Why Women Professors Are More Likely to Leave Their Jobs

“Much of the past literature on women academics—tenure-line professors in particular—talks about how one of the major barriers to success that may push them out of the workforce has to do with work–life balance, especially in terms of managing career and family,” says Lauren Rivera, a professor of management and organizations at the Kellogg School.  

But that explanation paints an incomplete picture, according to a study by Rivera and her colleagues Katie Spoon of Stanford University; Joanna Mendy of the University of Washington; Aaron Clauset, Maria Martinez, and Daniel Larremore of the University of Colorado; and Mirta Galesic of the Santa Fe Institute. 

The researchers studied more than 6,000 current and former tenure-track academics at about 300 PhD-granting institutions in the U.S., including professors in STEM fields like engineering and non-STEM fields like economics. They found that the factor most strongly associated with women professors leaving their position was devaluation—the experience of feeling excluded, disrespected, mistreated, or held to different standards.  

“In our study, the most-gendered factor associated with attrition was not work–life issues; it’s actually this experience of being devalued within departments and universities,” says Rivera. “Women felt that they were devalued precisely because of their gender.”  

Six thousand stories 

The team’s research focused primarily on professors’ free-text responses to an open-ended question, which was part of a larger study of workplace experiences among tenure-line faculty.  

For professors who had switched institutions, left academia, or retired, the question was about what needed to be different for them to have stayed. For professors who had not switched, left, or retired, the question was about what needed to be different to reduce negative experiences in their positions.  

Rather than have an algorithm sift through the responses, the researchers took a manual approach—reading and coding each response and then looking for patterns as they emerged. They hand coded 6,615 professors’ responses in all. 

“We were interested in understanding their experiences from the ground up,” Rivera says. 

The pool of professors who responded to the survey spanned a wide range of career stages, academic ranks, and fields. They gave many different reasons for leaving or thinking about leaving their positions, from the pressure of running a lab to struggles with specific administrative policies, work–life balance, and salary. 

Among all these reasons, feeling devalued (both formally and informally) stood out as the most gendered experience. Specifically, women were 3.4 times more likely than men to report devaluation.  

“Both women and men do report devaluation, but women report it so much more than men,” says Rivera.  

For many women, devaluation was not a single dramatic incident but rather an accumulation of experiences. One white woman in business, who was pre-tenure, described it the following way: 

“It’s 1,000 cuts. From colleagues not saying hi to you when you say hi to them. Or knowing that a group of guys regularly goes to lunch and being brave enough to ask them to come get you but then have them not follow through. … To hav[ing] men interrupt and aggressively question my knowledge base. To never be[ing] given the benefit of the doubt.” 

Reports of devaluation were consistently higher for women in both STEM and non-STEM fields. Still, the difference between how often women and men reported feeling devalued varied across disciplines. The gender split was especially high in engineering (a 39 percent difference) and economics (36 percent), compared with just 18 percent in computer science and 15 percent in psychology. 

A surprisingly high share 

Not only did women consistently report feeling devalued more often than men did across career stages, but to the researchers’ surprise, the gender gap increased with seniority as well.  

“A surprisingly high share of senior tenured women were considering leaving their tenured positions because of these intense and persistent experiences of gender-based devaluation,” Rivera says. “Being at the top of your field doesn’t neutralize or buffer the types of gender biases or forms of mistreatment that are disproportionately targeted at women.” 

What’s more, the devaluation experienced by women was explicitly tied to their identity—including their gender, age, race, or parental status—much more often than it was in men: 52 percent for women compared with 13 percent for men.  

Women of color in particular reported devaluation at a higher rate than other groups: 76 percent for Indigenous women, 51 percent for Hispanic women, 51 percent for Black women, and 41 percent for Asian women. In comparison, the rate was 36 percent for white women, 24 percent for men of color, and 14 percent for white men.  

“In addition to devaluation being the most explicitly gendered aspect of the workplace environment that people reported complaints about, it was also the most racialized,” Rivera says. 

Banding together 

The researchers further used a model to characterize associations in the professors’ responses. Out of all the concerns reported, devaluation appeared to have the strongest connection with women’s departures. In other words, devaluation seemed to be the driving force for professors leaving or considering leaving their jobs much more often for women than it was for men.  

One white pre-tenure woman in engineering shared a series of experiences in which she felt she was treated differently from her colleagues who were men, including being paid less and having her leadership potential questioned by her department despite being asked to lead efforts in her field. But what seemed particularly consequential was what happened when she raised these concerns: 

“When I bring up evidence of issues like these, more times than not I am told my problems aren’t real problems,” she wrote. “No matter what I do, the pervasive lack of support for women at my institution and in my field continuously sets me up for failure, and because of that, I am looking for other jobs.” 

That pattern appeared repeatedly in the responses.  

What seems especially damaging is when women report concerns about gender-based devaluation, harassment, or discrimination to administrators, only to have those concerns ignored, minimized, or met with retaliation rather than meaningfully addressed. “Those things together really ignite devaluation and increase attrition risk,” says Rivera. “That sense of institutional betrayal … that’s when, regardless of their seniority, women are really considering leaving.” 

Rivera speculates that academia might be particularly vulnerable to this trend because of a lack of oversight or managerial training compared with other organizations. Leaders are often trained as professors first, rather than as formal managers, and may not have sufficient training in how to properly respond when someone reports harm, for example. 

To address this shortcoming, it’s important to establish and enforce formal evaluation standards, says Rivera. “Universities need to look deeper and to look critically at the infrastructure of evaluation and reward allocation.” 

Fixing the more-informal forms of devaluation, like harassment, is harder, but Rivera sees opportunities for improvement there as well.  

“I think one of the obvious ways is to have better reporting structures, and when women report mistreatment, harm, et cetera, we should believe them,” she says. “It is so simple, but it often doesn’t happen.” Indeed, the findings suggest that an inadequate institutional response can compound the original experience of devaluation rather than resolve it. 

A potentially more-impactful change would be to create a more-collegial, inclusive workplace culture—to “create norms that actually make people think of other people as full human beings,” says Rivera. 

University administrators should take note of these needs, not just because of how they affect faculty but also because of how they could affect the school’s bottom line. “Hiring is one of the most costly things organizations do, and onboarding and attrition is expensive,” Rivera says. “So there’s a business case for taking what is documented in this paper very seriously.” 

Finally, Rivera hopes that individual professors, “whether they’ve experienced devaluation or not, can band together. We know that when people come together collectively, that’s when change is more likely to be enacted.”