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Why so few female science professors?

Posted by JOE WINDISH, Technology Editor in Science & Technology.
May 11th, 2008 | Comments

A friend (who is a female science professor) sent along this piece from The Chronicle News Blog:

For women contemplating careers as science professors, the numbers are daunting. More than half of the bachelor’s degrees in science and engineering these days go to women, but they run into a high hurdle when it comes to securing academic jobs. Fewer than one in three science and engineering professors are female, and the numbers for full professors drop to one in five. So Congress held a hearing today to consider how to raise those odds.

The first comment, from a “woman who left science for a more fulfilling career,” suggests that maybe women are just too smart to take that career path and points to this article so, she says, we’ll know what she means:

Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:

age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college

age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a stipend of $1800 per month

age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year

age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000 per year

age 44: with young children at home (if lucky), fired by the university (”denied tenure” is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s

This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT. His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research wasn’t quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a “second rate has-been” label on his forehead.

Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? [READ ON]

My friend says, “While I don’t necessarily agree with everything this guy says, his general sentiment is interesting and prudent…more distressing are the comments to the original chronicle article.”

What do you all think?

mikkel

I think that the article is pretty accurate. About 50% of the women I've interacted with that are currently exploring a career in science have either quit or drastically altered their plans for the reasons that Philip cited.

Although he makes it sound like most universities are flush with cash, and that's just not true. Sure Harvard is, but that's Harvard. And MIT is MIT. Most of the other prestigious research universities are barely scrapping by (I hate to say it, but there is extreme bias to give money to people that have already proven successful, so a lot of times the teams from Harvard, MIT, et. al get favored over teams from other places, even though their ideas aren't superior), which brings me to another point: tenure means jack these days. All tenure means is that you will get enough money so you're not fired. Well that doesn't help much for researchers because you still wouldn't have any money for other workers or a lab or experiments.

I have to agree that it seems like most people that stay in science do it either as ego trips or because they have absolutely on responsibilities other than their job.

I will say that I don't believe that increasing pay is necessarily the answer; increasing the amount of grants is. There is just way too much competition and hand wringing, and it is nearly impossible to get grants that are based on exciting new ideas rather than boring extensions of current theories.

For example, we just applied for a grant specifically for people that have never received a major grant and that encouraged ideas that are "extremely novel" and they received about 2700 grant applications for 20 spots. That grant actually had quite a bit of money, but most other grants asking for novel ideas give a pittance.

The grant process is heavily focused on giving immediate results and solid answers at the expense of interesting exploration, because it's been decided that spending 4 or 5 years and having something not work is a waste of money. They seem to overlook that almost all of the most famous scientists had periods longer than that with almost no product because it took them so long to put together a paradigm changing thesis.

Lynx

As a female in the graduate phase of her science career I would cite the impossibility of having a high level science career and being a traditional mother as another reason.

Science is much more than a full time job, it's hugely competitive, the very few stable positions are to be gotten through being the very best. That means publishing, and publishing means putting in absurdly long hours. It's not at all uncommon for lab bosses to look very badly on graduate "students" (I have a big beef with being called a student since I work 5 days a week 9 hours a day, and don't actually study) and post-docs that don't voluntarily kill themselves working.

During your graduate years this can be somewhat tolerated by anyone. But once you get into a post-doc, people are getting married and having kids. We can try to be PC about it, but everyone knows whose taking Jimmy to the doctor when he gets sick, who will stay home if the sitter fails to show up, who has to leave early to pick Jimmy up from school. Even in couples that are relatively modern, it's overwhelmingly the mother who does these things. Science is a very jealous child, it will not take kindly to you trying to be a good mom. Women will get passed up for promotion due to their incapacity (actual or supposed) to give 150% to science.

Of course there's also the very real discrimination of people who don't want to take young women on because they assume that motherhood will prevent them from fully concentrating on the job, but I think that in fact it's the very fact of having a family, combined with the fact that in the not-so-equal society of today mothers carry the lions-share of parental responsibility, that accounts for fewer women in the top levels of science.

runasim

In a word, I think we don't practice what we preach,
A lot of talk, but action - not so much.

We are so worried about falling behind in the sciences but we make no effort to encourage a large segment of the population, women, to help meet the need.

Health insurance, child care - those are family values issues. I thought we were a nation of family values.?
.

superdestroyer

Many of the sciences are being dominated with foreign students and immigrants. It may be easier for the chinese students to cope because they support each other versus the non-immigrant students. There are also jobs outside of academia that benefit non-immigrants more than immigrants. If finishing early means going back to Korea or China, those students do not care if the process is slow.

Jim_Satterfield

The people who say that we have too many scientists and engineers have it reversed. It's not that we have too many of them but that we place too little value on what they do to provide the funding for the research positions that they could fill. Most companies have too much pressure on the bottom line to do anything but the most "practical" research which means that there is no source for funding for the research that is viewed as impractical but is the kind of research that provides the foundation for all the rest. And that must be determined by our nation because the states certainly don't have the money to spare.

pacatrue

It's a complicated issue, of course. I have to think that it's a combination of society and, to some degree, nature, though the latter part is so impossible to measure and so out of proportion with the current reality that it can largely be ignored right now.

I'm a grad student in the field of linguistics myself currently, and my department is entirely dominated by women. I am very commonly the only male in a room. And then I took a computer science course, and the only woman in the room that time was the professor. It's not the hours that make the difference. I promise that hard-working grad students in linguistics or psychology, which have a majority of women, work 14 hour days, 6 and 7 days a week, just like people in the sciences. I myself go to bed around 1:00 AM each day and get up around 6:30 the next.

I have to think that something is making women not think of physics, comp sci, or theoretical math as great careers, but it's not obvious what it is. Even within a single field and single department, you can see certain gender patterns. While my department is probably 75% female, if you move into computational linguistics, you end up majority male. If you move into acquisition, which is the study of how people learn language, you end up 80% female again. Whatever is going on cannot simply be bad profs steering women away from certain areas. That might happen, but I think it's happening long before they get to university.

(And for the record, I'm a man who picks up and drops off his son at preschool everyday, takes him to the doctor, and stays home when he gets sick. Some of that is another grad school pet peeve -- many don't really think of what you do as work.)

DaveA

Well, with my contract up at the Universirty... And is not being renewed. So yeah, I hear that. And the post is dead on that the pay is quite poor compared to the business world.

On the plus side, the hours are flexible (at least for CS grad students and profs) and much less than in the IT industry as a whole. From experience senior IT is definelty "your work = your life." I even split care with my mom for our little one, and it is more or less doable. Another huge, benefit is that the politics are much less, not non-existant of course, but much, much less dangerous and frequent then in the business world. And of course the benefits as a prof are great, but not before that point, where they truly stink.

As to lack of female presence? Yes at least in IT its rare to see undegraduate women students in class beyond the first two courses. It did not used to be that way, but there you have it. At the grad level its not so rare, but then again almost all of women choosing comp sci at the graduate level are foreign students.

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