An alternative argument for why women leave STEM
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It's worth taking a look at three other professions with long, high-intensity pathways from apprentice to master --all of which have been wrestling with the same challenges. They are management consulting, law and medicine. I've written about them elsewhere.
In medicine, there's been a surge of female participation (and leadership) in specialties such as dermatology, psychiatry and radiology, where it's relatively easier to rearrange hours and training regimens to be family compatible. There's been less progress in surgery, where hellish hours are considered part of the journey.
In law, some firms have been experimenting with a blurring of the boundaries between associate and partner, so that there's a middle level at which women can enter into motherhood without tanking their career chances. (In the traditional model, close to 40% of entry-level associates are female, but few of them stick around to make partner.)
I'm wondering if either of those models is transferable to STEM academia. Are there particular sub-disciplines where professional success and sane hours might be more compatible? Similarly, are there tenure-track or quasi-tenure track job titles that split the difference in tolerable ways?
I haven't researched these well enough to have clear answers. But it's worth discussing.
It’s a complicated issue, it needs to be tackled on many fronts. As men in the field we should advocate for those things Karen recommends, namely flexible hours, obscenely convenient high quality childcare, and other supports to make a career not the death of family.
Even if you disagree that there’s a problem here (and I think you’re wrong) how would these changes cause harm? Wouldn’t it just be a better world if people were less stressed by these things?
Flexible hours impose large costs in terms of increased difficulty of coordination and communication and if you’re really serious about them you need to completely upend the organizational structure, like changing an on premise company to a fully remote one. There’s also a hard upper limit on your career because managers are the bottleneck for communication so they almost have to be available when active else is. Arrangements to make flexibility economically profitable are also often denounced, see Uber.
> Even if you disagree that there’s a problem here (and I think you’re wrong) how would these changes cause harm? Wouldn’t it just be a better world if people were less stressed by these things?
It would be a better world but flexibility imposes large costs. Obscenely convenient childcare is also far from a panacea. Sweden has cheap to free childcare and it’s available 24/7 for those whose jobs demand it. But while Sweden’s employment rate is very high it’s among the most sex segregated in the world and fertility isn’t noticeably different from countries that aren’t so generous, suggesting the effects on family formation are minimal.
Of counsel[1] isn’t an intermediate rank, it’s a recognition that you’re almost certain never to make partner but that you’re capable of working with close to zero supervision. Non-equity partners[2] are closer, given that in some firms at least they get both a voice and a vote on firm wide decisions.
In academia the equivalent to Of Counsel is probably either a post doc or a Visiting Assistant Professor, both of which are contingent positions, like being Of Counsel. The closest to non equity partner is tenure track teaching faculty, often called lecturers in the US, or maybe staff scientist, which is more or less being a post doc with job security.
These positions already exist but post docs, adjunct faculty and grad students are cheaper, so they’re comparatively rare.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Of_counsel
[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Partner_(business_rank)
In law firms, partners are primarily those senior lawyers who are responsible for generating the firm's revenue. The standards for equity partnership vary from firm to firm. Many law firms have a "two-tiered" partnership structure, in which some partners are designated as "salaried partners" or "non-equity" partners, and are allowed to use the "partner" title but do not share in profits. This position is often given to lawyers on track to become equity partners so that they can more easily generate business; it is typically a "probationary" status for associates (or former equity partners, who do not generate enough revenue to maintain equity partner status). The distinction between equity and non-equity partners is often internal to the firm and not disclosed to clients, although a typical equity partner could be compensated three times as much as a non-equity partner billing at the same hourly rate.
I haven't researched these well enough to have clear answers. But it's worth discussing."
One of the easiest, and most important things, academia could do is make pausing tenure clocks have both less stigma and be easier to do. Like, automatically opt-in for both men and women.
Unfortunately, it's much harder to pause grants, which is its own problem.
a) compensation is very high
b) hours of work cannot be 're-arranged' due to critical life-safety or court-rules.
I presume there are other professions that do not compensate that well, but have similar 'cannot move dates' constraints.
And it would be interesting to see women participation rates on those.
Perhaps this is a specific factor that has gone received proper attention in various analysis.
For an extreme example, just look at the AAA games industry.
Having said that, I think you could say the same about most industries unfortunately. I don't know if it's just because that's what competition forces us into, but I would guess that is a big part of it.
This is really a bad thing, because women are generally superior to men at tasks involving fine motor skills.
Unlike lower-skilled workers, the kind of person who even has the opportunity to get a PhD is also likely to have other good opportunities should they choose to take them. Academics should improve their lot and that of others by voting with their feet.
Every now and then I get an overwhelming sense of guilt when I talk to/think about my friends who are engaged in academia or pursuing advanced degrees (I'm 28, for reference).
The crazy workloads they have, the insane restrictions on how they can do their jobs, and the cut-throat nature of the industry means that they're working so much harder than I am, and are either doing their part to advance the grand sum of human knowledge, or are training to literally save peoples lives...and I'm sitting here, a college drop out, getting paid _way_ more than they're making, in an industry where I will never have any fears about job security, playing with networking equipment and writing about it.
That guilt is proportional to the value you place on your work-time/daily output. The guilt will subside as your output importance does.
Also, the grass often appears greener, and many in academia are mired in its doldrums too.
Sounds like you're under 45
The first thing I thought as well. When you read all these horror stories about burned out phd students, why is anyone doing this?
If a woman in STEM wants to combine family and work (or a man or anyone else really) there are many jobs in the industry that are actually relatively 9-5, and pay really well.
I don't understand academia at all. It sounds like a combination of paperwork, flying to conferences, endless networking, publishing papers for publishing's sake. It's like a Kafka novel.
I think the joy of pure research is that you only have to engage in occasional bullshit academic politics and otherwise have a completely pure existence in a monastery of scientific spiritual ideological purity of sorts. This is probably why some of the most sought after jobs under communism were non-political professorships at Universities, like being a math professor. Many of the post-soviet oligarchs were professors at universities during the soviet union times.
Did not work out, since I now have an office, but at least I can show up at 2pm without being fired.
As an academic, your description is rather accurate regarding the research part of academia (you left out the teaching).
Some of us put up with all that because we love the science, the sense of discovery, of doing what no one has done before, advancing human knowledge, the feeling of working for public good and not for some profit-driven corporation. Flexible hours is also a plus (although also a double-edged sword).
(I confess I do like the "flying to conferences" part as well, though).
This is exactly what is happening! (Well, the leaving, not the improving).
The argument is that men are more willing to put up with the particular nature of the poor working conditions in academia, hence women disproportionately leave.
I wonder why there are few women in engineering, where the conditions and the pay are so much better. I've seen a number of women in IT industry, from junior developers to CTOs, and most of them were brilliant and sharp. But they are still a minority in the field. This puzzles me.
It was less than minimum wage.
But there are plenty of other people willing to take their place, so the only consequence is that research standards drop, which is something most of society will only notice over the very long term.
So I disagree with the idea that individuals leaving will somehow fix the problem. The real solution is to change the terrible culture imposed on academic by the people at the very top. Turning it into a business espousing KPI driven nonsense rather than a vocation. This culture began in the USA and is now widespread in the UK, and it has destroyed goodwill and IMO resulted in dramatic drops in teaching and research standards.
The solution is to scrap REF, restore direct government funding, rebalance funding from grants to departmental funds, reverse the centralisation of administration and the lop-sided admin-academic balance, remove admin workload from academics, provide proper teaching and research career tracks, and cut the number of students attending university.
This is a problem that can only be solved with intelligent thought at the top, not by people acting individually. Market forces are the problem in academia, not the solution.
Sure, I maybe have the mental faculties to become an engineer. Do I want do so, however? If I go to work in a firm, I need to do what the owner of the firm wants to in exchange for the monetary and other rewards. In academia, you write grant applications and research proposals for something you want to do (or to be practical, something you and you advisor agree on, but usually the opportunities are much larger than "client wants a webshop").
And what I would be doing at a $firm? Building more applications and other products and optimized adverts of products for other people, when majority of my free time I try to avoid unnecessary apps, adverts and consumption of useless products that waste natural resources of our planet for no good reason at all?
Sure, there are some companies who offer opportunities at doing basic research, but a) getting into those jobs you need to be exceptionally exceptional (getting into a PhD program, mere "exceptional" is enough), and b) would I really, really want to work there? I am reasonably sure that I have less ethical dilemmas if I am funded by a government or foundation to do research at a public university than getting a paycheck from $big_name_company, to produce value for $big_name_company.
Further, companies can go from research to product that ostensibly makes a difference at scale with a speed that absolutely no University could.
I'm really not seeing any reason to stay in academia whatsoever if you want to do the most exciting applied research today. Maybe if you want to do basic science or something more obscure where the applications are very far off.
1) They have more data. It's not clear that it's better.
2) That difference is, to the eyes of many of us, showing up, making things worse, and then "pivoting".
3) I get to decide what I want to do. I want to add a project on X? I go work on it.
Isn't that the point of being an academic? That you don't have much, if any, interest in generating a product?
And women don't have the luxury of putting up with that BS.
You do see the problem here, don't you?
It would result in more people going into successful careers in industry.
That's a good thing.
I think a big issue in the study of gender differences in work is that it is much easier to quantify the salary earned than the price one must pay in order to be successful in the field. About the best you can do is compare sub-populations that have paid roughly the same price - eg, urban childless single college-educated adults. At that point, studies generally show an insignificant gender difference in wages and success.
So, why is there a gendered component to participation in high-pay/high-sacrifice fields? I've not seen any sort of hard data, so I'd have to speculate. If you made me single out a candidate for investigation, I'd have to look into the how the heterosexual dating market will asymmetrically treat career success. People respond to incentives, and dating success is one hell of an incentive.
Anecdote: My uncle explicitly stated on his dating profile that he was looking for women with masters degrees who were willing to stay at home. I have no idea why he wanted that or why my dad's sister agreed, but this kind of demand is oddly common.
It's both genders; women do not lack agency in the dating market. It'd be as fair to make "my partner should be willing to give up their career to start a family" as the default and blame the dynamic on women - after all, they prefer men who are unwilling to compromise in the pursuit of their career.
I try to avoid either, and just mention that this axis has a gendered component in terms of both what people do and desire.
Since the funeral I've thought about this a lot. Our later-life relationships will be affected by the age at which we had kids. I'm sure this is in the minds of a lot of people in this economic age. There's a lot of "investing in your career" where the equation doesn't account for this.
I wish we could have an economy where this was easier. Say you could have your kids early, in your 20s, yet still progress your career. Perhaps pay for it with working to an older age, which should be possible with some improved health outcomes. Along with a flexible education system that allowed you come in and out. And perhaps incentives for firms to let people in and out, instead of the constant career grind that requires people to constantly push. Some of the finance and legal tracks seem to be for people who are expected to die at 45, like some weird victorian dystopia.
But, physically and emotionally, I wish we could have had kids at 22 or so. Of course we hadn’t even met so this is pure wishful thinking. But still. Raising a family is a real joy, but it’s also very physically demanding (even for men), and the younger you are the easier the physical aspect is. Also, we know a small number of people who had children very young, and now in their 40s their children are grown. It’s a really fascinating relationship, with somewhat more ability to relate to each other and a really cool ability to live life together. Especially when this is across generations, it’s amazing to have an extended family with three generations not just alive but still well.
I have no idea how society could ever adjust to make something like that work out - I think it might be easier to “fix fertility” to give more people the option of starting a family in their 40s. But still, I wonder about it often.
Just like it used to be.
I know many other young families. While I am a well-paid software engineer most of my young family friends are middle/high school teachers.
And who will pick up for missed work, absence, and economical expenses of such a model?
Many years ago an ex-girlfriend, who works in STEM academia (and is otherwise a liberal, progressive feminist), expressed concerns similar to the author about having kids. When I brought up that it wasn't written in stone that she would need to be the primary caregiver, she said she'd never even thought of the alternative!
(Anne-Marie Slaughter touched on this in a 2012 Atlantic article called "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" for anyone who's interested.)
Also many women tend not to want men who earn less then them:
https://www.marketwatch.com/story/rich-women-like-rich-men-a...
That too, is sexism, of course. Sexism also harms men.
I envied doctors at the time, they could just name their hours, some other professions can - but not STEM fields for some reason. I'd say the reason is sexism - its a bunch of guys who are married to women who look after the children, so flexibility is not built in to the system.
They're definitely the only ones who can breastfeed(at any practical rate anyway).
One may, of course, elect not to do that, but it does make a difference for the child.
Even if the husband takes care of the child, doing your masters in LA, your PhD in London, and a postdoc in Sidney, why on earth would anyone want to drag a child along with them?
From what I can see, working in STEM academia definitely means you are likely to be the lower-income partner.
Well, certainly nature is sexist in that only one of the sexes is able to gestate a child. Perhaps that will change someday. However, for now, (biological) women face a unique reproductive burden that is worth recognising and compensating for.
Biology aside, there is an important difference between assuming women must bear a disproportionate responsibility for childcare, and recognising that women do bear a disproportionate responsibility for childcare. The former is sexism, the latter is pragmatism. Saying "my house is on fire" doesn't make you pro-fire.
> That's something that very few diversity-in-STEM folks are really thinking about.
I'm not sure how that can be true. What you're describing, the assumption that men work and women stay home, is the foundational stereotype that sparked second-wave feminism. Unless the argument is that "diversity-in-STEM folks" aren't familiar with basic feminist ideas like gender roles?
In any event, here is some evidence that this is, in fact, something that people are really thinking about:
> The boundaries of the gender division of labour between productive and reproductive roles are gradually being crossed as women have started to enter formerly male-dominated areas of work and men have started to accept greater responsibility for domestic tasks, including child care. However, changes in women’s roles have been greater and much more rapid than changes in men’s roles.
— Beijing Declaration and Platform for Action – Fourth World Conference on Women (1995) https://www.un.org/en/events/pastevents/pdfs/Beijing_Declara...
> Take measures to increase the participation of men in caregiving both within households and in care professions, such as information and awareness campaigns, education and training, school curriculum, peer programmes and government policies to promote men’s participation and responsibilities as fathers and caregivers, and to encourage men and boys to become agents of change in promoting the human rights of women and in challenging gender stereotypes, in particular as they relate to men’s roles in parenting and infant development
— Agreed Conclusions of the 53rd Commission on the Status of Women (2009) https://www.unwomen.org/-/media/headquarters/attachments/sec...
> Labour market policies that offer men access to paternity and parental leave, especially when coupled with Scandinavian-style incentives which encourage men to actually take leave, are a critical signal that men have responsibility for their children. However, gender norms are strong and pervasive. [...] Through community-based organisations and educational sessions supported by social protection programmes, health clinics and schools, fathers should be actively integrated into childcare activities and helped to see themselves as central to their children’s development.
— Women's Work: Mothers, children, and the global childcare crisis – Overseas Development Institute (2016) https://www.odi.org/sites/odi.org.uk/files/odi-assets/public...
> The time-use and labour force data presented in this chapter make a compelling case for inequalities in unpaid care work and inequalities in the labour force being deeply interrelated. This not only confirms the “unpaid care work–paid care work” connection discussed in Chapter 1, but demonstrates also that no substantive progress can be made in achieving all dimensions of gender equality in the labour force before inequalities in unpaid work are tackled through their effective recognition, reduction and redistribution between women and men, as well as between families and the State.
— Care Work and Care Jobs – International Labour Organization (2018) https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/---dgreports/---dco...
> Rather than focusing only on increasing women’s workforce participation, it is also important to increase men’s participation in caring responsibilities. In countries where family policies incentivise men to take caring roles, the impact is seen both in the rate of men accessing leave and in societal attitudes towards parenting.
— Women in STEM Decadal Plan – Australian Academy of Science (2019) https://www.science.org.au/files/userfiles/support/reports-a...
The author's point about being over-critical of sexism is well-taken, but by reducing the sexist attitudes towards, for example, stay-at-home dads, it may be possible to help more women in STEM have fully productive careers.
"It's biology" has a long history of being used to justify everything from sexism to racism to genocide. Please provide a source for your claim (and for the implied claim that men do not have the same drive).
Life is about collecting wonderful memories with the people who you love, not about maintaining some idiotic excel spreadsheets in an open plan office. Maybe we should measure how many women are happy with their life rather than measure how many of them have a certain job title in a certain field. If we can maximise the former then who gives a shit about the latter.
Because if women don't participate in the industry, the men who do will continue building a world designed for men.
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2019/feb/23/truth-w...
There is a lot of pressure on woman to have families and in circumstances where their right and ability to both do that and progress in their careers isn't respected and protected we end up with the current system. One in which woman drop out of less flexible fields earlier, and even in them don't get promoted as fast as their male counterparts who don't need to bow out of the field for months at a time to have a child.
I don't disagree with most you said, but if you weren't there then no amount of artificial thinking will compensate for that.
We can take several actions to balance the books, but the important point I would like to ask is: Do we really want to stop/de-incentivize intelligent women from having children and having an active role on raising them?
Of course there are lots of compromises that can be made to balance the work-home life, but ultimately a decision does need to be made. Spending time with your children in those crucial fundamental years before pre-school is incredibly important and rewarding.
Yes, and employers should be more flexible to allow parents of all genders to do more of this and keep their jobs.
With all due respect, I don’t understand this call to action. Faculty position is basically a zero sum game. If more women end up as faculty, fewer men will. So, unless it costs more to train women than men, I doubt any “investment” would be saved (and that’s not the point of gender equality anyway).
Btw, this maternal wall idea is nothing new. I talked to my mother about gender inequality in hiring many years ago and she was quick to point this out (didn’t call it “maternal wall” though).
The assumption is that aptitude for these positions is roughly the same between genders, so if there's a significant imbalance, society doesn't get the best people on the given set of seats.
The later calculation is along the lines of "society is pouring so much money both into these positions and into getting-women-into-STEM programs without reaching this supposed goal, so here's a counter-proposal to use this money more wisely"
> Btw, this maternal wall idea is nothing new.
She's quite upfront that she borrowed the term as well, so the idea can't be new. But it might be time to reiterate that point (as opposed to the popular reduction of the problem to sexism only), and since she did a good job (IMHO) to collect sources...
An assumption which I have to point out is absolutely not verified. In fact, there are mountains of circumstantial, statistical, and biological evidence to the contrary - which policy makers in the west are increasingly ignoring as they ram gender parity down industry's and academia's collective throats, possibly to the detriment of the institutions and society at large.
Aptitude can be exactly equal and aiming at equality can still be a poor choice if men and women are different. Among medical school graduates women are more likely never to practice, to work part time, to retire early and less likely to work past retirement age. If working more hours leads to more productivity and we value productivity rewarding productivity makes sense.
> And yet, if you ask leading women researchers like Nobel Laureate in Physics 2018, Professor Donna Strickland, or Canada Research Chair in Advanced Functional Materials (Chemistry), Professor Eugenia Kumacheva, they say that sexism was not a barrier in their careers.
— is such a bizarre argument to make. How can one conclude anything about sexism by asking leading women researchers whether whether it has been a barrier in their careers. The very fact that they’ve achieved leading positions says that it wasn’t; it says absolutely nothing of whether it was for those who have left.
_(I am not claiming anything about sexism; I was simply mystified by this paragraph)_
Also, The whole idea of having young people work like dogs in order to have a shot at making partner, or gaining tenure, or gaining a medical degree is both outdated and ageist.
If a company allows employees to take unlimited leave, then worker A who avails him/herself of it, will be at a disadvantage to worker B who keeps working like a dog, when it comes time for promotions.
If company A mandates 32 hour workweeks, then they will eventually lose out to their competitor company B who mandates 40 hours (or more informally).
If country A says ALL companies must have <=32 hour workweeks, then country B, with no such law, will become more productive. And on and on. There will always be some less enlightened competitor to take advantage -- and do we really think America is ready to stop being #1?
It also assumes that workers A and B both working 40 hours (or more informally) are both working like dogs, trying to earn a promotion before the other. This is definitely true in some fields like finance, but not all.
The last assumption is that there is no economic benefit to added free time. Where would we be if the world was solely workers who didn't have the free time to engage with their own thoughts? We certainly wouldn't be on this website, or a computer for that matter.
We aren't computers with a job queue that can be maximized. We are animals that get exhausted easily, distrust our own warning signs, and have been known to do foolish things like jump from buildings if an artificial number dips below some arbitrary level. I think we can all afford to slow down just a little.
You can't dictate this though. Say you have a well-run engineering team where everyone spends exactly 40 hours a week and only 40 hours a week on their jobs. And everyone does this.
You hire one new person who just LOVES THEIR WORK and they work 80 hours a week. Their output is through the roof, they get recognition, raises, bonuses, and promotions.
Now everyone chases them. Goodbye work/life balance for the entire team.
And before one suggests "make it against the rules to do that", good luck seeing how long your group or business lasts with such a policy. Probably NOTHING could be worse for morale.
Even being generous and kind, you end up with that situation. So your solution must work with that tendency, not assume it out of the problem.
No one is forcing people to work that hard to gain money and social status. They do it to themselves.
According to PEW (https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/diversity-in-the-...) there were 17M STEM employees in 2016, so this leaves less than $1000 per employee for childcare. According to Fortune (https://fortune.com/2018/10/22/childcare-costs-per-year-us/) the average cost per child is $9K/year (probably more if you adjust for the distribution of STEM careers?). I'm guessing STEM employees have at least one child on average (some have none, others have multiple, etc), so that only covers about 1/9th of the bill. That's a dent in the bill, but I'm not sure it's enough to make even a proportional dent in the pipeline.
Note that this assumes the money finances a benefit that must be offered to all employees; if you can target the women in question, the calculus clearly changes; however, I suspect that would be difficult under current US discrimination law (IANAL).
That said, I'd rather that money go to employees where it would certainly be useful as opposed to the current programs which, as far as I can tell, is squandered (to put it nicely).
What statutes do you believe would stand in the way of an organization offering excellent daycare services to its employees, as suggested in the OP?
I ask because my partner Is a software engineers. She plans on continuing to work and I plan on staying home with the kids.
Practically speaking it doesn’t totally make sense since I currently earn more being a few years older in the same career. It’s just what we both have wanted since we found one another and we’re willing to make the life adjustments necessary to make it happen
I can’t help wonder how often women partner with men with lower incomes. Obviously the physical toll of baring children tips the scale a little but given couple where the woman makes significantly more than her partner I would imagine the decision would be logical for her to continuing work and wonder what percentage of women leave stem in this particular subset of the group?
It's just a different form of it than the "my coworkers constantly stare at my tits and don't take what I say seriously" variety.
We've put women largely in charge of child rearing duties. Obviously, men aren't able to get pregnant and bear children. We are, however, perfectly capable of changing diapers, singing lullabies, and doing laundry.
I'd bet that we would see the same kind of impediments to women rising to the tops of their professions in many demanding fields, fields where if you take too much time to have a life, you are considered broken and uninterested in excellence.
That is sexism. It is clear sexism, it is classic sexism and it will not go away by pretending that it is not. And I agree very much with the author that it is the real reason behind the constant stream of promising female researchers leaving STEM academia.
Do you mean something else by the "it" in "It seems to be just plain old biology"?
Or would you keep looking for a solution that allows women, who have the very normal female attribute of “having breasts”, to also be catered to and be able to get work done and be compensated despite the whole “breast having” thing?
We need to--as much as we are able--change societal expectations, workforce expectations, and the way jobs are structured so that women are not at a disadvantage. These changes can also benefit men (eg, equal parental leave and other policies that it more affordable and feasible for people to have children). It hurts both sexes when workplaces are biased towards this archetype of a male breadwinner that is content putting in long hours away from his family.
You could view this as anti-family bias, which, due to society and biology, disproportionately affects women.
I agree with your sentiment, but there's a big biological difference here in terms of the fertility age. As discussed in the article, this question is very urgent for women in their 30s, but men can delay reproduction until their late 40s with no major issues. As such, men don't face an ultimatum on this, the way that women do.
She literally spends 25%+ of the post explaining the fertility wall that does not affect men.
That's what the author is failing to discuss. Why do women need to give up their career to _raise_ children when the business of _having_ children takes a tiny portion of the duration of a career in STEM academia.
Do you have an explanation for that?
Anecdotally, observing my own family and that of my (mostly well-off STEM) social circle, I can tell you that this is when women really take a hit career-wise. What's less obvious in the graphs is that many of them take it deliberately, and _choose_ to focus on things other than career. This, ironically, puts pressure on men to provide, and compete in the workplace. I know it put pressure on me like you wouldn't believe - we "settled", got a mortgage, monthly expenses went through the roof. I've roughly tripled my earnings between the time my son was born and his 10th birthday. It came at a tremendous personal cost - I basically didn't have a life for a decade, and our marriage nearly fell apart. I like where we are today, though, thanks to all that effort. My wife took a couple of years off work, and did not aim for a quick career progression afterwards, preferring lower stress and more family time. Was my career progression done at the expense of someone less motivated at work? Quite likely, yes. Was it worth it to my family? It was, although there were many times when I was in doubt about that.
This is something the workforce percentage graphs do not communicate at all.
But in modern society, we tend to cast off our grandparents.
All of my parents grew up and lived in the same state as their siblings. All of my siblings live in different states, and none of us live in the same state as our parents.
My siblings and I don't have any kids yet, but their family life and amount of time they spend with extended family (aunts, uncles, cousins) will look dramatically different than my experience, and it's only been ~25 or so years.
Judging from my neighborhood at least, the answer to that seems to be the grandparents get a class A RV [1] or a large travel trailer [2] and move to their kid's lawn for a few months to help with the grandkids.
Probably only can reasonably work, though, if the kids wait until they have a home and decent sizes lawn to have kids of their own.
[1] https://www.fleetwoodrv.com/models/pace-arrow-1
[2] https://www.rvusa.com/rv-guide/specs-by-model-2019-heartland...
This might be different for people who have kids much later; however, in modern society there IMHO still is no gap where the grandparents already can look after kids because they've retired and still can look after kids because they're physically and mentally able to do so, because most non-rich people tend to work as long as they can, and when they stop working, they themselvelves need caregivers instead of being able to be caregivers for the extended family.
I think the way to measure this might be grandparents moving out of state of family (think Arizona and Florida).
Obviously the stigma of aging should get the bulk of the responsibility here.
Any got any advice on how to re-norm grandparents? I'm hesitating on moving out of state during my kids early childhood.
Living in the same neighborhood as your grandparents would be best. I know families that do that, and the payoff is great for the kids, the parents, and the grandparents. The kids love their grandparents, the grandparents love taking care of the kids, and the parents get safe, reliable, and free help. It's a win all around.
It's the way things ought to be.
To the extent there are factors which systematically work against opportunity, there's both a moral issue, and a pragmatic issue (i.e. losing good talent) at play, before we get into the more controversial issues of representation and equality of outcomes.
Countries that are more egalitarian and have more social mobility have STEM percentages that are decreasing as the same society becomes more egalitarian over time because the women have other options, and they choose to take them.
Sexism is real but its importance is far from being large. It is really tiresome to see the news regurgitating the talking point on wage gap without properly giving context.
What is clear to me is that the wage gap as measured by the average earnings by gender (even drilled down by field) is very hard to be fixed given the obvious biological differences between males and females (in which motherhood reigns supreme).
Women also need to be honest about their prospects, it is very hard to juggle a career and motherhood. You can't have your cake and eat it too. So there needs to be an honest confrontation on the trade offs of motherhood and having a career and the cope that comes with it.
Work and family is a trade-off, their is no way around it. One can live a balanced life and be moderately successful. But to be among the best, the most elite, something generally has to give.
That's not to say that we can't reform the systems to not make it as "winner-take-all", sort of like how the author suggested.
Does anyone ever stop to consider that? Maybe women are doing what's best for themselves, sticking to things they like, and screw your arrogant western leftist ideas of what YOU think they should do?
Let's just pretend women like shoes and handbags more and men like engines and guns more just for purely random reasons. Despite global perpetuity. Everywhere ever.
Let's just pretend engineers and nurses is inflicted, not chosen, despite what ultra high gender equality Scandinavia says.
Let's all pretend that only the North Koreans are brainwashed and that only they care little for facts and human flourishing.
Let's all just slosh in wierd western religious fervour. Or actually, how about no, and hop on a plane to the civilised world.
I mean, it's a more actionable level of detail, but it's still sexism, no? Just maybe more structural rather than at the level of individual hiring or advancing decisions?
Similarly, men live fewer years than women, and so receive less retirement benefits. This is a structural gender-correlated inequality (maybe gender-correlated is even better than gender-based) but I don't think many people would call it "sexism against men". They would just say "oh, yeah, that's odd... maybe we should adjust that now that you've brought it to our attention".
Winner takes all is a very male attitude, and I think it gets back to men being more expendable because their sexual refractory period is orders of magnitude shorter than women's.
But does it make sense? Does the 80th hour on the ward as a resident make you a better doctor? Does the fifth publication make you a better professor? Does another fifteen minutes of billable time make you a better lawyer?
I don't think they do. I think these careers are needlessly intense and stupidly so. I contemplated going down a couple of those paths and recoiled because it seemed so unnecessary and gratuitous, and I didn't want to spin my wheels fitting into a nonsensical system.
The Swedish government order a study a few years ago in order to explain why the teacher profession are so gender segregated. The study found that initially the applications are almost 50/50 men and women, but then every year men start to leave. Once graduated and starting to work, every year men are a few times more likely to leave the profession than women. They even called it a leaky pipe.
They had multiple explanation in order to explain it, like how more academic focus rather than pedagogic helps retain men, and how higher salaries might help, and they also did similar to this study and asked the men who left why they did so. A lot of answers were that the profession did not fit their life, they felt the environment to be alien and uncomfortable, and they didn't feel like they fit in the work culture.
What the study also found was that the remaining male teacher that did stay tended to enter specialties such as PE and STEM subject, and away from subjects like langue and social studies. Many who left did so for similar profession outside of the education system such as sport.
So here we have women and men, both being described as a leaky pipe, both leaving at similar rates, both describing similar reasons for leaving, both finding specialties where they are not a minority. Could there be a common theory rather than two separate theories to explain this?
And the government study had such suggestion. There is research that is now about 50 years old that observed that people who are in an environment as a minority does not feel same confidence in themselves as those being part of the majority. When faced with a failure such as a missed exam, and making a decision to continue, being part of a majority increase the probability of the person continuing. The government study suggested that if you apply this theory over the time frame of a teacher career from the point of student to being a long term employee, what you get is a leaky pipe. It also suggested the solution that mentor ship programs helps in reducing this.
I also recall that a while back a women in IT imitative that said that of all their work, what had actually produced results was their mentor program. Seems like a pretty good evidence to me, and as a universal theory it seems pretty good explanation to explain the situation for both men and women.
That being said, as someone not in academia, it seems like a crazy path for anyone, male or female. As the article said, you're usually 34 before you have a lab established and the research program really gets going. Is there any way the system could be changed/simplified so that talented researchers could start earlier?
So, pursue men involved in "child friendly" careers. Nurses instead of doctors; teacher aides over academics; tax preparers over management consultants. Or even men who are passionate about the idea of being a stay at home dad.
A big part of strategy in marketplaces is choosing something that has a lot of participation so that you can find enough counter-parties to make your strategy work.
There's also a biological asymmetry in terms of age and fertility. A man who is single until age 45 and then gets a lot of economic success can marry a younger woman and have children.
Sure, the positive way to change this, is to reduce the unpaid work (child care professionals are paid, cleaners are paid etc) - that is, to acknowledge it as work that needs to be done, is productive, and should be part of what society rewards/share resources to get done.
But the equal rights / equal opportunity path indicates that we also need a (bigger) culture shift so that the unpaid work of running a home is more equally divided.
Women are often pushed towards professions involving some kind of care -- and it's expected that they'll want it because they have an emotional attachment rather than for money. Being a homemaker is the limit case: absolute attachment and zero pay.
I wonder what would happen if we simply made the purely numerical correction of counting homemaking in GDP. Would we value it more? Would it make it more attractive to men? Would we develop better infrastructure?
The behavioral stereotype that I'm seeing is that when a man considers a job that they might like, that has some socially acceptable status (teacher is considered a respectable profession compared to running a garbage truck, at least for an educated middle class family) but that pays lousy, then they more often than not discard that option as unacceptable and taboo and go looking for a job that sucks in other aspects but pays better e.g. driving a truck or building houses; women in the same situation more often than not stick around with lower pay.
If a stereotypical man needs to choose between money and reasonable hours that are compatible with seeing your family, they tend to choose money, the sterotypical woman often chooses the opposite (part of which is the argument in this article for the years after childbirth). A particular local example that I see is that the municipal public transport drivers are mostly women and long-range (both scheduled traffic and tourist trip) bus drivers around here are mostly men. The municipal transport pays much less, so men don't apply there; but the long-range drivers work obscene hours and are away from their families for most nights, so women (who have the needed experience qualifications since they're driving the same machine, just locally) don't apply there - there's a self selection.
In management, we can observe a pattern of increasing divorce rates (for the same age) as men reach higher levels of management; suggesting that there may be a pattern that when choosing between a possibility of promotions and not wrecking up your marriage, more men choose to prioritize their work and more women choose to prioritize their home life (which IMHO is the sane choice). The same applies for physical health - women tend to avoid many of the physical jobs that screw up your body or risk your life. E.g. roofing is a job that can be done well by women, but is one of the more lethal jobs in USA - and it has about 0.5% women in there. It's not a well paying job comparing to skilled jobs (e.g. a registered nurse) but it pays significantly more than childcare, but we're not seeing the poorly paid women in childcare joining up roofing just for the money.
Also, if a stereotypical middle class man needs to choose between doing a lower class job and sufficient money, they often choose sufficient money; the stereotypical middle class woman chooses otherwise. I have an observation from some time when our local economy was doing badly - if a man can't get a respectable job that can sustain their family, they'll often get a 'disrespectable' job below their skills or even occasionally commit suicide if they fail. On the other hand, women actually do overwhelmingly continue work in female-coded low-paying jobs like you describe even if other options exist; e.g. we had a local situation many years ago when schoolteachers were very, very poorly paid, but a construction boom (or bubble) had a big need for all kinds of workers. This resulted in almost all male teachers leaving schools and getting construction jobs, including very many that don't have a strength or skill requirement as e.g. painters, and very few female teachers did so (though I know some), resulting in the gender gap in school teaching becoming even more extreme. The same happened for university students picking their course subjects - because of the known problems with teacher pay, boys absolutely refused to study pedagogy degrees, with the gender ratio dropping from something like 30/70 to 1/99, but girls still enlisted. Another local observation is that boys treat the local med school entry conditions as all or nothing - if they can't get in to the doctor's "full medicine" study track, they refuse to go to med school at all and do something else; but girls who apply tend to choose both "full medicine" track and nursing as options, so if they want to be doctors but don't make the cut they consider the lower paying carreer path as acceptable. For career paths that pay poorly at the bottom and well at the top, young men will face an 'up or out' pressure from their families; if it doesn't seem that they'll reach the "good paying" level, then they'll be pressured to drop out of the career and do something menial but better paying; while for women its considered acceptable to stay there and hope to get supported by a spouse.
I could go on and on, but I've probably made my point - there seems to be a difference in preferences in job market. For men, decent pay compared to alternatives is a 'hygiene factor', and they'll sacrifice all kinds of other important job factors (hours, prestige, office vs outdoors, risk and health, family balance, abusive conditions) in order to avoid getting stuck in an otherwise decent but low-paying carreer. For a man, intentionally choosing the low-money path is essentially taboo, their family and society will shun them for that and push them towards various tracks where decent money can be made; but for a woman, it's not so, so they stay in low-paying areas that are otherwise rewarding.
If it’s not paid, how do those doing it live?
Tax documents call the salary worker + home maker combo “household income”, which may be an appropriate way of thinking about the household getting paid and the household looking after the home.
This applies regardless of the genders of the happy couple, so I’m not sure it’s ‘sexism’.
And: why is one sex doing less paid work and more unrecognized work?
You need resources and work to care for your family. The fact that in some cases you are 'paid' (i.e. you have to trade labor) is completely irrelevant. Beaver families are not paid by anyone to care for their home and family.
You could, and can, completely trade out your labor such that you 'care' for your family by being a couple of lawyers completely outsourcing the work of raising your own kids to strangers. At which point I think you've failed as a civilized society. You're only acting as economic agents maximizing profit, and your country is not a country anymore, but an economy. I think America is already at this stage, and that's not a good thing.
Just because housework isn't recognized, doesn't mean it doesn't add value to our society. But it's not priced, and it's not taxed.
At any rate - the interesting part is, if we say there's something like five hours of work every day to run a home - how come men seem fine with dropping that in favour of paid work, and women not?
There's a limited few months of giving birth to a child that only women can do, but we see that disproportionately women seem to end up doing much more. Sure, we can simply reduce the amount of unpaid work, by paying people to clean, cook and watch children - but that doesn't answer why not doing so affects women disproportionately from men.
One plausible explanationis sexism; that our society isn't equal.
Modern society is conflicted however because enlightenment philosophy, which is baked into everything, as well as some Eastern traditions teaches us that knowledge or enlightenment is the highest virtue.
So when it comes to agreeing on how to align society from the perspective of governance, time allocation, what to promote socially etc.. we have this existential crisis where people try to saddle the fence between reproduction (aka "family") and enlightenment style "progress."
I'd love to see a startup tackle this problem: think a benefits platform that allows companies to offer daycare as a benefit, or a Wonderschool-like daycare for working parents. Even an improved work from home policy for new parents would go a long way to plugging the talent "leak" that's prevalent right now.
* most mothers were still with their infants and very young children. The babies weren't being taken care at a daycare where you can have one staffer trying to deal with 4 crying newborns.
* mothers were doing active work, not work that requires sitting in one place, not work that requires long-term concentration, not work that requires being on someone else's schedule.
I have noticed it is no problem doing active work like cooking or the dishes or grocery shopping while bringing along an infant. But I cannot do computer work -- baby goes crazy from lack of stimulation.
Also, being on a schedule while trying to take care of a baby causes immense stress. What if you have a client meeting while baby is crying because he needs to be fed ... or is crying just due to lack of comfort and attention? Or sometimes (oftentimes) baby has a bad night and keeps you from sleeping, but you still need to be up and at work at a given time, instead of being able to nap when baby naps?
Both parents doing a schedule-bound, desk job while raising a newborn baby is not how we evolved to do things, and it's always going to be a source of stress and problems, even if you have "high quality" daycare available.
One of the nice things about being in charge of a remote company is that when I bring the baby to our weekly video call, no one says anything, and of course they all feel comfortable doing the same (although right now there are only fur babies).
If I need to take a nap because the baby kept me up all night, I can, as long as there is no meeting scheduled.
We try to do things as asynchronously as possible, mainly because being remote this is a better way to work, but the nice side effect is not a lot of scheduled meetings.
The hardest part honestly is saying no when my son asks, "Daddy, do you want to play trains with me?!"
But my point is, I think remote companies with family friendly policies will help a lot in this regard. There is still the issue of "I need to concentrate for two hours uninterrupted", but a lot of the other issues aren't so bad when people understand you have kids and they might come to a meeting and that you may not be available instantly.
And once they reached a sufficient age (10 or 12), children usually helped the family with their craft.
Before the industrial revolution, what's considered norm today was the norm only for aristocrats.
Daycare only become necessary once transportation, tools that could cut, and exposed toxins became abundant.
Imagine a world were all parents let their children roam the streets from dawn til dinner, child-right-of-way, and any harm befalling a child was universally met with public outcry against the adult responsible for creating unsafe conditions. (If you left a can of gas unlocked and Jimmy burns thing down, you are responsible, not Jimmy or Jimmys parents. Rational precautions etc.)
Kids would be barred from factories sure, highways and other necessarily dangerous places could be fenced off. Contrast this with our blame-the-parents instincts, now.
Can we collectively consider taking a step in that direction?
When our workplaces have a spot for our cars and not our children, should be surprised that car ownership climbs and fertility falls?
I would disagree: historically, kids had to cope with other threats - illnesses, toxic or otherwise deadly animals, general accidents that are "tiny nothings" today could cripple or even kill you back then because there were no antibiotics...
Back 200 years ago, this only worked because people bred like rabbits. Partially of course because there was no birth control (or its usage, e.g. intestines as condoms, frowned upon by the church) , but also because if you had 10 kids it didn't matter if all survived and losses were expected/built in. Now with people having only one child or two, these must be protected to ensure family survival, and that is where helicoptering comes from.
> When our workplaces have a spot for our cars and not our children, should be surprised that car ownership climbs and fertility falls?
The other idea would be to provide livable wages again. I am 28 now, my father was barely 20 and a fresh police officer when I was born - but he could solely fund me, my sister, my mother and himself, saving enough on the side for a downpayment on a 100+ m2 flat.
Today? Many young policemen have to work side gigs to make rent, and my s/o and I plan for the first kid in 3 years from now because without us both working (she's finishing her MSc) we don't stand a chance to financially survive, and forget about saving anything or buying a place to live if our parents would not support us financially. And that doesn't even include the question "who will stay home for how much time/reduce their hours".
Provide real wages, limit workdays to 4x6 or 5x6 hours a week (and ENFORCE this) and whoops, there are the children that have been missing. If people don't feel safe they don't have kids.
Young children (under three) babble and screech and cry and explore and try to finger everything and put everything in their mouth and then screech when you take the thing away from them or try to restrain them from getting at that shiny object they really want. They play for a few minutes then come running over demanding attention and screech if you ignore them. They get hungry and cry, they fall and cry. And this cannot be trained out of them because they are too young for that.
None of this is a problem if you have baby proofed your house and they can wander and play with whatever they want, and if you are just doing chores and can give them the love and attention when they demand it and go back to your chore when they go back to playing again. But it is a big problem if you and other people are trying to concentrate and work.
I'd imagine many families are like mine, where our house is strategically designed for optimal childcare.
[1] https://fbe.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/80599...
> think a benefits platform that allows companies to offer daycare as a benefit
Companies could offer daycare as a benefit today if they wanted to. It isn't their benefits platform holding them back.
In fairness, I can see why companies don't offer daycare as a benefit: it's enormously expensive (particularly in major metros) and it would be very difficult to plan what % of your employees would be utilising it at any one time.
Other countries have solved this problem by making it everyone's problem: the government subsidises it. I won't hold my breath waiting for the US to do the same.
https://www.fastcompany.com/3062792/patagonias-ceo-explains-...
Can you share any study/evidence to support that statement?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cradleboard
I wish we knew more about how children spent their days in pre-industrial societies. Maybe they played out of site of their parents, only coming home to eat. I had a pretty autonomous childhood.
If yesterdays woman could bring her kids to work and todays cant, then we are pressuring women to have fewer children, and dumping the blame on them to boot.
What does todays idealized woman look like? Who are the role models we assign to our daughters?
Anecdotal evidence/sample size one story: My wife has a doctorate in chemistry and 2 postdocs under her belt, but she had to leave her field purely due to sexism she encountered during her post docs. The PI (her boss) was quite abusive, outright sexist and a horrible racist. My wife wanted to move on to industry jobs but her wouldn't let her leave. So he kept giving bad references. We didn't know about this until after my wife looked into why she got rejected.
My anecdata suggests women are less willing to allow a single aspect of their lives to entirely dominate over all others. Child bearing happens to be one of the bigger alternative endeavors, but it's not the only one.
Supporting women (and men!) who want to pursue an academic career in STEM while raising a family is a laudable goal. I hope it is more effective than I expect it to be.
Every time there was a contractor that they needed to have someone at the house for, or every time their kid got sick and/or couldn't go to school, guess which of the two of them always took the time off work to handle it?
Now I had no insight into their family dynamics, and it felt it wasn't my place to pry. But over dozens of "time off" incidents through several years, it was very clear to me that my female employee was the "default caretaker" for anything relating to the house or the child that came up. This was despite the fact that she had a higher-paying position than what he had (based on what I can now see on levels.fyi).
In business, one thing that I have seen a lot of people crash aground on a reef on is that working in professions that require STEM credentials is a night-and-day difference from the process that one goes through to acquire those credentials. I've known a lot of people that loved their computer science programs in university, and then found actually working as a programmer such a shock that they noped right out into something else.
Many factors are at play here:
* Most Indians tend to marry young and have kids before 30.
* most families have either one or two kids only.
* Parents support their children for life, i.e, grandparents have a major role in supporting the care and rearing of kids.
* Daycare isn't expensive.
* Government mandated maternity leave with full pay and no loss of seniority.
At least in america women are, in this way, almost always asked to choose between their career and having children. This is asymmetrical with men's experience because whether or not they are comfortable with it, its considered normal for them to spend most of their time at work even if they have a newborn.
I'm not sure what else you'd call this status quo aside from "sexist." It's a systemic sexism that has deep roots in how we organize the aesthetics of our society.
Women and men both have to choose between their careers and spending more time with children, and their choices reflect their preferences. One can make the argument that this is indirect sexism - that women's preferences stem from sexist social influence. But the fact remains: most women don't want to work full time, and the lower rates of women working full time after having children is reflective of women's preferences.
1. https://www.pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2010/...
Or it's a systematic sexism that has deep roots in human biology and thousands of generations of sexually dimorphic specialization, and I can't believe we've successfully convinced multiple generations of westerners now to pretend that men and women are equally suited for all roles, including child rearing.
Now we need an article which takes an honest look at the possibility that gender imbalance in STEM (and other fields) is at least partly a result of similar specialization for cognitive tasks, where researchers like the author of the article are closer to extremes of an ability distribution. But I'm relieved to see a take that questions the tired, pervasive assumption that STEM is simply not welcoming to women because old white men are sexist.
Their resentment is quite real. Their actions looks like choice, until they trust you well enough to vent to you.
It's not people just graduate along the path from A to Z - it's viciously competitive.
Issues of maternity et. al. I think are just one important artefact of the nature of competition which for whatever reason I think is still going to favour men. Risk taking, hubris, aggression, physical endurance, combativeness, a certain kind if confidence, social expectations, possibly even the acceptance of those things by others - these things mean a lot at those later stages.
The best time to have kids is when you are getting your undergrad degree.
High quality parenting is the goal. We could provide adequate time off for anyone wanting to spend their time parenting THEIR child. Will they lose their job? No. Will they not get a raise or promotion? Yes.
That one word 'just' speaks volumes. People grow up. People change. Perhaps they want a different challenge than what academic achievement can provide. Raising children is challenging, daunting, and rewarding.
Could the drop-out rate simply reflect the higher share of men who are able to fulfill the functions that are required at those higher positions?
Maternal Age seems like a boogie man story to scare women.
Perhaps STEM women who are early career (24-28) would benefit from meeting mothers (both who are in STEM and not in STEM careers) who had children at age 35+.
> ...Women who stay in academia expect to marry later, and delay or completely forego having children, and if they do have children, plan to have fewer than their non-STEM counterparts (Sassler et al 2016, Owens 2012). Men in STEM have no such difference compared to their non-STEM counterparts
I would love to see the figures regarding the partners of STEM Women vs STEM Men. Is it due to the old sexist notion that women must "marry up" so a woman with a successful career have partnered with someone who also has a successful career?
Having family shifts perspective. Perhaps some of these women no longer felt a strong desire to further their career, and family matters became more interesting?
As a father, I love my job, but I gladly set aside my career to raise my kids.
The opportunity cost was enormous but now that the kids are grown it sure seems like it was a great plan for us. My wife did get a lot grief from her family for dropping out of the workforce ($$) until they started having their own kids.
We have two daughters. The youngest is in college for CS, she has made it very clear that she does not want to have children. The older daughter is not STEM -- she is an Army officer (Westpoint Grad) who does want kids someday.
One of my in-laws is using nannies and such even though they easily could drop to one income (MD specialist dad, pharmacist mom) -- it hurts my heart to see how much time they voluntarily spend away from their kids, including weekend shifts, holiday shifts, etc. But it is their life, and their kids seem to be thriving so what do I know.
It's just a biological reality. It is certainly possible to have a healthy birth after the age of 35 but the rate of health problems and birth defects don't go up linearly with age. The rate of pregnancy loss is 35% after the age of 35 and is above 50% after the age of 45. This is just reality. If women want to have multiple children it is wise to start before age 33.
Actually not. It's not just the genetics / pregnancy problems that are proven to significantly rise with age... but also that the time of menopause can neither be forecast nor the effects reversed (some hit it with 40, some with 60!), so there is a significant disadvantage (=no kids at all) for waiting too long.
Additionally: do you want to deal with a baby when you're 25 or when you are 40 or, worse, 50, that keeps you awake all night? It's a massive toll on your physical and especially mental health - the younger you are the better you cope. And your kids will be happier to have a dad/mom who can actually do things with you when they're 15-25 years...
You’re going to need some money when they get to be old enough to go to college.
Men and women also pair up with the man being older. So this isn't going away until the government forces equal-age mating.
But the problem is that they ended up being single parents, at least for a while.
I believe there is an obvious difference men and women which, on a general level, incites women to weigh family responsibilities over career prospects. However, industrialized nations exacerbate that difference by making it very difficult for women with children to spend the time necessary for career advancement.
The key here isn't necessarily throwing your hands up and saying there's nothing you can do about it, but more robust programs for parents to help lessen the load of parenthood.
Surveys like this are not necessarily honest as the participants are not necessarily being honest.
Wait what....you mean by STEM you just meant academia?
So maybe the problem is that industry STEM is offering an overall better benefits package than academia? We're seeing the same thing in fields like AI, where academia can't retain top talent.
But what I can say is that I don't hold all of the values that I did as a young man. I'm not excited about the same things, and today I find some of those ideas uncomfortably naive or even off-putting.
As I've engaged in more activities, as I've socialized with more people, I've encountered many more ideas and a lot of nuance. Nothing has simple answers and there are other solutions to problems besides code, or tools, or pills, or surgery.
And one of the consequences of this is that I'm not confident that if I show up to interview at a startup that I'm going to exhibit the degree of 'passion' they're looking for. I have plenty of passion. Too much, some will tell you. I just know beyond all doubt that your new iOS app is not going to save the world, and quite bluntly, that you have some unresolved issues that you need to work through if you so desperately need to believe how transformative your work is going to be. And I know that's not just STEM - all the 20-somethings who I've seen doing volunteer work - and bless you for showing up - feel exactly the same way. I'm gonna change the world. I have to change the world. Otherwise my life is empty and I am nothing.
It can be discomfiting to be around and I'm sure I telegraph it.
They say that young women socialize a little ahead of young men. Maybe they just get a whiff of my reality before all the rhetoric gets piled on so thick that's all they can see.
What leads you to think primarily about "passion" & socialization? It seems almost as though we read different articles, I didn't see anything about that.
This is good, though. If you faked the passion, you might wind up surrounded by lunatics who actually believe their iOS app is going to save the world.
Also, this "passion", most of the time, is just a word that has been co-opted by the owner class to mean "working nights and weekends".
The article is about women in STEM academia which is a tiny subset of women in the STEM workforce. Some STEM professions do a better job of retaining women than others.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=21774299
This one, I saw also today ..
Institutions in the country introduced gender quotas for internal committees and boards in an effort to reduce bias during hiring and other inequalities, but such measures themselves are now being labelled potential hindrances to female progression because the roles cost women career-crucial research time.
https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/germany-mulls-extr...
I think those issues are called narcissism.
I think it's perfectly fine to not care about your job to a higher degree than necessary, and I also think it's fine to seek out work based on social impact rather than salary. Most people can't have it both ways, and end up having to make a choice at some point.
Women are not rewarded biologically for being the top 2% in their industry. It's almost as if the higher women climb career wise the fewer dating options they have because women tend to want men that are even higher on the totem pole.
Outside of a score keeping system, each additional dollar is less rewarding very quickly once you pass $150k in income.
I think you misrepresent startup founders. Most I've met are generally very smart people and they've read The Remains of the Day too so it's not like they're this nerd-in-the-basement fantasy you get from the movies. The Hollywood fantasy is dead.
I'm only saying this so that young fellows browsing HN from their computers at university aren't immediately discouraged. To them: The world is very exciting here. You can find a team and work happily and passionately on something you care about. You will be fine. It is probable that you will be better for it. Good luck!
Break out the tiny violins.
The article does a good job of identifying the funnel. It reiterates what we already know about society: women are aware of their biological clock and people desire to make children. But it does make an assumption that the women that stay in the funnel are childless victims, or at least portrays them that way. "Meanwhile in the Netherlands, woe!" This is hyperbole, but barely. It is okay to assume an even distribution of wants and desires as the non-STEM women, but what if there isn't? Let's get some perspectives.
Additionally, freezing eggs, surrogacy, and adoption are options followed by additional help with nannies and au pair, costly options which could be supported and subsidized by the very arguments that this article is making.
I think the case would be even stronger if we added the perspective from the child free women, along with a perspective about cultural tweaks that women could also consider. Distinct from only pointing out what organizations do not do to address the maternal wall.
It's a divisive topic, so fractiousness is not easy to avoid, but everyone should make sure they're up to date on the site guidelines before posting. They include: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
1. Pregnancy is very hard on women's bodies. It is not uncommon for health effects like high blood pressure, joint inflammation, and gestational diabetes to become temporarily disabling for expectant mothers. 2. Infant childcare is incredibly expensive. Even at professional levels of compensation, the expense is likely to outweigh the added income from continuing to work. Costs drop significantly once children are potty trained, but remain quite high. 3. Three months of paid maternal leave is very rare. Even with saved time off, taking large amounts of unpaid leave is hard on a family. 4. Breast feeding a child while working full days requires a huge amount of work, above and beyond the exhausting labor involved in having a new baby. If a nursing room is not provided, women often resort to spending a large amount of time pumping milk in the restroom. Which is uncomfortable, unsanitary, and disheartening.
Just because some women have the resources or the stark need to return to work so early does not mean it is possible or desirable for everyone.
We need to have better maternal leave and accommodations. Fathers need to step up and do more of the work. We need to have better paternal leave and accomodations. We need to support affordable child care options. We need to make the above 4 items available to everyone.
Fair enough- but how often has Aaronson published, or publicised, an opinion from a woman who disagrees with his view? Er. Not often. Probably because he disagrees with them and so will tend to find that they do not marshal "data, logic, and [their] own experience in support of an insight that strikes me as true and important and underappreciated".
So what have we learned from the fact that Scott Aaronson has published this opinion on his blog? Absolutely nothing. We knew his opinion, he still has the same opinion. We know there are other people, including women in STEM, that have the same opinion as Scott Aaronson. Here is one of them and her opinion. We have learned nothing new.
This is just preaching to the converted.
I implore you to consider the well-founded facts on both sides, not to claim this piece has absolutely nothing worth saying.
[0] https://medium.com/@kjmorenz/is-it-really-just-sexism-an-alt...
Technocratic twitter after reading this article: We must solve the “maternal tax” gap!
Normal people after reading this article: "yes, this is what we have been saying for years. Promote the family."
This seems like violent agreement. I think Scott was trying to dismiss the people who criticize them by inviting Morenz to make a guest post. Perhaps his dismissiveness is the reason why this is so acrimonious.
You seem to be making a fairly subtle point here that I think others might be missing. Which is not that women choosing to take on the burden of childcare represents sexism (which is an argument some people make), but rather that the fact that their making this choice impinges upon their personal economic future is sexist. That is maybe a more interesting point than the former, but I don't think it really holds up to scrutiny. Choosing to take on the burden of childcare is choosing to spend less time working. In any other context, if a person chooses to work less, that negatively impacts their earning, and we consider that perfectly reasonable and fair. If I choose to play video games for 8 hours a day and work part time, basically everyone accepts it's reasonable that I make less money.
Now, if women are being pressured or forced into accepting this childcare responsibility at their own economic expense, then yes. That is 100% structural sexism. Also, if society would have treated men making this choice differently than women, then that too would represent structural sexism. But there are men making this choice, and their careers are generally just as negatively impacted as the women who make it.
Is this injustice? Perhaps you could characterize it this way, but since the perpetrator is beyond reason and lacks expression, I'm not sure how youre going to fix this.
People want reality to reflect their world view but biology is biology. It's not an indictment on society that only women perform certain biological functions.
Great.
But my personal experience is that this notion seems to vanish as soon as we look at things like rates of workplace deaths, life expectancy, hours worked, imprisonment, or numerous other areas. And even if they don't vanish, the level of attention devoted seems to be remarkably different. Would the way we structure society in regards to structuring our attention for social ills also possibly include sexism?
And I guess such notions can be dismissed as being off topic. As they aren't relevant to the actual issue under discussion. But when we start viewing larger more structural things as sexism, then wouldn't even such dismissal potentially qualify as sexism?
What does raising children have to do with society? Decision of having and raising a child is a fundamentally personal, not societal decision. Each pair should decide how they want to split responsibilities of raising a child before its conception, based on their preferences, and society should not force them to any model.
Also, it seems to me that society already prioritize child-raising too much compared to other non-work activities. If people would leave STEM/some other field due to work-life balance for some other personal goals than child-raising (say part-time working in a non-profit), would anyone care?
Can we, though? It seems that there is some amount of time that women are unable to work due to the physical rigors of pregnacy, child-birth, and (in many cases) infant care.
Taking time away from work, no matter what the reason, necessarily affects the trajectory of your career. We can try to minimize that in various ways (as the original article discussed) but it seems impossible to reduce it to zero barring sci-fi tech like artificial wombs.
It might be reasonable to say that we can structure out work so that women are disadvantaged _as little as reasonably possible_ for having kids.
And I don't understand why people absolutely need to have biological children. I think more people should just adopt if they want to raise children.
I also think sexism in the US is the biggest factor for women leaving Academia or not entering STEM. In other countries more than 50% of the researchers are women and 40% of the students studying computer science are women.
As someone who has adopted 3 children, I assure you that the biological route is way easier and cheaper. It's not like rescuing a dog from the pound...
Consider these possibilities:
1. A best case scenario is that what you have expressed is a personal opinion that takes your genes out of the future in a Marty McFly fading away fashion as this opinion hardens.
Fine. Your choice. More pie for the rest of us.
2. A worst case scenario where this opinion accumulates in the market place of ideas and inevitably leads to human extinction.
Impossible right? Well, know that disgust with sex is climbing in rich nations (like Germany and Japan) and the number of births per woman is falling. Is this a function of wealth, or technology?
South Korea has fewer than 1.1 births per woman. That can only translate into a poorer, older, and smaller country for the future. [1]
https://www.macrotrends.net/countries/KOR/south-korea/fertil...
(I tell people that this was the thickly veiled premise of the movie Bird Box.)
If that is true, then can it be called a choice? Are people actually choosing to have fewer sexual partners than their parents generation? Are people really choosing to feel disgust at the thought of intimate contact?
Maybe repulsion-to-sex is a bigger threat to continued human existence as nuclear weapons.
Another fun article:
https://medium.com/migration-issues/how-long-until-were-all-...
Especially smart women in STEM should have children because cognitive abilities like intelligence and conscientiousness are largely inherited traits (e.g. IQ is between 50% and 80% inherited according to twin studies).
But the thing is, it's a choice, no one is forced to go into super high status occupations. Those that choose so must be very bright and completely dedicated to one thing. I think most women know or realise later on that this level of competition is insane, and that's why they quit and find something that is not as high status, but is more enjoyable.
A very small percentage of men are willing to ditch everything else to be at the top, some get there, most don't, most women find out that it's not worth it.
Oh, and I think it's crucial for children to bond with their mother and skipping this and putting them in daycare early is not in their best interest. I also think that motherhood is more valuable than most engineering job or paper publishing.
Oh.
Up to this point I was keeping notes with my criticism of this article, but this caused me to stop and reconsider.
If I may advise the author, I understand how difficult it is to balance life decisions that seem to be at odds, but trying to deny the very reason why those life decisions are hard to combine will not make the choice any easier.
It is stupid and sexist that you have to think of pursuing a PhD and having two or three kids as an either/or option, when the (probably) man you'll want to start a family with will not have to do that, even if they are also a PhD in STEM.
This is part and parcel of the sexism that people complain about. It's not just inappropriate behaviour by senior male academics. There is no reason why a woman must put her career on hold to start a family when a man in the same career does not need to. There is no reason why women are expected to be the ones most concerned with the business of having and raising children when men are expected to be the most concerned with advancing their careers. How is that not sexist? How is that not the sexism that's keeping women from advancing their careers in STEM academia?
Why should the academy structure itself so that women who choose to put their attention into their families do not have a career impact? If academic positions are necessarily zero-sum, it seems impossible to correct for this without seriously unfair negative externalities?
How is it that the biases inherent in collective decisions of individuals within society are the responsibility of the academy to correct for (that men tend to choose to focus on career and women on family)?