“I Don’t Want to Live Your Life!” The Flight of Women from Research Science, by Guest, Mary Ann Mason
Mary Ann Mason, today's guest forum contributor,
is currently professor and co-director of the Center, Economics & Family Security at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. From 2000 to 2007, she served as the first woman dean of the Graduate Division at UC Berkeley, with responsibility for nearly 10,000 students in more than 100 graduate programs. During her tenure, she championed diversity in the graduate student population, promoted equity for student parents, and pioneered measures to enhance the career-life balance for all faculty. Her research findings and advocacy have been central to ground-breaking policy initiatives, including the ten-campus "UC Faculty Family Friendly Edge". Her recent research report on women in science is "Staying Competitive: Patching America's Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/2009/11/women_and_sciences.html
As Graduate Dean at Berkeley, many faculty members, especially those in the sciences, reported to me that they frequently heard this sentiment from their women graduate students. These students didn't see how they could combine a family with the intensely competitive world of research science. As one student put it in our UC wide survey of doctoral students: "I really want to be a mom. This seems like an extremely difficult goal to align with the goal of being a faculty member at a top university in engineering."
Our research at Berkeley reveals that family formation; marriage and especially childbirth, is indeed the major reason why women give up their goal of becoming academic researchers. According to the NSF Survey of Earned Doctorates, women with children are 37% less likely than men with children to take on a tenure track job. Women without children, however, are almost even with men in attaining that position.
This defection begins early. The UC science doctoral students who do become mothers are very unlikely to continue in academic science. Women postdoctoral scholars who had a child while a postdoctoral scholar were twice as likely to change their career goal as men and twice as likely to do so as women with no children and no future plans to have them.
What are the universities and the federal agencies doing to stem this leak? Not enough for faculty and even less for the young researchers. Among the sixty-two top ranked research universities only 13% offer any paid maternity leave for employed graduate students and nearly half have no policy at all regarding childbirth. The message is: "Take time out from the competitive race and lose your place." It is not a surprise that our young scientists look around them and say "no way."
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Hi Mary Ann and forum readers,
A nationally coordinated policy sounds like a very good idea. Perhaps an organization supporting women, AAUW or AWIS or another one, might take up lobbying for such a policy.
When Sue Rosser was at NSF, they had POWRE grants for women's reentry. The whole format was shifted to enabling institutions to address their issues in recruiting and retaining women then. But a national program of reentry grants has always seemed like a good idea to me, especially since I reentered the professoriate after administration for five years via a POWRE grant from NSF.
And Title IX, indeed. Enforcement at the level of lawsuits, etc, seems to be focused on sports and looking at child care, etc would be very useful. Readers, review Sonia Pressman Fuentes' postings from some time ago to see other laws that should protect women more than they do.
cheers,
Laura
So far, several comments have suggested a national policy. I agree. It is not easy but research science at universities is almost entirely supported by federal agencies--who do not have a co-ordinated policy on retention of women in science. Here are three suggestions of what the federal government could do--either by executive order or Congress.
First--Provide automatic grant supplements for childbirth. This would allow a mother or father to take a paid leave and their work cold temporarily be assigned elsewhere.
Second--Encourage re-entry grants or postdocs for parents who had been out of the workforce for caretaking
Third, enforce compliance of the maternity discrimination provisions of Title IX
From: Mary Ann Mason
Your point of view is limited up to your department, institution or country but I am talking about USA and whole the world; the global world. Please carefully read these sentence of Mary Ann Mason. She says
" What are the universities and the federal agencies doing to stem this leak? Not enough for faculty and even less for the young researchers. Among the sixty-two top ranked research universities only 13% offer any paid maternity leave for employed graduate students and nearly half have no policy at all regarding childbirth." Although she did not recommended to change whole the system but its clear by her point of view that there is need of change at any extant.
What its mean? You think that the women of your department are happy then all the women are happy??? No not at all. I am also point out the situation of women in 3rd world countries, where women have no opportunities even of basic education rather than advance science education. Please consider whole the world in your point of view and then think about the big change.
I'm going to add a counterpoint to this discussion but let me say first that I resonate with Mary Ann's post. Her work was extremely helpful in providing data for my postdoc association to leverage for several key family friendly policies at that institution that made work/life balance much more attainable for graduate students and postdocs alike.
Those changes had no impact on our postdoc survey results however (which were consistent with national results) showing that women still choose to leave the academic track at greater numbers than men and that childbearing correlates very well with that decision. You can patch the system, but it doesn't mean you can fool the women into thinking a faculty position is for them.
So my counterpoint is why care if women leave to do science outside the academy? They still contributed to academic research as graduate students and postdocs and enhance the scientific knowledge of our country.
To Mad Dog's point, there are plenty of examples in my department (which is 50/50 by the way up the director level) where women chose an industry position over an an R01 top-tier academic position. I myself am one of them. And no one in academe cares...there is always a man standing by waiting to grab that previous job and do it well I might add. So from the business perspective, the university still gets their F&O, the department still gets their faculty member who delivers publications and contributes to teaching and industry gains another bright mind to further drug discovery. The women who leave are very happy! Everyone wins...so what's the problem?
Why should the system change when there is no financial incentive? The only incentive I see is a moral one that we decide is important and inherently goes against our sense of fairness. And that just doesn't sell well in academe.
To resolve all these problems we need a new system in which all the universities and other institutions adopt the same rules and regulations. In the present system specially in USA you cannot bound the institutions to adopt the same rules. Can Congress pass this kind of bill??? Its important question.
Its very amazing and shameful that among the sixty-two top ranked research universities only 13% offer any paid maternity leave for employed graduate students and nearly half have no policy at all regarding childbirth. You cannot expect anything much from this system. Its need of hour to rise up better and big change.
I also want to remind all members of Women in Science that you are talking about an advance country. Can you all imagine what is happening in third world countries???????
This is a thorny issue. I am really hesitant to place all the weight of women's experience on children, although that is a big part of it. I have had the "I don't want your job" comment from women without children, as well. And I am sure that the pay equity issue, as well as the pattern of slights, affects women regardless of child status, perhaps even more as you go further up the ranks. I have said before, the worst of my career experiences as a woman occurred before I was married.
Also, the demands on the faculty are ever-increasing. The expectations of the universities are ratcheting upwards, the funding is harder and harder to get, and everyone seems to want more and more of us. I go to meetings and the academics are always much less happy than the women in industry.
Still, children are an important issue. It's ironic that we as academics trumpet the flexibility and liberalism while treating women worse than corporate America. Companies cannot afford to waste talent the way we do. To help battle this, my own university now funds partial "maternity fellowships" for grad students, and they can apply for grants to help with child care. But you and I both know that a woman showing up to a postdoc or faculty interview pregnant is probably disadvantaged.
I have long thought that women feel less invested in the academic hierarchy and are therefore more willing to "step off" and do something different. But I'm also increasingly aware of women who have "made" it (tenure, etc) who are also stepping off, exhausted. And many of these do not have children. And there are times when I envy them!
It looks like academia may be getting it for tenure track women, but before that, women get no support with childbirth or child care issues as Mary Ann Mason says. So perhaps postdoc and grad student organizations should take this issue up and pressure their universities to add these needed items, citing Mason's work as evidence! I think this has a chance of helping, anyway.
Perhaps there is a way: if academia lost recruits to industry regularly, meaning those women who are most likely to bring in reams of indirect cost funding (assuming we keep NIH and NSF going in spite of Congress), then they might awaken to the need to do a better job with these issues.
Yes, I saw several cases of this when I was in grad school, women who couldn't manage to continue when they had children due to lack of infrastructure. It's a shame but I doubt we can do anything now, since everything is on the chopping block in Congress. Things I've worked for during years of effort are about to disappear. So adding another very good and important thing looks nearly impossible.
Dr. Mason, do you see any strategies that might move academia to put such supports in place in today's environment?
