Reasons affecting four types of faculty mobility in higher education: Does gender matter?

• In Event: Gender equity in Higher education

Proposal

1. Purposes of the inquiry

Gender disparity has long existed in higher education, particularly in science and engineering fields (Xu, 2008; Larivière et al., 2013). Although women attain over 50 percent of doctoral degrees, they make up around 30 percent of faculty across the U.S. (Johnson, 2016), and there are fewer women in associate professorships now compared to 2003 (Turner Kelly, 2019). When it comes to more advanced positions based on the academic ladder, women are overwhelmingly less likely to be full professors, endowed chairs, department chairs, deans, chief academic officers, and university presidents (Carnes et al., 2015; Hartlep et al., 2016). There might be multiple reasons why these inequalities endure.

Studies of academic mobility offer a potential reason why women remain underrepresented in academia, particularly in leadership roles (i.e., full professors, chairs, deans, presidents) and in fields (like education and linguistics) with relatively greater numbers of women faculty. Within higher education, faculty members are typically highly mobile and might take positions in different states and/or countries (Rhoades, 2008). Often, they move to more prestigious institutions to advance their careers (O’Meara et al., 2016). Mobility can be considered a gendered phenomenon, with women faculty members experiencing less mobility (and thus fewer opportunities for advancement) compared to men (Ackers, 2004; Kulis & Sicotte, 2002; Shauman & Xie, 1996). However, female faculty may also be more mobile, in that they are more likely to depart institutions due to dissatisfaction with the work environment (Gardner, 2012; O’Meara et al., 2016).

Because the decision of faculty turnover is prone to being an individual choice, most literature studying the reasons for faculty turnover chooses to rely on individual interviews (Cohen et al., 2020; O’Meara, 2016; Gardner, 2012; Holleran et al., 2010), surveys in one or multiple institutions (Daly & Dee, 2016; Li & Koedel, 2017), or other qualitative research methods (DiRamio et al., 2009). As a result, little research has revealed the overall characteristics and trends of faculty mobility. Research that uses nationwide public data to conduct quantitative research focuses on the analysis of institutional attributions and compositional problems (Eaton et al., 2020; V. J. Rosser, 2004). Moreover, there is a lack of literature on gender differences in faculty mobility, especially those with quantitative research methods.

In this study, aiming to fill this gap, I seek to conduct quantitative research to explore how gender shapes faculty mobility and how gender affects the reasons for faculty mobility. The research questions that guide this study are:
(1) What are the gender differences in faculty mobility?
(2) What are the gender differences among the reasons for faculty mobility?

2. Research Methods
I use data from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients (SDR) 2019, the National Science Foundation longitudinal study of Ph.D. recipients in the fields of science, engineering, health, and social sciences. The SDR 2019 data are the most recent public data available for systematic statistical analysis of faculty turnover.
Following a brief descriptive analysis of the patterns of faculty mobility, I conduct two series of logistic regression analyses to examine the predictors of mobility. With a logistic regression model, I am able to identify the predictors of four patterns of faculty mobility.

3. Findings
From the data sample, college faculty is a relatively stable occupation, with 82% of the respondents staying in the same position in the same institution continuously, that is, Mobility model 1. During the most recent survey period, 1,884 respondents (4.5%) moved to new positions within the same institute (Mobility model 2), 3,151(7.5%) moved to new institutes to take up the same position as their previous jobs (Mobility model 3), and 2,533(6%) found new institutes and occupied new positions (Mobility model4). Compared with the proportion of women in the total sample, the proportion of women in the latter three mobility models has increased.
In the first regression, gender effect on faculty mobility was tentatively verified. Compared to male faculty, female faculty are less likely to retain in the same position either in the same institution or different institutions. Female faculty are more likely to switch to another position in the same institution or jump to another institution and get different positions during their career life. However, we are temporarily unable to know the direction of faculty mobility. Based on our database, we can’t interpret whether they move to more well-known and prestige institutions or stay in the same type of institutions.
I therefore added race as a further test of mobility. Looking at the mobility model of males and females of different races, it can be found that within the female group, the difference in the impact of race on mobility is more pronounced, even if the race factor does not significantly change the overall trend of male and female mobility. Based on this result, it can be inferred that racial factor can exacerbate the differences in faculty mobility caused by gender, which is consistent with the conclusions of most qualitative studies.
In the second regression, I looked at the reasons for faculty turnover, and the differences in the reasons for males and females. Overall, the mobility reasons have roughly equal effects on the types of mobility for males and females. All the reasons related to working conditions and treatment have positive effects on faculty turnover (model 2,3 and 4) and negative effects on faculty retention (model 1). But in mobility model 2, males are unlikely to change position due to children school related issues while there is no statistically significant impact on female faculty. And in model 3, female faculty are more likely to switch to another institution and get the same position because of children's school issues. This is a very interesting finding. Because seeing from the result, for both males and females, the more kids they have the more likely they will stay in the same institution. Perhaps one can think that, as mothers, females are more concerned with the task of raising children. Family and children are a particular factor influencing female faculty mobility and, more so, their career development.

Author

• Anli Peng, UMD