Way back when I was first on the EEB faculty job market, I used to notice trends in the subject areas of ecology faculty jobs. I especially tended to notice trends relevant to me personally. I’d think to myself stuff like, “Hooray, seems like it’s a good year for community ecology jobs compared to last year!” Or, “Boy, microbial ecology is so hot these days, it seems like all the jobs are microbial ecology jobs!” I doubt I was alone in this. Probably most faculty job seekers notice these sorts of trends in what sorts of faculty jobs are, or aren’t, available.
But were the trends I noticed actually trends? Or was I just fooling myself? After all, it’s not as if I was systematically counting all the community ecology jobs, or all the microbial ecology jobs, or whatever. More broadly, people in general are terrible at identifying real trends, just based on whatever anecdata they happen to notice or hear about. Think for instance of how lots of people always think crime is increasing, even when it’s actually decreasing. Heck, people can be pretty bad even at correctly recalling their own experiences (e.g., how many hours they work in a typical week).
We’ll never know if Past Me was right about the trends he thought he noticed regarding the EEB faculty job market. But we do have data that allow us to quantify recent trends in the the subject areas of EEB jobs. I went back to the last 10 years worth of ecoevojobs.net spreadsheets (2015-16 thru 2024-25, inclusive, except that 2017-18 because the sheet for that year is all screwed up). I downloaded the “subject area” for every permanent EEB job. The subject area of the job often is listed at the top of the job ad, though sometimes it’s a word or short phrase chosen by whoever added the job to ecoevojobs.net. The subject area doesn’t always provide complete information about the scope of the job. For instance, sometimes an ad with a broad subject area will specify one more narrower sub-areas of particular interest to the hiring department. But the subject areas should be sufficiently precise and accurate to capture any major trends over time. Certainly, any trends big enough for EEB job seekers to notice, and to be worth caring about, should show up in the subject area data. Conversely, any purported “trend’ that doesn’t show up in the subject area data almost certainly isn’t a real trend at all.
I used all permanent EEB jobs, rather than restricting attention to faculty jobs, ecology faculty jobs, or North American faculty jobs, in order to maximize sample size. But I’m quite confident that none of my results would change if you narrowed the scope of the dataset to ecology only, or faculty only, or North America only.
I quantified the frequency with which each word in a looooong list of terms occurred in the subject areas of EEB job ads each year. My searches were not case-sensitive. Here’s a graph of the frequencies over time of all the terms that occurred in the subject areas of at least 5% of the ads in at least one year:
The only terms I checked that exhibited any trend at all were the three most common terms, each of which exhibited a modest downward trend during the late 2010s: “biology”, “ecology”, and “evolution”. But even that doesn’t actually indicate a declining absolute number of jobs with those terms in the subject area. Rather, it indicates an increase over time in the number of jobs in other subject areas listed on ecoevojobs.net. The number of permanent EEB jobs listed on ecoevojobs.net went from 320 in 2015-16, to 546 in 2016-17, to 818 in 2018-19; the total number of jobs has bounced up and down since then with no temporal trend. That is, starting in the late 2010s and ending around 2020, ecoevojobs.net users as a group started broadening the definition of what counts as an “EEB” job. So that permanent jobs with traditional words like “ecology”, “evolution”, and “biology” are just as numerous as they were 10 years ago in absolute terms (there are year-to-year fluctuations, but no directional trends), but they’re a bit rarer as a fraction of all EEB jobs listed on ecoevojobs.net.
I checked many other terms besides those graphed; see the footnote for the list.* Terms associated with various subfields, various kinds of organisms, various methodologies, various habitats, various other things…They were all rare. None of them ever occurred in even 5% of the subject areas in a single year, and none exhibited any temporal trend to speak of. That long list of rare terms included several terms associated with subject areas that are widely thought of as “hot” or “trendy”. “AI”, for instance. “Bioinform*”. “Global”. “Quantitative” and “statis*”. “Forecast*”.
I also checked the frequency of job ads for which the subject area was the single word “ecology” or “biology”, rather than merely containing the word “ecology” or “biology”. Those sorts of ads tend to be the broadest sort of ad, for which the widest range of candidates might be good fits. Turns out that such broad subject areas are pretty rare. Jobs for which the subject area was just “ecology” never comprised more than 8% of the jobs in any given year, and usually just 1-3%. Same story for jobs for which the subject area was just “biology”: never more than 9% of the ads, usually 3-5% of the ads.
There are three clear-cut conclusions here. First, over the last decade, there are absolutely no trends to speak of in the subject areas of permanent EEB jobs. I’m very confident that conclusion is robust, however narrowly or broadly you personally prefer to define “EEB”, and whatever allowance you want to make for the fact that job subject areas don’t provide full information about the job’s true subject area. Second, no narrow (or even fairly broad!) subject area comprises more than a tiny fraction of all EEB jobs. So if, as a job seeker, you’re bummed that there are hardly any jobs in your own subject area, well, that’s totally understandable. But FWIW, literally every other EEB job seeker is in the same boat as you. There are no lucky EEB job seekers out there who are spoilt for choice as to which jobs to apply to, because they work in some trendy subject area in which there are many dozens of jobs every year for which they’re a perfect fit. Third, extremely broad ads for “ecology” or “biology” are rare, especially once you allow for the fact that ads in those broad subject areas often specify a preference for some narrower area within those broad subjects. I’m aware of occasional disagreements on ecoevojobs.net as to whether very broad job ads are a Good Thing, or a Bad Thing. Those disagreements seem rather moot to me, because very broad job ads are too rare to be much of a Thing at all.**
If you’re on the EEB job market, or advising anyone who is, I hope this information is useful to you. (I can’t promise it’ll make you happy, but I hope it’s useful.) Looking forward to your comments, as always. And if there are any other terms you want me to check, ask in the comments, I’m happy to do so. Although I can tell you right now that, whatever term you’re wondering about, it’s almost certainly like most of the terms I checked already: very rare.
*Here’s the long list of other words I checked, none of which ever appeared in the subject areas of even 5% of the ads in any given year: quantitative, data, Indigenous, global, animal, theor*, statis*, freshwater, invas*, management, forest*, aquatic, terrestrial, fish*, mammal, vertebrate, entomol*, insect, bird, ornith*, invert*, population, community, ecosystem, organism*, biodiversity, model*, wildlife, resource*, chang*, restor*, botan*, bioinform*, behav*, sustain*, function*, trait*, biogeogr*, applied, range, fire, disturbance, landscape, remote, resilien*, GIS, spatial, human*, forecast*, AI. Heck, the large majority of these never appeared in even 2% of ad subject areas in any given year. Some of them never got above 0.5%.
**Which I guess means that now people can start arguing about whether they ought to become a thing.