A male-dominated workplace and a competitive culture that often shuts out family life might be contributing to the decline in the proportion of women at successive stages in research. In a qualitative study of 28 US female PhD students in physical sciences and engineering, led by Bianca Bernstein at Arizona State University in Tempe (M. Cabay et al. Soc. Sci. 7, 23; 2018), 12 said that they did not want to pursue research careers. Of those, 6 blamed their workplace environment and culture, including 2 who said they could no longer work within a male-heavy profession. Some of the female students reported that they felt ignored, dismissed or excluded from scientific conversations and other lab interactions among male colleagues. One said that a male colleague attributed her winning a scholarship to her gender and to quota filling. Some of the female students also reported being asked disproportionately often to perform ‘women’s work’, such as cleaning up the lab or performing clerical duties.