Career Success For Female Stem Faculty At Public Two Year Institutions

Very limited research exists on the career advancement of STEM female faculty members at public two-year institutions. Within a four-year institutional setting, several employment outcomes, including representation in faculty and leadership positions, tenure status, academic rank, salaries, disciplinary affiliation, research productivity, and others, are identified as markers of academic career advancement. Community colleges differ dramatically from their four-year counterparts in missions and institutional characteristics. These differences point to the need to re-examine the explanatory power of some findings on STEM career success and advancement outcomes of female faculty in the four-year sector in the context of two-year institutions. In this paper, we present a study to investigate (1) the extent to which the factors associated with advancement and employment outcomes in the four-year sector translate to the two-year institutional context, and (2) the extent to which there exist other factors affecting female faculty members’ employment outcomes that are unique to two-year institutions. This study examines factors associated with community college female faculty members’ academic career success and employment outcomes in STEM fields using secondary data from the 2004 National Study of Postsecondary Faculty (NSOPF).