STEM promotion bias helping drive academic gender gap

The factors driving gender disparities in academia are so complex that simply recruiting more female staff will not “close the gaps”, a New Zealand study has found.

University of Canterbury (UC) mathematicians say that only a “nuanced set of interventions”, which takes account of discipline and rank as well as raw numbers, can solve the “gender problem”.

The study followed the team’s 2020 research showing that age and performance alone could not explain why female academics tended to earn so much less than their male counterparts. The earlier analysis crunched performance scores in the national research assessment exercise to find that “sexism” was the underlying cause of a gender pay gap that, over a lifetime, could equate to the cost of a house.

The new study, published in the journal Royal Society Open Science on 15 July, examined more than 1,100 UC academics’ pay records over a 15-year period. It identified five “compounding” factors that disadvantaged women.

They included the “sticky floor problem” where employees became stuck in junior roles for so long that their chances of promotion dissipated – a phenomenon that prevented many women from progressing past lecturer level. People trapped at particular levels also proved more inclined to quit academia altogether.

The study also found that academics’ chances of promotion decreased as they aged, and that women tended to be hired at lower ranks than men – disadvantaging them from the outset.

The most “intriguing” discovery was that academics in STEM fields had different appointment, promotion and attrition patterns from their peers in other disciplines. “We found that STEM subjects have these massive promotion rate advantages,” said lead author Liam Gibson.  

“You tend to be promoted more quickly if you’re in STEM subjects – and coincidentally, STEM subjects tend to be male-dominated, which drives lots of these gender-based effects that we see.”

Gibson said a 2024 study by the team, involving data from about 30 countries, had found that male-dominated fields tended to have better research grant success rates and performance evaluations than female-dominated fields. “We’re not demonstrating that there’s…explicit sex-based discrimination,” he said. “We’re just uncovering these broader global patterns.”

He said the latest findings highlighted the need for a “specific set” of policy interventions. “If you want to achieve full gender parity – the same number of women and men at the highest ranks of academia – [it requires] equalising the rate at which women and men are hired, the rank at which they’re hired, and the…discipline as well.”

He conceded that enforcing gender quotas within disciplines could be a tough ask for universities. They could try to boost the diversity of candidates by distributing job advertisements more broadly, but ultimately they could only recruit from the pool of applicants.

The study found that just 25 per cent of UC’s female academics were in STEM fields, compared with 55 per cent of men. It also found that female recruits tended to be about two years older than male recruits of equivalent rank.

Women’s average ages at each rank had increased over the 15 years examined, while men’s average ages decreased. Gibson said this was consistent with a phenomenon called “demographic inertia”, where the progression of more women into senior positions influenced the age profile.

He said the study was the latest to show that a “wait for the old men to retire” approach would not achieve gender parity. “We’re going to need additional interventions.”

john.ross@timeshighereducation.com