Scientists’ Participation in University Research Centers: What are the Gender Differences?

University-affiliated multidisciplinary research centers have grown in importance in academia. Most research to-date has focused on these centers from an institutional perspective, with recent work only beginning to explore the ways in which such centers affect the development of academic careers. Hence, little is known about how scientists who are centeraffiliated differ from those who are not affiliated. Clearly, both selection and influence effects may be expected to operate in terms of research productivity, timing, and resources. A further puzzle is how center affiliation may differ between male and female scientists. In this study, we use a new, nationally representative dataset of scientists and engineers working in Carnegie Research Extensive universities to develop an understanding of how center-affiliated scientists differ from exclusively department-based academic scientists and engineers, and investigate the extent to which gender moderates the effects of centers. As expected, our national sample shows that women are younger, whiter, less likely to be tenured, and at a lower rank than their male colleagues. We find that women are as likely to join centers as men, and do so at a similar stage in their career. Most of the male–female differences observed in disciplinary settings are sustained in centers, but women appear to have greater research equality in them (compared to the departmental setting). In particular, men and women in centers spend the same amount of time writing grant proposals, conducting both grant-supported and unfunded research, and administering grants. This suggests that centers may constitute an institutional context in which some aspects of gender equity in science may be achieved. JEL Classificaton: C42, O32, Z13, E61 1. At the forefront of US production of scientists and engineers The development of national research infrastructure is central to the American innovation system, and the Research Extensive universities are a crucial component of that engine of growth (Crow and Bozeman, 1998). A large body of work has demonstrated that female academic scientists remain disadvantaged in their access to research resources, and the rewards that attend them such as productivity and career progression. However, this work has focused almost exclusively on scientists in traditional academic departments. A question we believe has received insufficient attention is what role the development of university-based research centers, in which 40% of academic scientists and engineers now work, plays in the career prospects and patterns of underrepresented groups. In this paper, we seek to explore how centers and departments differ in creating contexts for female academic career success. Our own earlier work leads us to expect that centers create different opportunity structures for female scientists; in this study, we use a better sampling strategy to investigate our earlier findings (Gaughan and Bozeman, 2002; Corley et al., 2003; Bozeman and Corley, 2004). We briefly recapitulate the findings about women academic scientists, bearing in mind that this special issue addresses the literature comprehensively. We focus especially on university-based research centers as new organizational contexts for scientific career development. We find there are few studies that link the direct effects of universitybased science centers on academic scientists, or that provide clues to how faculty members perform in them. There is enough work, however, to use the two literatures to generate hypotheses to evaluate men’s and women’s experiences in university-based science centers at Research Extensive universities. We then test these hypotheses using data from the 2004 Survey of Academic Researchers completed by the Research Value Arizona State University, School of Public Affairs, Tempe, AZ 85287-0603 E-mail: [email protected] Georgia Institute of Technology, School of Public Policy, 685 Cherry Street NW, Atlanta, GA, 30332 E-mail: [email protected] Journal of Technology Transfer, 30: 371–381, 2005 2005 Springer Science+Business Media, Inc. Manufactured in The Netherlands. Mapping Program at Georgia Tech (Barry Bozeman, PI). Finally, we draw some general conclusions about how our results may inform science policy within university-based science centers. 2. Academic women in science By the 1990s the promise of affirmative action to redress gender inequity in universities had largely been realized (Cole, 1979; NRC, 1987, 2001). Yet women remain under-represented in the senior tenured ranks, and over-represented in off-ladder positions (Barber, 1995; NRC, 2001). Early work on scientific careers evaluated how science is socially stratified by a variety of ascriptive and acquired traits (Cole andCole, 1973). This generated a stream of research that evaluated the determinants of women’s lower academic career success (Long and Fox, 1995). The university remains an employment sector that is highly sex segregated, with negative consequences for the women in it (Reskin, 1978; Bielby and Barron, 1986; Jacobs, 1996). Xie and Shauman (2003) attribute gender differences in outcomes to gender differences in personal and structural characteristics that bear on typical scientific output measures such as publication productivity and research resources. Numerous studies have been conducted that elucidate some of the individual-level mechanisms for these differential career outcomes. For example, women have differential access to resources during training (Reskin, 1978; Fox, 1995), and experience less mentoring and collaboration during their career (Long and McGinnis, 1985). Also, they tend to be less productive, which has negative impacts on career progression (Long et al., 1993). Overall, women are thought to benefit less from organizational factors that improve productivity (Allison and Long, 1990; Long and McGinnis, 1991). On the job, female academics are more aware of and sensitive to the presence of organizational constraints (Fox and Ferri, 1992). These constraints tend to reduce productivity and collaboration activity of female scientists (Fox, 1991). Given what is known about women in competitive academic science at universities, it is important to investigate how variations in the institutional context itself affect career development. Center affiliation is an important new basis of structural location in the academic structure, one we know little about in its place in the development of the academic career in general, or gender differences in particular. If center researchers are more productive, then centeraffiliates can be expected to benefit from the same contextual boost that Allison and Long (1990) found in departments. University-based research centers Since the 1980s interactions between industry and universities have become increasingly important in the development of R&D conducted at US universities (Gray et al., 2001). According to Cohen and colleagues (1994) about 70 percept of industry’s support for academic research is channeled through roughly 1100 industry–university centers that they identified in 1993. As Boardman and Bozeman (forthcoming) have noted, in the US the past three decades could be credibly called the ‘‘era of inter-institutional research collaboration.’’ Increasingly, US science funding agencies are supporting centralized, interdisciplinary research centers that represent a different institutional form from the decentralized, individual-investigator research of the past. Bozeman and Boardman (2004) use a detailed analysis of the National Science Foundation (NSF) Engineering Research Centers (ERCs) to demonstrate how the rise of universitybased science centers has led to the development of a new institutional form for the execution of university-based research. The National Science Foundation’s Industry/ UniversityCooperativeResearchCenters (IUCRC) Program, which originated in 1973, is one of the oldest government initiatives focused on cooperative research across the industry and university sectors (Hetzner et al., 1989). The purpose of the NSF IUCRC program is to strengthen the relationship between industrial firms and universities, especially colleges of engineering (Adams et al., 2001). In fiscal year 2000, the NSFs contribution to the centers was about $5.2 million; however, industrial and other external support of the centers totaled about $68 million in FY 2000 (National Science Foundation, 2005). Currently there are approximately 50 IUCRCs, all of which are administered by the Engineering Education 372 Corley and Gaughan