Why so few female science professors?
May 11th, 2008 by JOE WINDISH
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?
This entry was posted on Sunday, May 11th, 2008 at 12:02 pm and is filed under Women, Teachers, Women's Issues, Sexism, Science, Education. Both comments and pings are currently closed.
