Gender and the influence of research environment in topic selection of early-career faculty in STEM

TL;DR

This study investigates how research environments influence early-career STEM faculty's research choices and collaborations, revealing gender-specific patterns and the impact of departmental gender composition on research topic selection.

Contribution

It uncovers gender differences in collaboration patterns and research topic choices among early-career faculty, emphasizing the role of departmental gender composition.

Findings

Departments attract early-career faculty to collaborate within their existing research areas.

Female newcomers collaborate less with female senior incumbents than expected.

Female faculty in departments with more women tend to choose research topics farther from their department's focus.

Abstract

We study the influence that research environments have in shaping careers of early-career faculty in terms of their research portfolio. We find that departments exert an attractive force over early-career newcomer faculty, who after their incorporation increase their within-department collaborations, and work on topics closer to those of incumbent faculty. However, these collaborations are not gender blind: Newcomers collaborate less than expected with female senior incumbents. The analysis of departments grouped by fraction of female incumbents reveals that female newcomers in departments with above the median fractions of female incumbents tend to select research topics farther from their department than female newcomers in the remaining departments -- a difference we do not observe for male newcomers. Our results suggest a relationship between the collaboration deficit with female incumbents and the selection of research topics of female early-faculty, thus highlighting the importance of studying research environments to fully understand gender differences in academia.