Beyond the Leaky Pipeline: A Quantitative Analysis of the Academic Job Market in Humanities and Social Sciences

Abstract

Background: The structural diversity of faculty in higher education remains limited, particularly considering race and gender. Examinations of faculty hiring processes often engage deficit-based explanations rooted in the “pipeline” of potential candidates who have historically minoritized identities. Recent critical examinations of faculty hiring have begun exploring structural and systemic explanations for the continued lack of structural diversity in faculty hiring. Despite the presence of anecdotal beliefs about the job market for doctoral students and early career researchers, empirical evidence about their experiences, qualifications, and successes remains absent from existing literature.

Research Questions: In this analysis, we ask: What are the experiences, characteristics, and qualifications of humanities and social sciences faculty job seekers in 2020? Are there relationships between candidates’ qualifications and job market success? Do differences exist between normative productivity metrics based on candidates’ social identities? And finally, are there relationships between candidate labor in the job market and measures of job market success when considering candidates’ social identities?

Research Design: The quantitative data for this exploratory analysis come from the 2019-2020 administration of the Job Search Collaborative Applicant Survey. The sample includes over 300 doctoral students and early-career researchers seeking faculty positions in humanities or social sciences. Operating from a critical frame, we provide descriptive information about the participants, their preparation, their job search behaviors, and indicators of success on the job market. We then engaged a series of Mann-Whitney U tests and chi-squared analyses to explore the second research question. Finally, we engaged Pearson’s product-moment correlation to test for association between paired samples.

Findings/Results: The results of the study provide data that informs realities of candidates’ experiences on the faculty job market in humanities and social sciences during 2020. No significant differences emerged based on race or gender across multiple productivity metrics (e.g., publications, citations). Despite this, race and gender did have significant relationships with success measurements including first-round interviews, on-campus interviews, and job offers.

Conclusions/Recommendations: The continual focus on increasing candidate productivity through an emphasis on normative academic metrics (e.g., publications, citations) within the faculty job search process may not yield success within the faculty job market for doctoral students and early career researchers in humanities and social sciences. Instead, institutional agents must engage power-conscious perspectives for acknowledging and addressing the perpetuation of systemic inequalities within faculty hiring.