How’s this for an attention-grabbing headline? “Family is the number one reason for women leaving academia.” You can get the full report here, but it turns out that even though women now obtain more than 50% of all PhDs in the life sciences in the U.S. (!), they leave before getting tenure. Take this jaw-dropping snippet:
Our findings indicate that women in the sciences who are married with children are 35 percent less likely to enter a tenure track position after receiving a Ph.D. than married men with children. And they are 27 percent less likely than their male counterparts to achieve tenure upon entering a tenure-track job. By contrast, single women without young children are roughly as successful as married men with children in attaining a tenure-track job, and a little more successful than married women with children in achieving tenure. Married women without children also do not fare quite as well as men.
Though I can’t say this is too surprising:
In unparalleled surveys of doctoral students and postdoctoral scholars at the University of California, we found that both men and women report a shifting away from the career goal of research professor, with women’s move being more pronounced. Among doctoral students, career-life issues populate four of the top-five most commonly cited reasons why students changed their minds, with women more likely than men to cite these issues as very important, and more than twice as likely as men to cite issues related to children.
Then there is some really maddening stuff about the lack of mat leave provisions, which makes this Canadian go a little crazy (full-time workers in Canada are entitled up to 52 weeks of maternity leave for bio moms–with a bit of an income paid by our employment insurance system–and up to 9 months of mat leave for adoptive parents, to be split up in whatever way you like between the two parents).
But this really made me flip:
The time pressures of academia are unrelenting for most faculty in the sciences, who work on average about 50 hours a week up through age 62. When combined with caregiving hours and house work, UC women faculty with children, ages 30 to 50, report a weekly average of over 100 hours of combined activities (—compared to 86 hours for men with children). And women faculty with children provide an average of more than 30 hours a week of caregiving up through age 50, while family responsive policies rarely address this long-term career-life issue. Evidence indicates that the collision course between career timing and family timing may be worsening—the average age for tenure receipt among tenure-track faculty in the sciences was 36 in 1985, and extended out past age 39 by 2003.
Wow. That sheds some serious light, doesn’t it?
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The children issue was definitely one of the main reasons for me and my wife to leave academia. Among our friends, no (this means literally zero) academic couples got children while they were working at university. All of them got their first child after leaving.
Among the reasons why, I can name more than enough: Common necessity of a long-distance relationship (one couple we know: she works in California, he in Australia); hair-raising unstable future prospects; hidden to sometimes open chauvinistic attitudes among colleagues and professors; pathetic to nonexistent daycare facilities at universities. (And perhaps the unspoken attitude in academia that a person without tenure is still a “student”, still in “education”, and not completely grown-up. When you get treated constantly like a little boy or a little girl, at a certain point you start to believe it unconsciously.)
Regarding especially the situation in Germany, I can provide two links to an hair-raising article and a study from 2006 (both unfortunately in german only). The study was exceptional because it was not done with a sample test but they had access to the complete employee data of all universities in the german state of North Rhine-Westphalia:
http://www.zeit.de/2006/15/B-Akademiker.xml
http://zeus.zeit.de/online/2006/15/studie_dortmund.pdf
The results are as jaw-dropping: 78% of women in academic pre-tenure positions in the german state of NRW are without children. In comparison: In the same age group, 45% of women holding a university degree but working outside academia don’t have children. It would not be surprising when the numbers for the other german states were similiar. This is a devastating result for the so-called academic work ‘culture’.
steffen wrote:
And perhaps the unspoken attitude in academia that a person without tenure is still a “student”, still in “education”, and not completely grown-up. When you get treated constantly like a little boy or a little girl, at a certain point you start to believe it unconsciously.
QFT!
I think this shows yet another sign of how universities can be terrible employers. It’s because from their point of view, as I commented on earlier, they can draw upon a large pool of people seeking academic jobs at any given time. At any level before someone has achieved tenure, that person is very replaceable from the university’s perspective. If a grad student is struggling to get through coursework or one of the other hoops on the way to the degree, we can just dismiss them and there’s a long line of applicants eager to take that student’s place. If a postdoc isn’t happy with the meager salary and nonexistent opportunity to publish, a PI can kick them out and have any number of newly-minted Ph.Ds ready to join the group. If a new assistant professor isn’t happy and wants more “me time” for whatever reason, well obviously they can’t handle the intellectual rigor of the professorship, and again we can easily replace that person with any number of eager and willing new Ph.D holders. As long as this replaceability view holds, there’s not going to be any incentive from the school’s view to make working conditions better for grad students, postdocs or young professors.
One way I think schools themselves can help stem the floods of students going into the “professor pipeline” is to do a way better job on the departmental level of getting word out about opportunities outside of academia. I saw the job boards at the two schools where I got my masters and did time in a PH.D program, and the undergrad opportunities board was filled with fliers for graduate programs. Similarly, the graduate opportunities board was filled with postdoc positions. If faculty aren’t consciously encouraging their students to go into the professor pipeline, then job boards like the ones I saw are doing so unconsciously (granted I am drawing my conclusions from job boards at two whole schools, but I’d be very surprised to see a job board advertising primarily openings in area industries at a given science graduate department). I realize an obvious question is what incentive do schools have to do this? Won’t it limit the number of students in the professor pipeline, and won’t it limit our ability to man all of our freshman-level courses with graduate student TAs? Yes it would, and as I type you may note the sound of the world’s smallest violin playing, but I think it would be beneficial to schools to have students in grad school who are there because they really want it, and aren’t just there to give it a spin or didn’t realize what other options were available (again I realize I’m just speaking from my own experiences, but I think in any grad program it’s usually some kind of mix of the two, with the former not entirely in the majority) .