Devaluation, not work-life balance, drives women out of academic careers

For decades, the leaked pipeline of academic careers has been explained away by one convenient narrative: women leave science because balancing a laboratory with a family is too hard, and motherhood arrives precisely when the tenure clock is ticking. That story has shaped funding priorities, institutional policies and countless mentoring workshops. But a sweeping new study published in PNAS Nexus suggests the story has been wrong at its root. Katie Spoon and colleagues surveyed thousands of current and former tenure-line faculty across 29 academic fields and nearly all PhD-granting institutions in the United States, and their findings point to a quieter, more corrosive force: women in academia are devalued, and that devaluation is what pushes them toward the exit.

The scale of the investigation gives the result unusual weight. Rather than sampling a handful of disciplines or a single institutional tier, the researchers captured responses from faculty spanning STEM and non-STEM fields, close to 300 campuses, and every stratum of institutional prestige. Respondents included people still on the tenure line and people who had already walked away, which allowed the team to compare not only why faculty consider leaving but also why they actually do. Participants were asked a deceptively simple question: what would need to change about your position to reduce your stress, or, for those who had departed, what would have kept you in it?

The answers revealed a stark asymmetry. Thirty-eight percent of women reported experiencing devaluation, compared with just 16 percent of men. In other words, women were more than twice as likely as their male colleagues to describe being discounted, undermined or forced to justify their standing. When the researchers mapped which topics best predicted departures, devaluation stood out as the factor most strongly associated both with women considering leaving and with women actually leaving. Work-life concerns, long the centerpiece of retention policy, did not occupy that position.

What makes the finding especially difficult to dismiss is its consistency. The gendered pattern of devaluation held across STEM and non-STEM disciplines alike, suggesting that the problem is not a peculiarity of laboratory culture or of any single field’s norms. It held across nearly 300 institutions, meaning it cannot be attributed to a few badly run departments. And it held at every level of institutional prestige, from elite research universities to less celebrated campuses, indicating that resources and reputation do not shield women from the experience of being undervalued.

The pattern also grew worse with time, not better. Devaluation was the only topic in the analysis that became more gendered as careers progressed. Among early-career faculty, the gender gap in reported devaluation stood at 19 percentage points. Among late-career faculty, that gap had widened to 31 points. This trajectory inverts the usual assumption about academic life, in which seniority confers security, authority and freedom from scrutiny. Instead, women who had climbed the full ladder to the top of their professions still reported having to justify their professional standing, as if decades of achievement had not settled the question.

The survey’s open-ended responses put raw personal experience behind the numbers. One senior Black woman in the social sciences described having to justify each year why a course release was required for her to properly run her program, while a male colleague directing another program was freely offered what she had to fight to keep. A senior white woman in social work wrote that she had fought for every raise she had ever received, and that the struggle had convinced her over time that the university did not have her back. She added a conditional note that captures what retention might actually require: if she could see leaders in higher education trying to solve these problems in earnest and at scale, she might be tempted to stay.

These testimonies illuminate the technical distinction at the heart of the study’s argument. Work-life balance interventions, such as parental leave, childcare support and flexible scheduling, address external constraints on a career. Devaluation is different: it is a condition of the workplace itself, an ongoing pattern in which women’s contributions are discounted, their requests resisted and their authority questioned. The two problems can coexist, but the data indicate that only one of them tracks so tightly with gender that it explains why women leave at higher rates than men. Policies aimed at flexibility alone may therefore leave the decisive factor untouched.

The intersectional dimension of the findings sharpens the picture further. The effect of devaluation was strongest for women of color, who face layered forms of discounting that neither race nor gender analyses alone can capture. For this group, the experience of having to fight for accommodations and recognition that colleagues receive without asking appears compounded. Any serious retention strategy, the results imply, must be designed with this heterogeneity in mind rather than treating women in academia as a uniform population with a single shared obstacle.

The longitudinal texture of the data, showing a gap that widens from 19 to 31 points across career stages, also carries a warning about timing. If devaluation accumulates rather than fades, interventions aimed only at early-career women, such as the mentoring and onboarding programs many institutions favor, may arrive too early to matter for the departure decisions of mid-career and senior faculty, who are precisely the people whose exit erodes institutional role models and leadership diversity. Retention policy, the authors suggest, needs to address the conditions of senior women’s everyday professional lives, not just the entry pipeline.

According to the authors, the results provide a basis for action by policymakers and institutions hoping to improve equity in academic retention. The actionable content of the study lies in its diagnostic clarity: if the question posed to faculty is what would reduce stress or prevent departure, and the most gendered and most predictive answer is devaluation, then institutions know where to look. Leadership accountability, equitable distribution of course releases and raises, and visible, large-scale institutional commitment to the problem are the directions the evidence points toward. As the survey itself makes clear, the women who remain in academia are watching for that commitment, and for many of them it may be the difference between staying and going.

Subject of Research: Gendered faculty attrition and devaluation in U.S. academia

Article Title: Devaluation, not work-life balance, underlies the academic gender gap

Article References: Devaluation, not work-life balance, underlies the academic gender gap. (n.d.). Original publication

Image Credits: AI Generated

DOI: Not provided

Keywords: academic gender gap, faculty attrition, devaluation, PNAS Nexus, work-life balance, women in STEM, higher education, retention policy, intersectionality, survey research, tenure, institutional equity