Title:

The unequal impact of parenthood in academia

Abstract:

Across academia, men and women tend to publish at unequal rates. This pattern holds worldwide and has been known for at least 40 years. There have been many explanations for this difference, including a potentially unequal impact of parenthood on scholarship. But, a lack of appropriate data has prevented its clear assessment. In this talk, I'll show how we can clearly quantify the impact of parenthood on scholarship, using an extensive survey of the timing of parenthood events, longitudinal publication data, and perceptions of research expectations among 3064 tenure-track faculty at 450 Ph.D.-granting computer science, history, and business departments across the U.S. and Canada, along with data on institution-specific parental leave policies. We find that parenthood explains most of the gender productivity gap by lowering the average short-term productivity of mothers, even as parents themselves tend to be slightly more productive on average than nonparents. However, the size of productivity penalty for mothers appears to have shrunk over time. Women report that paid parental leave and adequate childcare are important factors in their recruitment and retention. These results have broad implications for efforts to improve the inclusiveness of scholarship, both in the U.S. which is the source of our data, and other countries, where research shows similar effects exist despite different and often more supportive policy environments for parenthood.

Joint work with Allison Morgan, Samuel Way, Michael Hoefer, Dan Larremore, and Mirta Galesic.

Biography: 

Aaron Clauset is a Professor in the Department of Computer Science and the BioFrontiers Institute at the University of Colorado Boulder, and is External Faculty at the Santa Fe Institute. He received a PhD in Computer Science, with distinction, from the University of New Mexico, a BS in Physics, with honors, from Haverford College, and was an Omidyar Fellow at the prestigious Santa Fe Institute. In 2016, he was awarded the Erdos-Renyi Prize in Network Science, and since 2017, he has been a Deputy Editor responsible for the Social, Computing, and Interdisciplinary Sciences at Science Advances.

Clauset is an internationally recognized expert on network science, data science, and machine learning for complex systems. His research program focuses on two general themes: identifying fundamental principles of the organization and behavior of complex social and biological systems, and developing approaches for using data and computation to explore those ideas. A recent major focus of this work has been on the "science of science," where he studies the shape, origins, and consequences of social biases and epistemic inefficiencies on scientific careers, productivity, the spread of ideas, and the composition of the scientific workforce. His research results have appeared in the most prestigious scientific venues, including Nature, Science, PNAS, SIAM Review, Science Advances, Nature Communications, AAAI, and ICDM. His work has been covered in the popular press by Quanta Magazine, the Wall Street Journal, The Economist, Discover Magazine, Wired, the Boston Globe and The Guardian.