Traversing the academic ladder as an early career researcher in earth and environmental sciences

There is growing concern in Higher Education around job security, work-life balance and inequalities, and early career academics must make difficult trade-offs and life choices. Ample literature confirms that women navigating academia face additional challenges. Few studies have sought to connect contractual circumstances, employment priorities and their impacts on the life choices of individual academics. We report results from a survey exploring the experiences of 48 Early Career Researchers traversing the academic ladder in geomorphology and earth/environmental science and contextualise these findings by drawing on personal experiences and wider literature. Overall, we find evidence of multi-directional pressures that have materially negative effects on life choices, including concern amongst men and women that academic employment is a barrier to living where and with whom one may want to. The scale of precarity amongst survey respondents is stark in terms of years on fixed-term contracts (maximum 10), individual contracts held (maximum 14) and number of different institutions (maximum 6). Overall, women respondents opted to spend fewer years on precarious contracts, which will amplify the leaky pipeline and gender gaps at more senior levels. We also find that women put somewhat more emphasis on job security when applying for academic posts. Perceived institutional prestige was a low priority for the majority of respondents. We also find notable divergences between career advice given by more senior colleagues and the priorities of those seeking guidance. Our results furthermore infer that men were generally more satisfied by financial aspects of university employment. Drawing on input from survey respondents, we put forward a set of recommendations under four themes: improving policies on parental leave and flexible working; formalising and improving mentorship; transparency on pay and promotion; more considerate recruitment procedures. We believe these recommendations are within the scope of action by departments, laboratories and research groups.