A third of science researchers leave academia within 5 years

According to a new study, one-third of science researchers leave academia by the 5th year of their careers and half leave by their 10th year. But attrition rates, which are typically higher for women than men, appear to be becoming less gendered over time (High. Educ. 2024, DOI: 10.1007/s10734-024-01284-0).

These conclusions are based on the publishing records of over 350,000 scientists from 16 scientific disciplines and 38 countries. The study authors used the scientists’ publishing history to mark the start and end of their careers, then split the study group into two cohorts: those who began publishing in 2000 and those who began publishing in 2010.

Of the 142,776 scientists who began publishing in 2000, the study authors found that one-third had stopped publishing within 5 years and half had stopped by year 10.

Women in this cohort, identified by names on scientific papers, were more likely than men to stop publishing. The likelihood that a woman continued publishing after 10 years was around 49%, compared with 54% for men. Other genders were not considered.

“For this old cohort, there was a substantial gender difference in attrition,” says Marek Kwiek, director of the Institute for Advanced Studies in Social Sciences and Humanities at Adam Mickiewicz University and coauthor of the study.

The gender gap observed in this cohort aligns with previous work. A study last year showed that women leave academia at higher rates than men at every career level (Science 2023, DOI: 10.1126/sciadv.adi2205).

The new work by Kwiek and his doctoral student Lukasz Szymula suggests that the gender gap could be narrowing among newer generations, however. When the researchers looked at the 232,843 scientists who began publishing in 2010, the probability that men and women would be actively publishing 9 years into their careers was nearly identical: 42% and 41%, respectively. But, overall, this group is leaving science sooner and in greater numbers than those in the previous group, Kwiek says.

These findings “are extremely valuable for understanding our progress towards equity in science,” says Katie Spoon, a PhD candidate in computer science at the University of Colorado Boulder, who coauthored the 2023 study. The fact that “attrition in science is becoming less gendered makes studies of the gendered reasons for attrition even more critical,” she says.

Spoon says that her 2023 study indicates that even when attrition rates don’t differ by gender, the reasons that researchers leave science often do. For example, it found that women were more likely to feel pushed out of academia by a poor workplace environment, whereas men left because they felt pulled toward better opportunities.

In addition, gender differences were still present when Kwiek and Szymula zoomed into data from specific disciplines. Women were more likely than men to leave certain fields, such as biochemistry, genetics, molecular biology, and medicine. These are also fields in which women make up around half the research population.

“This is one of the biggest puzzles for us,” Kwiek says. “But we can’t answer it without talking to those who left and talking to those who are there.” In the future, he plans to conduct several thousand interviews using artificial intelligence and chatbots.

Although the overall attrition rates are grim, Kwiek also sees things through a different lens. “In the beginning I was thinking it’s a disaster because so many of us are disappearing,” he says. But he points out that one-third of the older cohort kept publishing after 20 years, which represents “hundreds of thousands of people staying in the science sector.”