The analysis by Aaron Clauset at the University of Colorado Boulder and colleagues revealed that only 25% of the institutions produced 71 to 86% of all tenure-track faculty. Between 70 and 90% of professors at these elite schools received their doctorates from other elite schools, while only about 5% received training outside this group.
The researchers also uncovered a systematic bias against women with elite doctorates, who slid further down the hierarchy in their faculty jobs compared with men from the same institutions.
“We can see there is this bias in the system, but we can’t say yet what causes the bias.” Clauset said, speaking to journalists at the 2015 AAAS Annual Meeting. There are a variety of possible reasons for this that the researchers hope to explore next, to determine whether there might be bias in hiring decisions, or if women are exiting the job pipeline in different ways than men.
Clauset and his colleagues spent three years compiling this massive hiring record, without the aid of any centralized database.”There is no organization that actually tracks faculty placements generally in academia, or even within most disciplines,” said Clauset.