Faculty retention a major challenge for universities
at about the same overall rate, except in mathematics, where men stay for a median of 7.3 years and women for 4.45 years — the difference of which is statistically significant, Kaminski said. The study did not investigate the specific reasons why the tracked faculty members departed their positions.
“On the whole, men and women faculty are being retained at the same rate. This is great news and an important step toward the goal of fostering gender diversity in science and engineering programs across the country. Something is working well,” Kaminski said. “In the case of mathematics, we’re not quite sure what’s going on, but we’re convinced it merits a closer look and further study.”
The release quotes Kaminski to say that the overall trend of faculty retention, however, is worrying. The median time a faculty member stays at a university is 10.9 years, which effectively means the school has to replace half its faculty every eleven years. The recruiting process is time and cost intensive, and startup costs for new engineering or science professors can range from $110,000 to nearly $1.5 million. Additionally, assistant professors generally teach fewer courses per year, as they’re expected to spend the bulk of their time writing proposals, securing grants, and launching their research program, Kaminski said. This means new faculty members are usually more expensive to employ for their first few years until they start attracting research funding.
“We think this study could be an important reference point to help obviate many practical and financial reasons for why all universities should arguably be spending more time, energy, and resources on retaining younger faculty,” Kaminski said.
Overall, at the fourteen universities represented in the study, about 27 percent of faculty members hired into science, engineering, and mathematics programs are women. This percentage is on the rise, but is unlikely to reach 50 percent before 2050, Kaminski said. Even after one half of all faculty members being hired are women, it will likely take at least another forty years before the actual population of science, engineering, and mathematics professors is 50 percent women.
Kaminski leads the successful NSF-funded RAMP-UP Program at Rensselaer, which seeks to foster a university culture and climate that is supportive of all faculty members.
“I think a balanced, representative university faculty is very important for our students. We have a shortage in this country of people who choose to study science and engineering. To re-fill that pipeline, we need to look at the entire population. Women are recruited from high schools into science, engineering, and mathematics programs at a lower rate than men. To help fix this problem, we need a faculty population that looks almost identical to the population of our country. The same is true for recruiting more students from underrepresented minorities into science and engineering. If we want the United States to retain its technological leadership into future generations, we need to make sure the fields of science and engineering are accessible to everyone,” Kaminski said.
— Read more in Deborah Kaminski and Cheryl Geisler, “Survival Analysis of Faculty Retention in Science and Engineering by Gender,” Science 335 no. 6070 (17 February 2012): 864-66 (DOI: 10.1126/science.1214844)
