Researchers in Australia have
applied principles from ecological research to explain why women are being
driven out of academia.
Researchers in Australia have
applied principles from ecological research to explain why women are being
driven out of academia.
Understanding how a species
battles to sustain itself in a challenging habitat is a cornerstone of
ecological research. Here, researchers from The University of Queensland (UQ)
and Monash University have published their findings in the ecology
journal, Oikos, revealing how a gender imbalance in science and
academia is maintained by institutional barriers.
Dr. Kate O’Brien from the UQ
School of Chemical Engineering said in ecology a species can only establish
itself and develop if the population exceeds a certain threshold.
“It’s similar for researchers and
academics who need to reach a certain point before they can attract more
funding, more students to teach and high quality collaborators which can
increase their research productivity,” she said. “Yet there are barriers which
prevent women from reaching this point.”
One of these barriers is the
tendency of female academics towards part-time work in order to balance family
and work commitments.
But working part-time is rare in
academia while university managers find it difficult to assess the research
performance of part-time staff using traditional methods.
Increasingly, the performance of
academics and researchers is being 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 organization, they
can also undermine diversity, which in ecological terms is fatal to a species
as it underpins resilience.
“To use the ecology analogy,
research productivity is similar to the birth rate of a new species,” O’Brien
said.
“Both need to exceed a critical
rate if the population is going to grow and survive, or the academic is to
become established in their field.
“However, research metrics are
strongly biased towards full-time continuous employment and penalize academics
who take time off before they become established.”
The ecological model also
suggests that if women have children before becoming established as an
academic, they will struggle to remain competitive with their full-time peers.
This explains drift of women from
research into teaching, where performance is assessed on current rather than
accumulated historical performance.
“In particular, we demonstrate
that careless application of metrics is likely to further reduce female
participation in research, and so reduce the pool of talent available,” the
authors write.
To address the gender imbalance,
O’Brien and Associate Professor Karen Hapgood suggest that women who go
part-time should be strategic and concentrate on either research or teaching.
In turn university managers
should be cautious in judging success using metrics, and implement schemes to
ensure that part-time work and career breaks are not “one-way tickets” out of
research.
“The ecological approach
demonstrates 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 our researchers are drawn,” 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.”
The article can be found
at: O’Brien KR et al. (2012) The
academic jungle: ecosystem modelling reveals why women are driven out of
research.
——
Source: UQ
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