For women academics, feeling devalued can be a fatal career blow

From ScienceMag:

Held to higher standards. Left off invitations. Pointed to as “diversity” but ignored. These are just some of the hundreds of examples of devaluation women faculty in the United States shared with computational social scientist Katie Spoon. These experiences, more common for women than men, are to blame for the higher rate of attrition for women faculty, Spoon, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, and colleagues report in an analysis published today in PNAS Nexus.

The new study “gets at things that are hard to measure, which is the climate in academia,” says Donna Ginther, an economist at the University of Kansas who studies the academic workforce. “It speaks to the subtle experiences of women not feeling like they belong.”

The work builds on an enormous survey of 10,000 U.S. current and ex-faculty, spanning institutions and fields, which found that women leave because they feel pushed out—not pulled toward another opportunity. At the end of that survey was a free-text box inviting respondents to “tell [their] story” and share negative experiences or reasons they left academia, says Spoon, then a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Little did Spoon know she’d get 6615 responses—an outpouring of heartbreak, documenting instances of disrespect, struggles with work-life balance, lack of institutional support, and more. “I was like, ‘OK, I think we need to do like a follow-up study instead of just ignoring all of that,’” she says.

Trained as a computer scientist, Spoon saw the opportunity to spot patterns that could explain why women feel pushed out. Working with sociologist Lauren Rivera at Northwestern University, they manually assigned themes to each response and then looked for relationships with identity and attrition. Categories included issues directly related to professional responsibilities of research, service, and teaching, as well as topics capturing the work environment, such as administrative policies, caretaking responsibilities, and leadership.

Of the 12 distinct themes investigated, devaluation—feeling excluded, disrespected, mistreated, or held to different standards—showed the biggest gender gap: Forty-one percent of women versus 18% of men who left comments felt this way. Informal devaluation was more common than formal devaluation such as problems during official evaluation procedures. This may suggest policy changes aimed at reducing discrimination in these processes are having some effect. But systems are still failing in other ways. Frequently cited alongside experiences of devaluation was so-called “institutional betrayal”—institutions failing to take complaints seriously.

And whereas the gender gap in other issues remains steady or even narrows with seniority, for devaluation it widens. It seems men gain respect over their careers, while women continue to report “‘I have all these accolades, and I have all this stuff, and [yet], I have to keep proving myself,’” Spoon explains.

And that, more than anything else, pushes them out. Devaluation accounted for the majority of the gender gap in those considering leaving, and in those who had left—far more than topics such as work-life balance and child care, which are major targets of interventions.

Devaluation was also the most racialized issue, affecting nearly half of all women of color. White women were the next most affected, followed by men of color, then white men.

“It was a very impressive study,” says Bruce Weinberg, an economist at Ohio State University. Although survey responses inevitably overrepresent negative experiences, the breadth of the study “[gets at] the pervasiveness of this,” he says. Evidence of these types of issues is often anecdotal or narrow in scope, which can make it harder to address. Of the new study, though, he says, “I would call this data,” making it possible to analyze intersections with career stage and race. “That’s valuable.”

Ginther questions whether the problem is specific to academia or persists across careers. Regardless, one definite problem in academia, she notes, is the unusually slow pace of turnover, meaning “there’s not a lot of change in department climate and culture.” And with more women than men departing midway through their careers, Spoon adds, it’s not a given that any improvements at the junior level today will trickle down.

Read More