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Faculty diversity has received increased attention from researchers and institutions of higher education, yet faculty demographics have not changed substantially for many underrepresented groups. Several barriers to the retention of women and faculty of color have been offered, including a lack of belonging, discrimination, social exclusion, and tokenism. Epistemic exclusion, scholarly marginalization rooted in disciplinary and identity-based biases, is theorized to act as another barrier to the retention of these faculty. The present study examines the effect of scholarly devaluation, a primary component of epistemic exclusion, on faculty workplace outcomes using data from 1,341 tenure-track faculty from a predominantly White, research-intensive institution. We found that women and underrepresented faculty of color reported higher perceptions of scholarly devaluation. Further, scholarly devaluation was associated with higher intentions to leave the university and this relationship was mediated by lower job satisfaction and poorer perceptions of the workplace climate. Notably, the negative consequences of perceiving scholarly devaluation were found for all faculty, not just women and faculty of color. We discuss the implications of these findings for retaining marginalized faculty and for institutions of higher education more broadly.

As scientific teams in academia have become increasingly large, interdisciplinary, and diverse, more attention has been paid to honorary authorship (i.e., giving authorship to those not making a significant contribution). Our study examined whether honorary authorship occurs because of the desire to include all or many team members. Interviews with project principal investigators (n = 6) and early-career project members (n = 6) from 6 interdisciplinary environmental science research teams revealed that principal investigators frequently employed inclusion-motivated honorary authorship but that this practice had some negative impacts on early-career team members with less power and status, thereby undermining true inclusion of those from underrepresented groups. We believe our findings are of import not only for environmental scientists, but also for scholars who are interested in issues of authorship decision-making regardless of disciplinary affiliation.

Overinclusive authorship practices such as honorary or guest authorship have been widely reported, and they appear to be exacerbated by the rise of large interdisciplinary collaborations that make authorship decisions particularly complex. Although many studies have reported on the frequency of honorary authorship and potential solutions to it, few have probed how the underlying dynamics of large interdisciplinary teams contribute to the problem. This article reports on a qualitative study of the authorship standards and practices of six National Science Foundation-funded interdisciplinary environmental science teams. Using interviews of the lead principal investigator and an early-career member on each team, our study explores the nature of honorary authorship practices as well as some of the motivating factors that may contribute to these practices. These factors include both structural elements (policies and procedures) and cultural elements (values and norms) that cross organizational boundaries. Therefore, we provide recommendations that address the intersection of these factors and that can be applied at multiple organizational levels. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]