Who benefits from the lack of advancement of women in STEMM academics?
Source: Wikimedia Commons [1]
Cicero famously asked “who benefits?” to expose interests motivating crimes. We can pose the same question regarding the motivations that underlie the lack of women’s advancement in STEMM academics.
By Janet G. Hering and Patricia A. Maurice
17 March 2026, DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.18892458
It is often considered a ‘paradox’ that women are well represented and successful in many academic disciplines up through the doctoral and even postdoctoral level but poorly represented in the tenured faculty, especially at the level of full professor [2]. Women also tend to be underrepresented in academic leadership positions such as Presidents or Rectors, Vice Presidents or Vice Rectors, Deans, and Department Heads, since these positions are usually filled from the ranks of the tenured faculty. Can the question “who benefits?” (“cui bono?”) shed light on this apparent paradox?
To answer this question, we must consider the interests and incentives of those in positions of academic leadership, including members of governing boards, as well as the interests of influential senior professors who exercise informal power [3] within their institutions. How do they benefit from the patterns of female representation in STEMM academics?
Filling the classroom
At elite universities, teaching holds an ambiguous position in the hierarchy of faculty activities. Elite universities often owe their status not to their teaching but rather to the research environment that they provide and to the research outputs of their faculty, up to and including the most prestigious recognition such as the Nobel Prize. At the same time, many faculty are dedicated to teaching [4], with female faculty often taking on disproportionate levels of service in teaching and mentoring [5]. Women are often over-represented among contingent faculty, who perform teaching duties without the benefit of long-term contracts [6]. Nonetheless, teaching is considered a core activity of the university and often generates income for the institution either in the form of tuition or fees paid by students and their parents or as public subsidies directly linked to student enrollment. Courses with too few students are often dropped from the course catalog and departments with insufficient enrollment may be merged or disbanded entirely. Furthermore, successful graduates may later feel gratitude and loyalty to their (under)graduate institutions, supporting them through contributions to alumni associations and direct donations. For private institutions in the US, highly successful alumni often serve as members of the boards of the universities from which they graduated.
So, there is a shared interest among the faculty and academic leadership to maintain or even boost enrollments – whether the students filling the classrooms are men or women is of little concern. Female students often express their wish to have women professors as role models, which may help to promote recruitment of women into the faculty. Such student interest may, however, become counter-productive if women become a super-majority of the students since this may raise concerns for the longer-term attractiveness of the discipline and for future success of its graduates. Increasing representation of women in a profession has been found to correlate with decreasing compensation [7].
Skilled research assistance
At the doctoral and postdoctoral level, simply filling the classroom and offering the potential of future donations is not enough. Research advisors, who are often professors, need skilled labor for experimental, modelling, and theoretical tasks as well as for field work. Doctoral students and postdocs, who are closer to the forefront developments in their fields, may generate ideas for improvements in research approaches or even new research directions. Ideally, this is a mutually beneficial relationship in which the advisee benefits from the experience, knowledge, and network of the advisor, who helps to shape the advisee’s work into a defensible – and eventually publishable – form. The gender of doctoral students and postdocs, like that of undergraduates, should be a secondary consideration for advisors if they are mainly concerned with the talent, skill, and work ethic of their advisees. Although some advisors may shy away from taking on female advisees due to logistical concerns regarding potential pregnancy and maternity or female safety in some field settings, the overall representation of women at this academic level is equitable.
The role of Assistant Professors (tenure-track and non-tenure track)
Energetic, ‘hungry’, and trained in the latest techniques and research approaches, Assistant Professors bring new impetus to the departments that hire them. Their ‘start-up’ packages provide for the purchase of instrumentation that may have benefits for their senior colleagues as well as for the new hire. Indeed, some unscrupulous senior colleagues may seek to exploit such benefits unfairly [8]. Although Assistant Professors usually have some relief from teaching, they are often willing (or can be convinced) to take on classes that their senior colleagues would rather avoid.
Non-tenure track appointments for assistant professors have become more common in European universities. Such appointments are often externally funded, for example by the European Research Council (ERC) Starting Grants [9]. Attracting a successful ERC Starting Grant awardee can bring prestige to the host university but may conflict with the institution’s own professorial planning. Although tenure-track or tenured positions may be created for some external grant holders, a more likely outcome is that they enter a job market being overqualified for assistant professorships, which is a common target level for faculty hiring.
When colleagues become competition
Senior faculty colleagues face little competition from Assistant Professors, who have usually not had time to embed themselves in the informal power networks that can provide access to resources [3]. Moreover, tenure-track Assistant Professors are often wary of antagonizing senior colleagues who will eventually have a vote on their tenure cases and could open doors to various professional opportunities [10]. But eventually, at least some junior colleagues will advance to the ranks of the tenured faculty and will have built their own networks both within their institutions and in their broader professional circles. If they are lucky, these advancing junior colleagues will be seen by their senior colleagues as protégés who will carry on a departmental or disciplinary legacy. There are certainly some senior faculty who are very generous toward their junior colleagues, as we have written in our posts on allyship [11] and individual male allies [12-16]. But other senior faculty may feel competitive with their junior colleagues, seeing them not as protégés, but rather as threats. In the US, this may be exacerbated by the absence of age-based retirement for academics. In Europe, where tenure track hiring is a recently established practice, there is less of a tradition than in the US of mentoring junior colleagues.
Discriminatory filtering
Various quantitative analyses show that women are more likely to leave academia than men but generally provide little insight into the question “did she jump or was she pushed?”. The age of appointment and period of evaluation of tenure-track Assistant Professors tends to coincide with the age at which women’s fertility declines. Thus, the conclusion has often been drawn that women self-select away from academic careers to have children and more time for their newborns or for children that they had earlier.
But most of these statistics focus on the “absolute attrition of women, while failing to consider the unequal attrition between men and women” [17]. An alternative approach was taken to analyze the representation of women in geosciences in the US, a field in which 30% of doctorates have been awarded to women since 2000, over 2 decades ago. These data were analyzed by comparing the advancement of women with that of men to generate a ‘fractionation factor’, for which a value above one indicates preferential advancement of women and a value below one a disproportionate loss of women. The greatest disproportionate loss of women was observed for advancement from Associate to Full Professor; the fractionation factor for this career step was still less than one in 2020 [17]. A much broader study of nearly 250,000 tenured and tenure-track academics employed between 2011 and 2020 showed that women left academic positions even after gaining tenure – workplace climate was identified as a significant basis for this decision throughout women’s careers [18, 19]. Women were more likely than men to report feeling ‘pushed out’ of their positions in contrast to men who reported feeling ‘pulled in’ by new opportunities. These differences were strongest for the most senior cohort (31-40 years post-PhD) [19]. These findings suggest that the improvements in gender parity in the hiring of junior faculty may be transient and that “faculty cohorts… will become progressively less diverse, on average, as they age” [19]. A study of academics in Australia has characterized women’s careers as in a ‘holding pattern’ as compared with men’s careers benefiting from a ‘tailwind’, the difference being partly attributed to caring responsibilities, service activities and a lack of support from colleagues [20]. A personal perspective on this issue was presented by Patricia in her book Do Science Like a Girl [21] and her accompanying post [22].
Concluding comments and questions for further thought
The hiring of female faculty, especially at the junior (Assistant Professor) level, is prioritized at many institutions. In contrast, the retention of female faculty receives little attention. Unfortunately, this discrepancy coincides with the interests of (mostly male) senior faculty who would prefer to retain access to and control over resources. Unless we are consciously aware of these power dynamics [3], we will be ill-prepared to counter them. As senior women leaders in STEMM, we can promote and reward generosity toward our junior colleagues and work to make information about available resources and the ways to access them more transparent and fairer.
An even more difficult issue, however, is that conventional academic incentives (which are strongly driven by high impact publications and funding acquisition) tend to overvalue individual accomplishment and undervalue collective and community efforts and accomplishments [23]. In responding to the pressures of rankings and fund-raising, academic leadership may be inclined to overlook inappropriate or even unethical behavior and associations. This has been sadly demonstrated in the case of leading academics’ association with the late Jeffrey Epstein, which was also characterized by undisguised misogyny [24].
As well as disadvantaging women and members of underrepresented minority groups, the conventional incentives, attitudes, and power dynamics of academia prioritize work that narrowly benefits academic institutions at the expense of work that serves the broader interests and needs of society. As previous posts [25-27] have suggested, a more humane working environment in academia would increase its attractiveness to students and staff at all levels and allow universities and research institutions to prioritize work that addresses the pressing challenges facing society.
In closing, here are a few questions to stimulate further thought and discussion:
· Have you considered leaving academia at some point in your career? What were the major factors in your decision?
· Are you aware of different expectations held and opportunities or barriers experienced by colleagues who are not the same gender as you?
· Have you experienced or observed exclusionary practices that might push you or colleagues to leave academia?
Notes, links, and references
[1] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cicero_Denounces_Catiline_in_the_Roman_Senate_by_Cesare_Maccari_-_3.jpg (accessed December 6, 2025)
[2] European Commission: Directorate-General for Research and Innovation (2025) She Figures 2024 – Gender in research and innovation – Statistics and indicators, Publications Office of the European Union, https://data.europa.eu/doi/10.2777/6847557 (accessed January 1, 2026)
[3] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/an-introduction-to-power-for-women-in-stemm-academic-leadership
[4] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/our-students-are-our-greatest-gifts-and-our-proudest-legacies
[6] Colby, G. and Guzman, R. (2025) “Data Snapshot: Women Faculty and Faculty of Color, Fall 2023” Academe Magazine, https://www.aaup.org/academe/issues/fall-2025/data-snapshot-women-faculty-and-faculty-color-fall-2023 (accessed February 28, 2026).
[7] AFL-CIO Dept. for Professional Employees (2025) “Women Professionals: Making Gains Despite Persistent Inequality in the U.S. Workforce” https://www.dpeaflcio.org/factsheets/professional-union-women (accessed March 4, 2026).
[8] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/liar-liar-campus-on-fire-how-to-cope-with-dishonest-colleagues
[9] European Research Council (n.d.) “Starting Grant”, https://erc.europa.eu/apply-grant/starting-grant (accessed February 28, 2026).
[10] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/why-stemm-leaders-need-to-talk-seriously-about-ethics
[12] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/allies-for-women-leaders-in-stemm-thoughts-from-an-unabashed-optimist
[16] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/equity-for-women-in-stemm-academics-as-a-strategic-priority
[17] Ranganathan et al. (2021) “Trends in the Representation of Women Among US Geoscience Faculty From 1999 to 2020: The Long Road Toward Gender Parity”, AGU Advances, 2, e2021AV000436, https://agupubs.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1029/2021AV000436
[18] Sidik, S. (2023) “Toxic workplaces are the main reason women leave academic jobs”, Nature 623: 19, https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03251-8
[19] Spoon, K. et al. (2023) “Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty”. Science Advances, 9: eadi2205, https://www.science.org/doi/10.1126/sciadv.adi2205
[20] Sharafizad, F., Brown, K., Omari, M., Jogulu, U. (2021) “Women’s academic careers are in a ‘holding pattern’ while men enjoy a ‘tailwind’”, The Conversation, https://doi.org/10.64628/AA.rnxcfjrc6 (accessed February 28, 2026).
[21] Maurice, P.A. (2025) Do Science Like a Girl: how women in science are changing the world. M&M Honey Farms Press, Edwardsburg MI, USA, ISBN 9781300277453
[23] Urai, A.E. and Kelly, C. (2023) “Point of View: Rethinking academia in a time of climate crisis” eLife, 12:e84991. DOI: https://doi.org/10.7554/eLife.84991
[24] Kutz, J. (2026) “The boys’ club: How Epstein’s influence shaped the exclusion of women in STEM”, The 19th, https://19thnews.org/2026/02/epstein-files-academic-research-women-scientists/ (accessed February 28, 2026).
[27] https://www.epistimi.org/blog/better-science-initiative-sustainable-research-culture-for-all