Hiring and Retention Results at the University of Cincinnati

Achieving higher levels of representation of women in the STEM sciences requires that science departments do a better job of recruiting, hiring, and retaining women scientists. In order to help the University of Cincinnati ADVANCE project team assess whether the under-representation of STEM women at UC is more a matter of not recruiting and hiring enough women or more matter of not retaining them, we conducted survival analyses. We were able to construct a data base of all UC employees who were hired from 1990 to 2012. For employees who left UC, we were able to calculate years of UC employment. Employees still on the UC faculty, or who left the faculty and moved into administrative positions at UC, were right-censored. Key results are as follows: (1) STEM hires have shorter spells of employment than non-STEM hires; (2) STEM women have slightly longer spells of employment than STEM men; (3) the three colleges in which STEM scientists work at UC differ markedly in average length of employment, with there being much higher turnover in Medicine and Engineering than in Arts and Sciences (A&S); (4) however, women in Medicine and Engineering had slightly longer spells of employment than did men, whereas women in A&S had shorter spells; and (5) African American STEM scientists had shorter spells of employment than other STEM scientists. The results of these analyses have important implications for how we create change at the level of academic units

Assessing the Intra-Departmental Social Networks of Male and Female STEM Faculty: A Preliminary Analysis

Social relationships and intra-organizational networking have repeatedly been shown to predict career success.[1] However, building social networks may become difficult when STEM women enter into an area where they are judged, implicitly or explicitly, to be less competent outsiders. Social networks can also become more difficult to manage when work-life demands become unmanageable. Thus, a key component to analyzing the success of the ADVANCE program at the University of Cincinnati (UC LEAF) entails assessing the social climate through real connections between people within UC. To this end, LEAF has begun collecting closed network data from faculty in each of UC’s STEM departments to assess department-level network characteristics. We will use these data specifically to examine whether the networks of men and women faculty within each department differ according to (1) overall number of ties, (2) the types of ties they have (e.g., research vs. teaching, professional vs. personal support), and (3) the “quality” of ties as measured by the rank of those individuals in their departmental networks. We will also match these data with findings from our climate survey to identify whether network characteristics are associated with more or less positive workplace perceptions. In this presentation, we will compare findings from three STEM departments and discuss how these data will be used to assess ADVANCE-related progress and to inform future programming. [1] Sparrowe, R. T., Liden, R. C., Wayne, S. J., & Kraimer, M. L. (2001). Social networks and the performance of individuals and groups. Academy of Management Journal, 44, 316-325