characteristics, employment experiences, the allocation of institutional resources such as laboratory space, professional activities, and scholarly productivity. This book paints a timely picture of the status of female faculty at top universities, clarifies whether male and female faculty have similar opportunities to advance and succeed in academia, challenges some commonly held views, and poses several questions still in need of answers. This book will be of special interest to university administrators and faculty, graduate students, policy makers, professional and academic societies, federal funding agencies, and others concerned with the vitality of the U.S. research base and economy.
Gender Differences in Pathways to Faculty Career Satisfaction
2017 ASEE Annual Conference & Exposition Proceedings
Women engineers are underrepresented in the U.S. workforce and at all levels in academiaundergraduate, graduate, postdoctoral, and all faculty ranks. One strategy for increasing the number of women engineering students and professionals is to increase the number of women faculty who teach, advise, and mentor students. For this reason, programs like NSF ADVANCE devote resources to improve institutional climate with the goal of recruiting, retaining, and advancing to leadership women STEM faculty. As part of an NSF ADVANCE grant (NSF HRD 1409472), the University of Delaware (UD) initiated a biannual faculty climate survey in the spring of 2014. Because faculty satisfaction has been linked to retention and advancement, one goal of this survey is to better understand the relative importance of different aspects of faculty work life on career satisfaction and potential gender differences therein. Based on earlier research 6 and on data from the UD faculty climate survey, we used path analysis to examine potential gender differences in pathways to career satisfaction. The variables that we explored were formal and informal mentoring, academic resources (e.g., lab space, research assistants), collegial support, effectiveness of the department chair, and transparency of policies and procedures (e.g., for promotion and tenure, family leave). factors in faculty career satisfaction 19,38. Several studies report gender disparities in lab/office space, teaching/service loads, and other types of research support 19,27. Internal relational support refers to collegial relationships among departmental colleagues of a type that make a faculty member feel valued, included, supported, and respected by her peers. Such supports are important to career satisfaction, in part, because they provide opportunities for collaboration, assistance, and information. Perhaps due to low representation, women faculty report feelings of isolation and, thus, may not receive the same internal relational supports as men 3,4,12,15,24,25,27,35,39. Yet, collegial exchange may be even more important for women than for men in finding job satisfaction 4,12. Faculty Career Satisfaction Model 1
1999
This secondary analysis of data, collected between 1987 and 1992 in a study of an elite group of academic scientists who had received prestigious postdoctoral fellowships, sought to assess differences in reported experiences of structural obstacles by cohort. The sample consisted of 23 women: 10 who had earned doctorates before 1970, 7 who had earned their doctorates between 1970 and 1979, and 6 who had earned doctorates in 1980 or after. Secondary analysis of the original questionnaire and interview data suggested differences and similarities among the three cohorts on three dimensions-perceived obstacles, perceived supports, and the compatibility of marriage, family, and career. Women in the earlier cohorts mentioned encountering structural obstacles more frequently than did women in later cohorts, and they almost exclusively pointed to a father or other male as being influential in their career choice. A majority of married women reported that marriage had a positive impact on their careers. The report concludes that birth cohort, rather than doctoral cohort, may be a more valid indicator of differences in attitudes and experiences related to compatibility of family and career. (Contains 10 references.) (CH) Reproductions supplied by EDRS are the best that can be made from the original document.
International Journal of Gender Science and Technology, 2012
A fundamental assumption of programs intended to increase the numbers of women faculty in science, engineering and math (STEM) has been that women in these disciplines experience a uniquely hostile climate. While this focus on STEM faculty is necessary and important, we argue that it may be too narrow. In this paper, we compare STEM to non-STEM faculty, drawing on a representative survey of university faculty in one institution (N=612) conducted in 2007. Our findings indicate that non-white men in the STEM disciplines are in fact significantly less satisfied than white men in these fields and less satisfied than their counterparts in non-STEM fields. Among white women, those in STEM fields are significantly less satisfied than those in non-STEM disciplines. These differences are largely mediated by perceptions of work and contextual factors, however. With a few exceptions, we find that the factors that predict satisfaction are the same across groups of faculty. This implies that efforts to improve university and departmental climates will benefit all faculty.
Gendered Facets of Faculty Careers and Challenges to
Women faculty remain underrepresented in many science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) fields in both Australia and the United States. Given the current interest in developing engineering education as a profession in its own right, it is necessary for engineering educators to examine and understand the experiences and working conditions of engineering faculty members. Otherwise, professionalization efforts risk ignoring and perpetuating gendered facets of faculty careers. Furthermore, those gendered facets of faculty careers stand as potential barriers to the successful promotion of engineering educator identities. Better understandings of the experiences of female faculty are necessary because gender biases of faculty careers often go unnoticed or unvoiced and therefore remain unproblematized as neutral features of academia.