Research Productivity

Tenure and promotion often largely depend on research productivity, making it a crucial issue. Thus, the central question in this section: Is there a gender dispar­ity in productivity? Faculty productivity can be defined in many ways. Here, we focus on grants received, lab space, and demonstrated, discrete output in the form of refereed publications and presentations.[76] Some of these can be the result of the efforts of a single faculty member or a collaboration between faculty members. For example, journal articles are sole authored as well as co-authored. Different disciplines place different amounts of emphasis on individual versus joint efforts. In the analysis of our survey data, we have combined individual and collaborative outcomes. In addition, one can measure productivity over the career of a scholar or more recently. For example, the NSOPF approach is to ask survey respondents to consider their scholarly activity both recently (over the past 2 years) and over their “entire career.” Previous studies have found in the past that female faculty evidenced less research productivity than male faculty; however, this gap appears to be shrinking over time (Cole and Zuckerman, 1984; Fox, 1983, 1985; Long, 1992; NAS, NAE, and IOM, 2007; Xie and Shaumann, 2003). This suggests focusing on recent publications and grant funding, and on current lab space, which is what we have done in our survey data.