Women in the Sciences

When I was a teenager, I was invited to participate in an overnight conference called "Women in Mathematics and Science" at a college two hours away. I always did well in math and science, taking a university biology class at 14 and eventually earning a B.S. in Mathematics. One would think I was the perfect candidate to stay in the sciences, but I wasn't. I wanted a more "rounded" life for myself--spouse, children, music, literature, languages, travel, looking at things other than computer screens all day, etc.

As I recall, the purpose of the conference was to bring in a number of science-inclined young women and encourage them to choose a career in the sciences. However, the only part of the conference I remember was a lecture on exponential population growth. The message I took away was that the people who wanted women to go into math and sciences also were against the birth of children.

Yesterday, The New York Times reported on the cost in family satisfaction paid by women science professors:

Surveying outcomes for 160,000 Ph.D. recipients across the United States, the researchers determined that 70 percent of male tenured professors were married with children, compared with only 44 percent of their tenured female colleagues. Twelve years or more after receiving their doctorates, tenured women were more than twice as likely as tenured men to be single and significantly more likely to be divorced. And lest all of this look like “personal choice,” when the researchers asked 8,700 faculty members in the University of California system about family and work issues, nearly 40 percent of the women agreed with the statement, “I had fewer children than I wanted,” compared with less than 20 percent of the men. The take-home message, Dr. Mason said in a telephone interview, is, “Men can have it all, but women can’t.”

From a purely Darwinian point of view, expecting a young woman to sacrifice her reproductive fitness for the sake of career advancement is simply too much, and yet the structure of academic research, in which one must spend one’s 20s and early 30s as a poorly compensated and minimally empowered graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, and the remainder of one’s 30s and into the low 40s working madly to earn tenure, can demand exactly that.

Bingo.