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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suggests, women academics can and do feel the weight of a ton of feathers, teeny individual moments of exclusion, oppression, rejection, objectification, hostility and so on. Moreover, in Canada, more women are enrolled in undergrad programs than men, but by the time you look at enrollments for Ph.D. programs, there are fewer women than men overall (though of course, this varies wildly by degree program in much the ways you’d expect).
