A Data‐Based Guide to the North American Ecology Faculty Job Market

Every year for three years (2016–2018), I tried to identify every single person hired as a tenure‐track professor in ecology or an allied field (e.g., fish and wildlife) in the United States and Canada by consulting public sources. I identified a total of 566 hires. I also used public sources to compile data on the new hires and the institutions that hired them (e.g., number of publications, teaching experience, hiring institution Carnegie class). These data address some widespread anxieties and misunderstandings about the ecology faculty job market and also speak to gender diversity in recent ecology faculty hiring. They complement, and in some cases improve on, other sources of information, such as anecdotal personal experiences. Academia is among the common career paths for Ph.D.‐holding ecologists in North America (here used to mean Canada and the United States: Hampton and Labou 2017). Some additional fraction of Ph.D.‐holding ecologists presumably seek a faculty position at some point. Ecology faculty job seekers want information about the ecology faculty job market. Indeed, one might think that they already have it. Because academia is traditionally seen as the “default” career path for ecology Ph.D.s, one might think that good systemic information about that career path is widely and easily available, for instance from friends, colleagues, mentors, social media, and faculty job workshops, such as those held at the Ecological Society of America Annual Meeting. But in fact, good systemic information either doesn't exist, or exists only for fields that are unlike ecology in important ways. So all ecology faculty job seekers have to go on are their own and others’ anecdotal personal experiences, and advice from others that itself is based on anecdotal experiences. Anecdotes, and advice based on them, can be useful sources of information. But they also can be unrepresentative or otherwise misleading, like any small and non‐random sample. The competitiveness of the ecology faculty job market combined with the lack of good systemic information creates a fertile breeding ground for rumors and anxiety. Both ecology faculty job holders and job seekers rightly care about diversity and equity in faculty hiring. Overt and subconscious discrimination, and systemic forces that shape individual decision‐making, can prevent the best people from applying and can prevent the best people from being hired if they apply. Further, academic departments, and the colleges and universities they comprise, are institutional wholes that are greater than the sum of their