8/ We also urge attention toward the children's books that make up the majority of the bans! We were surprised by the titles and stories that populate banned books lists.

6/ Do bans work at suppressing interest in books? Or do they inspire a backlash?

Across two different levels of interest indicators we find that interest in banned books stays consistently low over time. Most people just aren’t reading banned books, before or after bans occur.

5/ What counties ban books?

We find that one of the strongest predictors that a county bans books is a *decreasing* republican vote share over the past 20 years. Precarious conservative majorities, not Republican strongholds, are the most likely to ban books.

4/ And which authors write banned books?

Women and LGBTQ+ authors are slightly overrepresented, but authors of color are strongly overrepresented among banned authors.

The odds that an author of color is banned is:
4x a white author (among all authors)
12x a white author (among popular authors)

3/ First, what books get banned?

We find most banned books are children’s books featuring diverse characters, such as LGBTQ+ characters and characters of color. In contrast, popularly discussed banned books such as young adult queer romance novels only made up a small proportion of banned books.

1/ New paper out today in PNAS Nexus! This large-scale study of U.S. book bans started at a summer school 2 yrs ago with @msoligon.bsky.social @isarock.bsky.social Jack LaViolette. This has been such a fun and meaningful project!

🔓Open access paper: academic.oup.com/pnasnexus/ar...
🧵thread below...

11/ And current faculty report a very similar pattern: women cite climate reasons at much higher rates than men, and do so at all career ages. Work-life reasons are more common in the early career, and do show a gendered effect but not as large as we see for climate.

10/ Second, are faculty’s reasons for leaving gendered? Yes. Women former faculty most often cited climate-related reasons, while men cited professional reasons 📈📉 Women and men former faculty selected work-life balance reasons equally often.

9/ First, feeling “pushed out” increased with career age for everyone. But women (STEM & non-STEM) were more likely to feel pushed out & less likely to feel pulled towards better jobs, than men, at every career age – gender was the strongest predictor of feeling pushed vs pulled.

8/ More than 10K faculty responded to our attrition survey, answering (1) did they feel pushed out or pulled towards better opportunities? and (2) were their pushes related to work, work-life balance, or workplace climate?

6/ But gendered attrition is not distributed uniformly, which is perhaps why smaller-scale studies can be confusing. We find larger gendered rates among:
- tenured faculty (esp full profs)
- faculty in non-STEM domains
- faculty at lower-prestige institutions

5/ Far from disappearing after tenure, gendered attrition is actually largest among tenured faculty, especially among full professors. Here, we’re showing odds ratios between women and men faculty, adjusting for career age, employer prestige, and PhD training.

4/ First, at every career age, we find that women are more likely to leave than men 👉 gender parity at hiring won’t persist. These empirical rates imply a hypothetical 50-50 cohort would fall to 40% women over 35 yrs — both hiring and retention are critical for achieving parity.

3/ We answer such questions at scale, with
1) census-level U.S. faculty employment data [ht @aarcresearch] to estimate “all-cause” gendered attrition rates across career ages & fields, and
2) large-scale multi-field survey data to elucidate the gendered reasons that faculty leave

2/ Women faculty often leave academia at higher rates than men. But most data is on 1) early career faculty, 2) in STEM fields, 3) at elite universities. How do the rates and the reasons for gendered attrition vary systematically over a career? across fields? or with prestige?

1/ New paper! “Gender and retention patterns among U.S. faculty” w/ N Laberge KH Wapman @samzhang AC Morgan M Galesic BK Fosdick @danlarremore @aaronclauset: www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...
A systematic study of gendered rates & reasons for faculty attrition in US academia 🧵