Faculty who are planning to leave or retire, particularly the former, may be indicating that they are dissatisfied with their current work situation. Our survey asked faculty whether they were planning on leaving or retiring from their
current institution.[83] The variable was dichotomous; either the faculty member was not planning to leave or retire or they were. Out of 1,404 full-time faculty respondents, 171 did not provide an answer to this question, and the percentage of missing observations was essentially the same among men and women (13 percent compared to 11 percent, respectively). Both in general and disaggregated by field, there were no differences between men and women in their responses about whether they were planning to leave or retire (overall—men, 36.2 percent; women, 38.8 percent). Appendix 4-24 shows the percentage of men and women in each discipline who have indicated that they are not considering leaving or retiring from the institution. Since a larger percentage of men than women should be reaching retirement age, these data may suggest that more women than men are thinking of leaving their current institution for nonretirement reasons.
To get a clearer look at those faculty whose thoughts about leaving may more directly reflect dissatisfaction with their professional situation, we examined the percentage of faculty who were both planning to leave and had offers to leave in the past 5 years. We reasoned that faculty who were retiring were likely to respond positively to planning to leave but negatively to having recent offers to leave. Faculty who wished to change jobs were more likely to respond positively to both questions. There was no significant gender difference in the percentage of men and women overall who fit both conditions (men, 49 percent; women, 58 percent). Disaggregated by field, the difference between men and women was significant only in the case of electrical engineering, in which women were more likely than men to be considering leaving and to have received an outside offer.