The unequal impact of parenthood in academia

Abstract

Across academia, men and women tend to publish at unequal rates. Existing explanations include the potentially unequal impact of parenthood on scholarship, but a lack of appropriate data has prevented its clear assessment. Here, we 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 United States and Canada, along with data on institution-specific parental leave policies. Parenthood explains most of the gender productivity gap by lowering the average short-term productivity of mothers, even as parents 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.

Fig. 1. Cumulative productivity of men and women over their careers.

Average cumulative productivity relative to first tenure-track position and corresponding gender productivity gaps for (A) computer science faculty (blue; N = 1006), (B) business faculty (red; N = 491), and (C) history faculty (green; N = 285) with and without children. Insets show the same for faculty without children. Shaded regions denote the bootstrapped interval around the mean. Darker colors denote trends for men and brighter colors for women. Publications from computer science have been time-adjusted (section SB)

Fig. 2. Annual productivity of faculty with and without children.

Average annual productivity for men and women, relative to the birth of their first child (dark) or a counterfactual first child (light), for (A) computer science, (B) business, and (C) history. Values shown are the immediate productivity changes between parents and faculty without children, relative to the expected productivity of that group (${\mathrm{\beta }}_6/{\widehat{Y}}_0$). Estimates are adjusted for institutional prestige (section SD).

Fig. 3. Parental leave policy availability, knowledge, importance, and usage for faculty.

Proportions of (A) universities with parental leave policies, (B) early-career parents with knowledge of those policies, (C) faculty who reported that parental leave was important in choosing their current position, and (D) eligible parents’ usage of those policies, for faculty in computer science (blue), business (red), and history (green) faculty. Parental leave policies are coded as either at least 10 weeks long (roughly a semester; solid), more than 0 and less than 10 weeks (lighter), unknown policy (lightest), or no paid leave (empty). Pairwise hypotheses tests across gender with ***P < 0.01.

Fig. 4. Cumulative career productivity of fathers and mothers before and after 2000.

Average cumulative productivity relative to their first child’s birth and corresponding gender productivity gaps for (A) computer science (blue; N = 724), (B) business (red; N = 366), and (C) history (green; N = 185) faculty who became parents after the year 2000; insets show the same for faculty who became parents before 2000.