Fewer female scientists in the academic jungle
Understanding how a species battles to sustain itself in a challenging habitat is a cornerstone of ecological research; now scientists have applied this approach to science itself to discover why women are not staying in academia.
A study, published today in Oikos by researchers from Monash University and the University of Queensland, analysed the challenges currently faced by academics – mainly women - in the science-engineering sector working part-time or re-entering the workforce after an interruption to their career.
Monash University’s Associate Professor Karen Hapgood from the Department of Chemical Engineering said women face more challenges during their careers.
“One of the major issues faced by female academics is the tendency for them to move towards part-time work in order to balance family and work commitments,” Associate Professor Hapgood said.
‘Working part-time is rare in academia and it is hard to assess the research performance of part-time staff using traditional methods.”
The performance of academics and researchers is increasingly assessed using set metrics such as the number of papers produced in a year or the number of citations the research generates. While these metrics can promote research output within an organisation, they can also undermine diversity, which in ecological terms is fatal to a species as it underpins resilience.
“The ecological model shows that output is not directly related to the hours put in - if you are part-time, you don’t simply produce half the papers of a fulltime academic. There is a long lag time that needs to be factored in,” Associate Professor Hapgood said.
“This implies that research performance metrics targets either are not applicable, or need to be adjusted is a much more sophisticated way than the part-time time fraction.”
Dr Katherine O’Brien from the University of Queensland said research productivity is similar to the birth rate of a new species. Both need to exceed a critical rate if the population is going to grow and survive, and the academic is to become established in their field.
“Research metrics are strongly biased towards full-time continuous employment and penalise academics who take time off before they become established,” said Dr O’Brien.
The model also suggests that if women have children before becoming established they will struggle to remain competitive with their full-time peers. This explains the drift of women from research into teaching, where performance is assessed on current rather than accumulated historical performance.
To address the gender imbalance the researchers suggest that women who go part-time should be strategic and concentrate on either research or teaching.
“The ecological approach demonstrated that any system which operates on a narrow criteria, be it a forest or a faculty, undermines itself by reducing both diversity and the pool of talent from which researchers are drawn,” Dr O’Brien said.
“In a working environment dominated by those working full-time women need to be brave and be prepared to be the odd ones out.”