Women in Science in the News
A bunch of new and interesting studies on women in science have come out in the past couple of weeks. Today, the first two, on workplace issues:
The Athena Factor: Reversing the Brain Drain in Science, Engineering, and Technology from the Center for Work-Life Policy has gotten some good coverage in the New York Times and in Slate. I haven't read the full report (it costs $300!), but the gist of it is that women leave industry positions in S&E at double the rate of men, and the rate of departure is higher than for women in law and investment banking. The reasons cited are sexism in the work place and working conditions that are incompatible with family responsibilities.
I'm curious about the lower attrition rates for women in other high-powered careers. Are law firms and banks really creating more family friendly / less sexist workplaces? Or is it just that they pay so much more that it makes less financial sense for women to take substantial time off of their careers to raise children? I'd also be curious to get a sense of how much different factors contribute to attrition. Putting on my oblivious guy hat: One thing that surprised me was the rate at which women reported experiencing sexual harassment - 63%. That seems like a large number to me, but I don't have a point of reference. Are things better or worse in other professions?
Study 2, Alone in the Ivory Tower: How Birth Events Vary Among Fast-Track Professionals comes from a collaboration between Nicholas Wolfinger at the U of Utah and Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden at Berkeley. (Mason and Goulden wrote Do Babies Matter, which is a must-read paper) The findings are striking: census data show that academics are much less likely to reproduce than people in other high-skill professions (physicians and lawyers). Male and female academics are 40% and 20% less likely, respectively, to have recently had a child than their physician counterparts. This is after controlling for age, hours worked, ethnicity, etc. The report further suggests that the 20% reduction for men may be explainable by the fact that a high proportion of male academics are married to female academics.
In short, it looks like women in academic positions face some severe obstacles to having children. This is not going to be an issue for all women, of course, but if one is looking for a reason proportionately fewer women go into academic positions, reproductive issues are surely a big part of the story, if not the biggest.
One thing that was disappointing about the summaries I saw of the Athena Factor study was that there were no comparisons to women in academia (this may make sense, since it looks like the study population was anyone with a bachelor's degree in an S&E field). Sure, it looks bad in industry, but are things any better in academia? Mason and Goulden's work suggests otherwise.
An interesting data point: things look better in industry than academia for women with advanced degrees (and who knows, maybe in general?). This analysis of determinants of job satisfaction for S&E PhDs found that after controlling for other factors, in academia, women are less satisfied with their jobs than men, but that in industry, the opposite is true.
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on Tue, Jun 03, 04:06PM
I doubt that law firms and banks are creating more family-friendly environments than academia, but I do suspect that it's easier to take a few years off in those professions. There's a perception that since science moves fast, a person who takes a few years out to raise a child will find their knowledge out of date when they try to return. I would argue that that's nonsense -- even in the super-speedy fields like molecular biology, you'd just need to curl up with PubMed for a while to catch up -- but that's the perception, and it's part of the reason I don't know anyone who's successfully re-entered science after a hiatus. There's also the problem that if you take a few years off you're not considered sufficiently dedicated to the profession, but that may be just as bad in law/finance as it is in academia.
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on Fri, Jun 20, 05:06PM
I don't think it's simply that you "can't catch up". The real problem is that when you apply for grants, you will appear extremely non-productive over that period of time if you have no publications. Do NIH or NSF have a policy regarding this? Even if they do, if your proposal is up against others who have been working during that time, how can you penalize those folks? It's just a big mess, and I honestly don't think there's anything that can be done about it - aside from creating special grants only for funding women who have taken time off for pregnancy/child rearing. That's probably a political nuke.
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on Wed, Jun 04, 12:06AM
Yes, that's a good point. I'm sure the knowledge half-life argument is a factor for people with PhDs, especially in academia. However, I'd be surprised if it was a big issue people at the bachelors / master's levels, and my take on the Athena report was that it was looking at S&E very broadly, i.e. people with at least a bachelor's degree.
I agree that it shouldn't be too hard to get back up to speed - after all, if it were true that (a) everyone's knowledge expires quickly, and (b) it takes forever to learn new knowledge, then people wouldn't have time to do much of anything because they'd have to sit around reading journals all day.
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on Fri, Jun 20, 05:06PM
Geoff, just wanted to point out you switched the percentages given by the second study:
"Controlling for such factors as age, weekly hours worked, and race or ethnicity, male faculty members are 21 percent less likely than male physicians to have recently had a birth in their households. Controlling the same factors for women, those who are academics are 41 percent less likely than physicians to have recently had children."
