Academia roundup #3
A summary of what I'm reading this week
There were several insightful papers and articles written about academic careers over the past couple of weeks.
A large study examined how retention of faculty at US universities varied by gender. Using a combination of census data and surveys, the authors concluded that women are far more likely to be pushed out of academia as opposed to leaving to pursue better opportunities.
An article from last year resurfaced on social media and highlighted past work12 to note that just five universities produce one of every eight faculty at major universities in the USA. In addition, faculty are up to 25 times more likely to have a parent with a Ph.D. than not.
Here are 10 simple rules for creating a mom-friendly academia.
Nature released its 2023 survey of postdocs. The survey highlighted the frustration among postdocs regarding job instability, pay, and increases in the cost of living.
Outside of the career articles above, I also enjoyed reading a pair of other articles. The first article notes the importance of humility for researchers engaged in collaborative research. Stephen Heard points out the distinction between revising and editing.
Lastly, an important study on reproducibility was released as a preprint. The study provided the same data to over 100 different research groups to address the same set of questions. They found enormous variation in the effect sizes calculated between the groups.
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41562-022-01425-4
https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-022-05222-x