The proposal addresses the characteristics and role of networks in career advancement, outcomes, and mentoring for women and underrepresented minority academic scientists in non-Research I institutions. The questions driving the research concern the structural and resource determinants of underrepresentation, career success and satisfaction of women and underrepresented minorities PhDs who have faculty appointments in Research II and Comprehensive institutions.
The PIs propose to use OLS regression and structural equation modeling to answer research questions related to gender differences, relationships between network structure and outcomes, and the association of background characteristics on networks. The PIs will survey women and minority scientists in civil engineering, chemistry, physics and computer science. They will use event history analysis to study career trajectories from the curriculum vitae. To ensure limited bias, the PIs will compare characteristics of the respondents with the general population in terms of rank, gender, and field. Finally, another survey and interviews will target named mentees. The interviews will add an important qualitative dimension to the study.
The study addresses significant questions about how women and minorities at Research II and Comprehensive institutions access and use professional networks and to what effect. The PIs state that the project can inform education policy as it continues to seek new mechanisms to encourage and foster greater representation of women and minorities in STEM fields. The findings would provide a more nuanced assessment of the complex interactive environment that creates structures and provides resources that are critical to the career trajectory of minority STEM faculty.
Summary The project sought to understand three inter-related dynamics in the higher education science system: 1) The types of social and professional relationships and networks that help or hinder the development and advancement of science and engineering faculty careers and scientific productivity; and 2) To investigate whether these systems and networks of relationships operate differently based on the gender, race and ethnicity of the scientist; and 3) How the diverse system of American colleges and universities institutional settings, cultures, and support systems operate to foster and promote scientific careers. Scientific careers originate from, and work within, all parts of the American higher education system. We consider the study of academic scientists, their experiences, and their interaction with early career students to be critical in understanding and addressing factors that matter for the strengthening and success of the U.S. scientific enterprise. Academic scientists have their beginnings—and continue to contribute as professors—in master’s level comprehensive universities and teaching-focused institutions, both large and small. Focused specialty institutions such as Historically Black Colleges and Universities, Hispanic Serving Institutions, and women’s colleges are particularly important in producing students who continue on into advanced scientific training and academic careers. When we consider professional networks of scientists, findings show that collaboration, teaching and advice networks vary by race and by institution. When we consider career outcomes such as professional advancement, we find that scientists are particularly helped by social relationships that involve science-specific resources such as writing together and inclusion on funded research. We find that social relationships that are focused on advice giving tend not to be helpful, and there is some evidence that such advice-giving can actually hinder progress. We found that both the system as a whole, and the social networks within the system, are structured by gender, race and ethnicity. The system findings are well-documented: The more research intensive and elite the university, the more is it comprised of a disproportionately white, Asian, and male academic workforce. What we contribute with this research is the knowledge that these macro level system dynamics also translate into micro level differences in the ways that the social networks of men and women, and of majority and minority scientists operate to affect scientific education and career outcomes. Intellectual Merit Several features of this project contribute to the body of methods and data available to study the educational and career trajectories of academic scientists. Because there are so many different kinds of American universities and colleges, we developed a comprehensive sampling frame of nearly 26,000 academic scientists working in 521 universities and colleges. From this sampling frame, we employed stratified sampling criteria to select 9,925 target participants, over-sampling women, and members of racial and ethnic minority groups in four disciplines: Biology, Biochemistry, Mathematics, and Civil Engineering. In this way, we achieved a sample that was representative in terms of discipline, institution type, gender, and race and ethnicity. This is an uncommon achievement because small numbers makes it impossible to engage in simple random sampling: Our sampling plan assured a diverse study sample. Once we had specified our diverse sample, we collected data from several thousand academic scientists. We used a type of data collection method that allowed us to construct the social networks of these professors: We are able to see the relationships that they have with other scientists, their students, mentors, and other kinds of institutions. We also collected survey data about commonly used scientific measures such as publication productivity and grants activity. Finally, we collected the resumes of participants so that we can study how their publications are used by others, the different kinds of disciplines and institutions each person has passed through, and the speed with which career promotions and changes take place. Broader Impacts The United States has many different kinds of universities and colleges, which is a unique feature of the higher education system. Together, these thousands of institutions educate millions of students each year. Furthermore, they are central to the nation’s ability to engage in scientific knowledge creation and the technical products that result from such work. These institutions collectively educate the nation’s increasingly diverse population: The scientific education of women, and members of racial/ethnic minority groups are at historic levels. At the same time, the system continues to work for traditionally majority groups such as men, whites, and Asians. This project contributes to our knowledge base about how this educational science system—and not just elite research intensive parts of it—works. Our results underscore the importance of supporting an institutionally diverse educational system, while at the same time continuing to focus on the gender, ethnic and racial diversification of the scientifically educated. Public support for colleges and universities is critical to the development and deployment of a well-trained, productive, and diverse scientific labor force.
