Fig 1.
The RASE cycle, where R stands for Resources, A for Achievement, S for Status, and E for Events.
Resources are used to accrue Achievements. The scientific community accords Status to your Achievements. New additional Resources are then given based on Status, and the cycle repeats. At each time step, there is a probability to experience Events that impact Resources or Achievements.
Fig 2.
A screenshot of NetLogo’s graphical interface illustrating career outcomes in our model.
Advantaged individuals have stars on their shirts, and the pants color of all figures updates at each time step to indicate their Status. The numerical label next to each individual is their position in their population’s starting Resource distribution (1 had the most initial Resources). Resource (Achievement) Events experienced by both populations are represented by brown (green) dots. A large number of extra Events affecting only the disadvantaged population are not shown to simplify the image. Notice that no disadvantaged people (shirts without stars) have status pants above the green level, and that the individuals that started with the highest Resource level (e.g., circled figure) need not end up with the highest status level after 40 years: the stochastic Events significantly affect eventual success.
Fig 3.
300 sampled career trajectories of achievements over time, A(t), are shown with a histogram of final-year values for all 20,000 simulated individuals.
The histogram reveals a large number of final-year zeros. Two highlighted trajectories show in one case that early positive results often produce career-long advantages even in the face of random buffeting by positive and negative events; in another case, a slow start makes even a surge of fortunate events difficult to capitalize on. The dotted red lines depict the trajectories of the yearly medians and 75th percentiles.
Fig 4.
The cumulative effect of disadvantage over a 40-year career affects the percentages of disadvantaged members at each status level, assuming equal numbers in the advantaged and disadvantaged populations.
The disadvantaged population began with 5% fewer resources on average, was awarded 5% less status per Achievement, and on average experienced 10 low-impact negative Achievement events each year. After 40 years, the representation of the disadvantaged group among high status individuals falls to about a third. For reference, the highest two status categories together contain about 10% of the individuals.
Fig 5.
The shaded portions of the density plots depict the individuals who exceed the threshold for being invited to present a colloquium in our biology faculty example.
The threshold is the top 25.5% of a combined population consisting of 41.4%, or 470/1,334, disadvantaged individuals (see Table 1). The topmost density corresponds to no relative disadvantage. Moving down, we see that lowering the Achievement-to-Status multiplier—while keeping all other aspects of the simulation constant—diminishes the percentage exceeding the threshold. The dotted line depicts the cutoff for the upper 25.5% of the disadvantaged group only.
Table 1.
Model parameter settings in four simulation scenarios that achieve the observed percentages of women above a threshold of cumulative status observed among assistant professors in two fields as reported by [82].
Counts and percents for men may be obtained by subtraction. The simulations involve two subpopulations for which all settings are identical except the one being varied only for the relatively disadvantaged group. Further details about each of the four scenarios are given in the main text.