Is American Culture pushing women out of STEM?

Parents Forum
141

<p>Is it especially impossible to get tenure-track positions in physics or is it ‘merely’ just as impossible as obtaining a similar position in biology? I know with biology, it’s harder for ‘straight PhDs’ and lots of people are relegated to ‘research associate’ or ‘permanent postdoc’ but I am not too knowledgable about other fields. </p>

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<p>([Perspective:</a> Ensuring Retention of Women in Physician-Scientist Training | Science Careers](<a href=“http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2009_01_30/caredit.a0900015]Perspective:”>http://sciencecareers.sciencemag.org/career_magazine/previous_issues/articles/2009_01_30/caredit.a0900015) ) </p>

<p><a href=“http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=20011322[/url]”>http://careers.bmj.com/careers/advice/view-article.html?id=20011322&lt;/a&gt; also talks about it</p>

<p>[Beyond</a> Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering](<a href=“http://www.nap.edu/catalog.php?record_id=11741]Beyond”>Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering | The National Academies Press) is a book on this issue. </p>

<p>It writes,

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<p>Small disadvantages can have long term effects: </p>

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<p>D Tomaskoviv-Devey, M Thomas, and K Johnson (2005). Race and the accumulation of human capital across the career: A theoretical model of fixed-effects application. American Journal of Sociology 111:58-89.</p>

<p>I don’t understand why everything I ever read on this forum turns into STEM vs non STEM. Academic STEM research requires certain skills like the ability to design things, the ability to not give up after getting nonsensical data forever (some lady I knew spent 5 years on a project and then finally got results), writing grants that have a low chance of getting accepted etc. etc. Work in other industries requires other skills. </p>

<p>They’re both stressful, in different ways, for different people. If I had to get a job where I had to network all the time and persuade people to buy my product, I would probably fail miserably. If some people had to do labwork, they’d probably get depressed.</p>

<p>Anyway, it is my personal thinking that all of this is a result of cultural deficits and deficits in education that will need to be resolved. You can’t tell people to just stop being biased. Maybe the role model stuff and whatnot is something that can be done from the top down but the rest, I believe, is a grassroots kind of thing. </p>

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<p>That is so cool! She is so inspiring. I wouldn’t know how medicine has changed over time - I just feel that there a glut of Bio PhDs who can’t get tenured and lots of un-innovative labs functioning out there which I can think increases the competition for grants greatly and pushes people to sometimes do unethical things with data.</p>

142

<p>The current situation in science (slashed budgets at NIH and NSF that have gone on for years and made much worse by the sequester) has made basic science research much more stressful and time consuming. I think at the moment it’s a terrible job for a parent. It wasn’t as bad ten years ago. It does involve travel to meetings and grant reviews, but so do lots of business jobs. The real problem is that most scientists I know work 12 hour days six to seven days a week. I think there are other stressful jobs. I went to an interview 6 pm on a Friday evening with a very famous architect when my kids were babies and was pretty horrified that the office was full of people working. I was very happy not to be offered a job there! My brother-in-law was a lawyer for VISA and never ever seemed to have any time when he was talking business on his phone. He’s switched to another company and seems less crazed now though he travels more. Investment banking as mentioned upthread seems to demand crazy hours too. I’d love to see more jobs that are a little less than full time with flexible hours so that anyone who is parenting (or taking care of their parents) has some time off without feeling guilty or missing out on promotions. I loved my first boss who would shoe me out the door if I tried to work a few minutes after 5 pm!</p>

143

<p>"By contrast, in the Asia offices, where domestic help is cheap and plentiful, my female colleagues squeeze out that baby and are back to full-time in weeks. The professional women there are not hung up on being viewed as a bad mother if they are not present 27/7 to personally wipe junior’s butt. "…</p>

<p>This is an unfortunate way of viewing parenthood/motherhood. It is not necesarry to devalue the role of mothers in order to elevate the role of professional women. Both roles are difficult.</p>

<p>I have sequenced my career so that I spent some years working full time, then some years being a full time parent, and now working part- time. What I have found most difficult about being a SAHM was that I didn’t get time off for coffee breaks, lunch breaks, sick days, and most of all, lack of respect! Comments like the one quoted above, IMHO, implying that the main job of a parent at home during the workday is to “wipe junior’s butt” point to a lack of knowledge about what really does go on during that day.</p>

144

<p>I am not certain about the recent situation in physics hiring in academic departments–about 10 years ago, I read an article in Physics Today that claimed that there were faculty openings at research universities for only 10% of the people who were physics post-docs. If you assume that only 50% of the physics post-docs were actually looking for a faculty position that year, then 20% of the people should have been successful in finding an academic position (with other variations depending on how you shift away from 50% in the preceding estimate).</p>

145

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<p>One of the distinctions I was trying to make with some STEM fields versus others is that there is an all-or-nothing quality to it. If you are not the best, you won’t be able to get a job doing what you are trained to do. Theoretical math and physics are good examples of this. That is, you won’t be paid to discover new math and physics theories/concepts.</p>

<p>With biology and chemistry, you can at least work at a pharmaceutical company and work relatively normal hours (e.g., 60 or less per week.) The difference in bio and chem is that they still need teams of educated people to do the lab work, not just as lab hands, but also to understand the theory. In the same way, you don’t have to be as good at Warren Buffett to have a management job in a business. However, with theoretical physics and/or math, all you need really is the imagination itself. Only the top people need to be paid.</p>

<p>I do agree somewhat that Qmech is right; these jobs are fundamentally not the same. A mathematician does not need the same people or organizational skills as a top-flight CEO; however, the CEO does not need the same level of imagination or raw thinking ability as a mathematician. It always helps somewhat; but it isn’t as critically important. They say that mathematicians often don’t produce anything very important after age 30 or 35; I wonder if part of this is because they start to have normal lives. </p>

<p>A different analogy is that mathematicians are more akin to startup founders than CEOs of existing companies. They are always in the state of creating something new rather than running an existing program. While technically that is also true of other STEM disciplines, in practice what you often see is a lab churning out the same type of research with the same techniques over years.</p>

146

<p>Diana66, I agree with you. I was really taken aback by the viewpoint you quoted in the first paragraph of #143. (Was that in a letter to the New York Times?) That viewpoint is so dismissive of what parents at home are really doing, and dismissive of the experience of giving birth, as well. Aside from that, I think the letter writer’s partner (if any) would be a fool to leave the letter writer at home with a child, without someone else who “gets it” being there.</p>

147

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U misunderstand my point. The intention was NOT to denegrate mothering, but to point out that there is indeed cultural pressure in America, on professional women who can “afford” to stay at home.</p>

<p>I have heard many critisisms in the U.S. of working mothers, such as: “why did u bother to have children if u aren’t at home with them”, or “how can u let your children be raised by strangers”. The cultural pressure on women is even worse in Germany, where there is a scornful term for working mothers: ‘rabenmutter’. </p>

<p>When I worked in my company’s Europe office, the fulltime professional women were either childless locals or expatriate. The local women w kids were all partime-- hard to work fulltime when the local public schools close at lunchtime for kids to go home to eat lunch.</p>

148

<p>Oh, I see, sort of. Yes there is considerable cultural pressure in the US currently–at least in some regions–to become involved in all sorts of “motherly” things, whether they make sense for the individual parent or not. The pressures are really fairly hard to resist, particularly if one goes to events at an elementary school. I’ve done my share of participating. </p>

<p>I have heard that in some parts of Asia, grandparents contribute substantially to the upbringing of children. However, I don’t know how general this is.</p>

<p>Still, GMTplus7, I have to say that the version of childbirth that amounts to having a woman “squeeze out that baby” is somewhat lacking in sensitivity, to say the least. Working mothers have to figure out how to be involved substantively in their child’s upbringing, despite having many hours on the job. Your example is the very least of it.</p>

149

<p>QM, you posted these two quotes:</p>

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<p>With all due respect, I don’t think you are aware of how other fields / industries / businesses work. It sounds as though you think that other people are just routinely doing things that they know how to do – processing the paper from in-box A to out-box B, so to speak, and fully know exactly what the end deliverable is expected to look like, and know the exact process to get there. </p>

<p>I don’t think anything could be further from the truth in many jobs. I know (generally speaking) what oldfort does, and she knows (generally speaking) what I do. I assure you that we face problems in our industries on a day-to-day basis that don’t have easy-peasy, find-the-manual-and-turn-to-page-10 solutions. Where we don’t know what the final deliverable should or could look like til we create it. We are “inventing” everyday just as much as you are inventing. We are searching for new answers, sometimes spending a lot of time trying to figure out what the right question is to ask in the first place. We are putting together complex solutions and often being the first to tread on new ground. I think conceptually almost every day about the processes I am currently using and how to create new ones for situations that I might encounter. These aren’t inventions in the sense of discovering new molecules that do whatever, but they are discoveries and inventions just the same. Honestly, I know you didn’t mean it to sound condescending, but it sounds awfully condescending to suggest that the rest of us who aren’t in STEM fields are just following laid-out processes and procedures to known ends, and our “job difficulty” is only if we have a demanding boss or unpleasant coworkers. </p>

<p>I got asked by a client (major multinational) - put together a strategy for us in 16 countries across X number of product lines, and tell us the potential and how we should deploy our brand portfolio. There isn’t some kind of manual for that. I had to make it all up as I went along, and look for conceptual similarities and differences, and figure out a process to size it all. That’s discovery and invention and it requires me to work at full intellectual capacity. That’s different from the types of discoveries you do, but it’s discovery nonetheless, and it’s no less hard than what you do – merely different.</p>

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<p>You have said this before, collegealum, and per my message above to QM – I don’t think the two of you fully understand that it’s not just the actual start-up founders of companies who need to be creative, inventive, put things together in new ways, find something that didn’t exist and figure out how to make it happen. Those of us in senior positions do that all the time, whether or not our title is explicitly “entrepreneur” or “founder.”</p>

<p>Data10, on the other hand, gets it:

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My facetious comment about butt-wiping paints a more vivid image of the issue</p>

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<p>Sorry, I didn’t read through a lot of the thread carefully, but that makes 100% sense. Biology and maybe Chemistry (though some subfields less so) appear to be really experimental. So yes, you’ll always need a postdoc or research associate or someone to do the work. </p>

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<p>I wonder if the number has actually dropped in the past 10 years. I heard tenure was easier to acquire (in Bio, at least) in the 90s and early 2000s than now. </p>

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<p>I agree with this. I feel like science and bio academia, specifically, sucks in general though - there is a lot of emphasis on publishing papers to obtain grants and people are afraid to take risks. Someone told me grant agencies look more at quantity than quality, so people with a few major papers (Nature, Nature Med) often get shafted for people who publish multiple ones a year. </p>

<p>Anyway, I think it’s better if less people go to grad school for STEM - there are only X number of resources, after all. I just think men and women should have equal opportunities to succeed when they are in the field. I think it’s silly to dismiss biological processes such as childbearing and rearing for women as automatic detriments to their career, because ultimately, those two activities are beneficial for society. As such, we should make provisions so individuals can do both. </p>

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Ew.</p>

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<p>Hmmm . . . Re Pizzagirl’s posts #149 and 150: I did not mean to suggest that other professional positions involve only routine, or that they involve following a manual–far from it. I understand that it is often essential to offer solutions when there are considerable uncertainties, that make things complicated. I also appreciate the role that judgment plays–my father in law used to say that other people where he worked (Booz, Allen) always said that “Knowledge is cheap, but judgment is expensive.”</p>

<p>Still, I think that there are things that are intrinsically harder than even the example that you have mentioned with the multi-national client. Research in general relativity comes to mind.</p>

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<p>Yes, it is all different and many many jobs have stressors. I have a couple of tenured professors (not STEM) in the family and they always seemed to think they were busier, more scholarly , their work was more important than what the rest of us were doing. I don’t think they meant to be condescending but the tone was sometimes there. It has been something that we have learned to just roll our eyes over the course of the years. So, it is not always the STEM people . Maybe it is the professors. :)</p>

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<p>GMT, this attitude exists, and is matched, of course, by the opposite point of view, which is that if you do choose to stay home and raise children you clearly could not cut it in the real world, and so you opted for the easy route. Which is to say that you can’t win, nohow, as a woman in America, so you may as well do what you want, if you can. </p>

<p>The remaining question is, do we, as a society, have any real desire to make it possible for women to fulfill the desire both to have families and to have a career on the same footing as men? Have we made any real progress from the days when women were discouraged from even attending college, since it was a waste of resources to allocate education to women when all they were going to do was get married and raise children? Or do we inhabit a peculiar hinterland, in which women occupy a grey area in which they are “allowed” to try to compete on the same footing as men, but are handicapped by the biological realities of childbearing? As long as the response to the problem is pretty much, well, if you’re serious about your job you won’t have children, then individual women will be forced to choose between being “serious” about their jobs, or “serious” about raising children well–which has dire consequences both for women and for children. Why does the current paradigm have such sway over our culture? It hasn’t really worked, ever, and yet people seem incapable of letting go of the Leave it To Beaver model for living. The “ideal” of one working parent, one stay-at-home parent was a moment in time, culturally speaking, yet people in this country behave as though it was a cultural norm for centuries. If we relinquish this vision, we can reimagine the roles of parents, of women, of individuals, in the lives of children and of our society generally, to widen the possibilities for all, to everyone’s advantage.</p>

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<p>QM - I say this nicely, I really do - get over yourself. The assumption that you (as a STEM representative) work that much harder or that your work is so much more intrinsically difficult than what the rest of us do, when you’re talking to seasoned, experienced, senior professionals such as oldfort and myself – is arrogant. I don’t see you as an arrogant person in general, but on this one I have to call it this way.</p>

<p>Edit: just saw sevmom’s post. Exactly. I don’t know what it is about professors where they think they work harder than anyone else, but it’s ludicrous.</p>

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<p>I’ll be upfront about it–I think that dealing with any human-made situation or product is easier than dealing with Nature, due to the complexity of the latter. I group mathematics into the subjects that deal with Nature.</p>

<p>PG: Back when you were a math student, did you encounter problems that took you years to solve?</p>

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<p>Not sure any arrogance or condescension by anyone is necessarily related to STEM.</p>

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<p>How does one determine the intrinsic difficulty of ‘work’? The number of individuals in a population that could do it well? The number of hours it takes? </p>

<p>If one goes by the first definition, one might say car repair is not a particularly difficult job compared to research or other professions. The line is more difficult to draw as the jobs get more complicated. I think science has a lot of complete shooting in the dark, because you have no clue what the parameters are. I had to kind of do this on a very small scale and it drove me insane.</p>

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<p>QM, Have you dealt with suicidal , homicidal or abusive patients that you had to deal with on a professional basis that you had responsibility for? I have. It is no picnic.</p>