Podcast: Salary and job satisfaction in science

Julie Gould:

Hello, and welcome to the Nature Careers Podcast. I’m Julie Gould. This month, we’re talking salaries and workplace satisfaction…

Chris Woolston:

People who are running labs should be checking in with their researchers, should be checking in with their team. Ask them how they’re feeling about their jobs, ask them how they’re feeling about their work-life balance, about their futures. I think they would get some really interesting answers and they, unlike us, would be in a position where they could actually do something about it.

Julie Gould:

… and mothers’ insights.

Jamie Krueger:

It’s okay to back down a little bit sometimes. You don’t have to be Supermum and Superscientist and it was just really refreshing to hear somebody say that it’s okay, it’s okay to back off.

Julie Gould:

In October this year Nature published the results of its biennial survey of salary and job satisfaction in the global science community. The results have an important message – that there are many different career paths a scientist can take both in and beyond academia, and that those leaving the academic workplace shouldn’t be afraid that they might lose out on emotional or financial satisfaction. I caught up with Chris Woolston, who wrote about the results for Nature Careers. Chris also covers our biennial PhD survey, which is due to run next in 2019. He’s been covering these surveys for four years now so is very familiar with them, and the conversation starts with Chris telling us why he’s so interested in these surveys and the insights they give into the lives of scientists.

Chris Woolston:

I just think it’s a remarkable set of data. We heard from so many researchers from around the world and we’re asking questions they don’t very often get asked, questions like "Are you actually happy with your job, are you happy with your salary, are you happy with your work-life balance?" Those are the sorts of things that I think scientists are very eager to talk about but not many people are asking them.

With salary, one thing that I find fascinating is how relative happiness is when it comes to salary. I spoke with a researcher in India who was not making very much. He was on the low end of the salary spectrum and he was very happy with his salary, and we know from the survey that there are people making over $150,000 a year who are unhappy with their salary.

And it just goes to show the power of expectations and the importance of matching your salary with where you live and what your job requirements actually are.

Julie Gould:

Chris, it’s interesting that you mentioned that a survey like this that seems to be asking questions that scientists don’t get asked very often, the questions like "Are you satisfied with your career, are you satisfied with your salaries?" And it’s funny that it’s a magazine that’s asking the questions. Should someone else be asking them? Should it be more commonplace for discussions about these sorts of topics within the scientific career and the scientific career ladder?

Chris Woolston

Yeah, well at Nature we’re in a very privileged position because we can ask that question and have it span the globe. We can get answers from everywhere and that’s something that an institution cannot do. And there are institutions that are taking a close look. Just this morning I was interviewing a person at the University of North Carolina and we were talking about issues for postdoctoral researchers, and they had done their own surveys and they check in with their postdocs to find out about their satisfaction and their frustrations.

So people are doing that on a smaller level.

Julie Gould:

But what about going to an even smaller level, for example, with a supervisor speaking directly to those people that work in their labs? Should it go down to that level?

Chris Woolston:

Yes, absolutely. I think one message from this survey is that people who are running labs should be checking in with their researchers, should be checking in with their team, ask them how they’re feeling about their jobs, ask them how they're feeling about their work-life balance, about their futures. I think they would get some really interesting answers and they, unlike us, would be in a position where they could actually do something about it. We can only report these numbers and I think people who run labs have the power to shape them.

Julie Gould:

Okay, now you’ve analysed both the 2017 PhD survey data, and the job satisfaction survey results. Now, when you look at both of those datasets, what leapt out at you? And maybe are there any concerns that both the PhD students and the salaried scientists share?

Chris Woolston:

Yes, both PhD students and salaried scientists have a lot of uncertainty about their future. In the most recent survey, 60% of the respondents said they were optimistic about future prospects, which sounds okay but that still leaves a lot who are pessimistic about their prospects. And the ones who were optimistic were more likely to be men and more likely to be younger, so older female respondents were especially likely to have fairly grim outlooks about their future, which is not encouraging.

Julie Gould:

Why do you think that is?

Chris Woolston:

There definitely is a lot of headwind for female researchers, and that’s something that shows up in this survey. One thing is that there is a pay gap, a gender pay gap, and that gap becomes especially pronounced later in their careers. We found that at the later stages of their careers, men were making significantly more than women, and I think that women see that, and especially older women feel that they don’t have quite the prospects that male researchers might have.

Julie Gould:

Broadly speaking, how satisfied would you say that scientists are at the moment with their career choices?

Chris Woolston:

I think that is one of the most interesting things that comes out of these surveys. I feel that this is a question that these scientists aren’t often asked – just the basic question of how satisfied are you with your job. And what we found in all of these surveys over the years is that job satisfaction tends to hover around the low 70s, high 60s, which sounds again maybe not bad but that certainly leaves a lot of room for improvement. And in this particular survey, we found that the job satisfaction didn’t really vary vary much between sectors, between academia, government, non-profit, industry, but we found that people in academia were the least satisfied of all.

And when we went into different categories, we found very interesting discrepancies in terms of salary, in terms of work-life balance and in terms of whether or not an institution was doing enough to promote diversity, and in every case, all of those cases, industry fared better than academia.

Julie Gould:

With regards to satisfaction, what can be done to increase and improve those numbers to make sure that more people are more satisfied with their careers?

Chris Woolston:

One of the things that turned out to be the most important factor for whether someone was satisfied with their job was control over their work. This is something that is true for any employment sector, science or anything else. People who feel like they have control over their work and over their futures are most likely to be satisfied, and that’s definitely a problem in science. I’ve been doing stories about postdoctoral researchers lately and that is a common theme – that postdocs feel like they are working for the principal investigators who are running their labs, and they are not in charge of their own destinies or even their own projects. And that is a major problem in science at all levels really. Even people who are running their labs don’t always feel like they are the ones in charge. They feel like they are chasing grants, they are just trying to keep their lab funded as opposed to running things. And what we found in the survey is that there are high levels of satisfaction in other sectors, the highest actually was in non-profit work. There’s government work, there are jobs in industry and you’re definitely not going to sacrifice very much job satisfaction and definitely not going to sacrifice salary if you take one of these other paths outside of academia.

Julie Gould:

We are due to repeat the survey in a couple of years’ time, so what do you think will be the interesting trends to look out for?

Chris Woolston:

I’m interested in looking at the question of would they recommend science as a career to students. We had 75% say that they would do that this year, and that’s a significant rise from two years ago, and I’m interested to know if that is a real increase or whether it was just a one-time anomaly.

And I’m just generally surprised by the fact that so many people would recommend science when we do have people complaining about different parts of it and there is so much uncertainty. I think that just speaks again to the importance of being interested in your work and the feeling that science is important.

Julie Gould:

Finally, Chris, you recently did a TED talk about the mental health of graduate students in the sciences. What led you to that and what did you talk about?

Chris Woolston:

I was asked to give a TEDx talk in Luxembourg after researchers there had read some of my work in Nature about the struggles of early career scientists, and I just talked about how much stress the system puts on researchers and it was very well received. I think a lot of people are interested in that message and they feel that they aren’t alone and they are relieved that people are talking about it and that some institutions are definitely reaching out to their students and their postdocs and even their PIs, and letting them know that this is definitely a part of science and that it’s not going to be overlooked and that people are taking it seriously.

Julie Gould:

Thanks to Chris Woolston. In our conversation, we touched briefly on the free text comments that scientists made when they filled out the survey. Here’s just a sample selection. All the comments are anonymous and the voices you hear are not of the people who made them, although some of the voices might be a bit familiar if you’re a regular listener. So, here’s a little insight into some of the challenges in science:

Anonymous:

I experience a double standard very frequently and I believe it is because I'm a woman – the only one in my department. The double standard means that I am expected to pick up far more than my share of administrative responsibility and when I do a good job, I am criticised for not being a ‘true’ scientist – in other words, one who neglects anything that isn't research. When a male colleague of the same experience level does his smaller portion of administrative work, he is praised for his effort. I am also expected to share any resources or opportunities I get, while others are not expected to share with me, as though there is a sense that I owe others. And when I experience success, I am sometimes told it's because I checked a box as a woman and that I'm lucky.

Anonymous:

Pressure to retire as I approach age 60 – not explicit or stated – but moral pressure and looks. Ridiculous bias in favour of women in our organisation has created an atmosphere slightly hostile to men.

Anonymous:

Co-workers have scheduled important meetings on religious holidays and when I object or do not attend, I'm viewed as someone who doesn't take their job seriously.

Anonymous:

In my organisation, there are small cliques controlling the funding and the organisation. Being an immigrant, I am always kept out of these. There is an intense push to promote females in the organisation so it is very unlikely for me to be promoted further. It is some kind of reverse discrimination.

After finding out that two women in the lab were pregnant, my previous PI came up to me and told me that ‘I should keep my legs closed’ because he didn't want any more pregnant women in the lab.

Julie Gould:

Thanks to the Nature Careers team for putting those together, and you can read more about the survey and the results in Chris’ piece called ‘Satisfaction in Science’, at nature.com/careers.

Now, the very last issue of Nature will have a 2019 events directory, and I’ve penned a little piece about how to make conferences more accessible for mothers or carers in science. This is a big topic at the moment, with many conferences and societies making efforts to help make conferences more accessible for everyone. Jamie Krueger is a neuroscience graduate student at the University of California, Davis, and she co-organised the panel discussion at the Society of Neuroscientists’ annual conference last month to share some of the experiences that mothers in science had had.

I had a quick chat with her after she got back to find out what she learnt and why she thought it was important to learn from other mothers in science.

Jamie Krueger:

So back in February, my friend Anahita and I had been talking, and I’m a grad student parent and she’s a postdoc, and she had just had twins and they were both in the NICU for a few months, and we were talking about how much we really would have loved to hear advice from other women who had kind of made it through, who had had their babies while they were a grad student or a postdoc or an early career, and kind of what they did to succeed because parenting and motherhood is isolating and it’s time-consuming and how do you kind of balance all of these different things.

And so, we really just wanted to have this panel to get women together to let them know they’re not alone, that we all face these same struggles and then just to hear about a different variety of perspectives on what people do to succeed.

Julie Gould:

Did you yourself bring your little one to the meeting?

Jamie Krueger:

You know, I didn’t because it’s so expensive. It was like $100 a day.

Julie Gould:

Wow, but I thought SfN was providing childcare?

Jamie Kreuger:

No, there’s an infant room where you can go with your infant to nurse, be quiet, whatever. And then there is a kiddy core childcare room, and that, I want to say, was about $100 a day. And so, for the duration of the meeting that would have been $500, on top of our monthly daycare costs, so for me it just wasn’t feasible.

Julie Gould:

That’s a barrier for many people I can imagine.

Jamie Krueger:

Especially as a grad student – your stipend only goes so far.

Julie Gould:

Absolutely. Were there any surprising stories or perspectives that you hadn’t expected to hear?

Jamie Krueger:

One perspective that I really appreciated – not that I didn’t appreciate all of them, obviously – was from Jessica Barson at Drexel, who was talking about how it’s okay to not be extraordinary at times because in this field, you’re always just pushing, pushing, pushing, doing everything you can to put out the best science and get all the research done and write all the papers and the perspective that she was offering was it’s okay to back down a little bit sometimes.

You don’t have to be Supermum and Superscientist, and it was just really refreshing to hear somebody say it’s okay, it’s okay to back off.

Julie Gould:

I imagine that she herself backed off a little bit and it didn’t hinder her career in any way to take a step back and to not be Superscientist?

Jamie Krueger:

I would have called her a super scientist myself, and a superhuman. I mean she opened a lab and within four months had twins, and that in and of itself and still running her lab and being very successful is really inspiring to see.

Julie Gould:

For those who couldn’t attend the talk, what were the, say, top three pieces of advice that were given by the panellists about balancing motherhood and being a scientist?

Jamie Krueger:

I thought Denise Cai had a really wonderful analogy about balancing motherhood in her life, and she was describing her life as an ice cream sundae, with the analogy that her husband was the ice cream and if she only had ice cream she would still be okay and that would still be awesome. But then she had her kids and they’re kind of like the hot fudge, where they add something additionally awesome to her sundae, and then this idea that her work is the cherry on top and she would still be okay if she just had her hot fudge and she just had her ice cream, but the cherry on top just makes it extra nice.

And I thought that was a great perspective for saying your work is not everything but it definitely compliments the whole package. I thought that was great.

Dr Hamidi, or Anahita, actually has decided to leave academia and become a science writer, and her message was kind of about redefining what the leaky pipeline really meant because you say you’re a leak out of the system and in a way, you think you’re a failure but she’s obviously not a failure. She is going on to succeed in a career that is perfect for her, and all those things I thought were really helpful pieces of advice.

Julie Gould:

Thanks Jamie Kruger. So, keep an eye out for the last issue of Nature this year for the Nature Events Directory 2019.

And this was the last episode for 2018. How fast has that gone by? Next year, the Nature Careers Podcast is coming back, but it will have a slightly different feel.

Instead of a monthly podcast, we’ll be producing four series of podcasts, each focused on a different topic and our first series, which will be launching in January, will look at funding – something that’s really keep to everybody’s career in science. So, here’s just a little teaser of what’s to come...

"My conclusion is that this is quite unhealthy for basic research, which is a quintessentially long-term... "

"The critical thing for any application is that the idea is a sound one and has got some importance… "

"This person is a really good person to put this funding in to deliver this… "

"You shouldn’t think more than necessary about what you’re trying to explain…"

"There is a great deal of randomness and luck that we find in determining who does and does not get funding."

Julie Gould

"And with that, I and the rest of the Nature Careers team, wish you a very Merry Christmas and a happy 2019. Thanks for listening. I’m Julie Gould. "