Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?
nytimes.com
nytimes.com
We have a shortage of scientists in this country. The fact remains that in science, and ultimately in the technology companies that men who grow up in these distorted academic norms found and run, there are things that can be changed. This benefits everyone, and doesn't require lowering standards.
There's a ton of data shared here, and in stated Hacker News tradition, I'd prefer to see a robust discussion of that vs kneejerk reactions. It's a long article and worthy of serious consideration.
Not according to the labor markets we don't.
1. http://rcm-papers.net/scrabble-ratings-gender.html
I'll only discuss chemistry as that's where I live:
1) "science" != academia. There's a large albeit shrinking PhD employment in Pharma and biotech. Probably larger than academia if teaching colleges are omitted.
2) there's NO shortages. We've got more candidates than positions and the layoffs over the last 5 years don't help. 20% out of Merck is the latest - might be 10's probably 100's of PhDs.
2b) PhDs enter the biz 27-32 and start having difficulties over 40. Narrow window, eh?
3) cultural and media depictions just suck. Employers are viewed as ogres, staff as tools or even participants in ogre-ness. Who the #!?%? wants to sign up for that? And there's no gates or zuck to counterbalance - who knows the players in the field outside the field?
4) investment takes a long time and ideas tend to not pan out. And it takes a whole lot of $$ to get to that failure. Look at the Alzheimer's or cancer fields.
5) biological systems are far messier than computational ones. Yeah, computers are basically free and the software environment is far better than it was but data is still a problem for model building and physics is a bear for complex simulations.
I could go on (and on) but I wanted to end with a plea. If you've made it to the end please keep in mind that while the next social startup might be fun, there are a fair number of problems needing both algorithmic and implementation work. We'd greatly profit from young blood coming in and redoing computational modeling, harnessing cluster and cloud topologies (like the DoE challenges) for large-scale calculations, ...
We have far too much left over from Vaxen. It holds us back and must be replaced.
Guess what? He's African American. Guess what? He has family members who are severely addicted. Guess what? He has found that 80%+ of people who take meth or crack are NOT addicts, and that a strong incentive like $20 or good social structure can be just enough to overcome the desire to take drugs.
As far as I'm concerned, he's living proof of why we need diversity in science. Who better to study addiction than one who has seen it and lived it first hand?
More info: http://www.wnyc.org/story/298365-drugs-neuroscience-and-curr...
It has started to really bug me how people continually lump multiple coherent but conflicting cultural blocs into one abstract whole such as "the USA" and then act confused that their results from surveying "the USA" are blatantly incoherent, inconclusive, and contradictory.
If you are white middle-class and live on one of the two coasts, then women are encouraged to be bold, strong, and independent. If you live in the South or Midwest, older ideas of gender roles are much stronger. If you are an ethnic minority, your own culture probably has its own gender norms under which you operate (and this actually goes for men, too), or which at least compete for your dedication with the mainstream norms.
Also, being a CS graduate student engaged to a field-biologist graduate student, the following statement is VERY true: success in graduate school is a matter of isolation, competition and ridiculously long hours in the lab, at least for everyone whose scut-work can't be automated with a Python script. And that's for a white middle-class girl who was encouraged to be strong, bold, independent and educated, and actually made it to grad-school in the first place.
Science careers right now have a whole lot of problems for everyone who's not a white/Asian male workaholic of comfortably middle-class background.
The nytimes essay does mention briefly the claim that women may be "happier" in "people" fields like medicine, but it presents this more in terms of the intrinsic rewards of the field.
I'm a PhD dropout myself, and I am a little bewildered that so many articles can lament the shortage of US Citizens or women in academic science research roles without at least considering the growing body of research that confirms that science is a risky and relatively poorly paid career path. If you'd like something less caustic than the greenspun article, try out the RAND study that concludes that the american aversion to science careers is rational and market based (just google "RAND scientist shortage").
As I mentioned in a previous comment, what I said above is in now way intended to suggest that there is no problem here. I can claim sour grapes, and I can advise others that those grapes are sour, but that doesn't justify discrimination. I do see a problem for women in science.
But those grapes really are pretty sour. It makes no sense to discuss the shortage of group X in science without acknowledging this. It's not the only thing to be discussed, and I'd agree it is not the only problem. But to leave it out is a glaring omission.
Hell, I really like CS research, I'm a grad-student, but I'm always looking over my shoulder asking if I really want to be on an academic career path, or what the hell else to do with myself.
That exclamation points are because I care. I just spent ten minutes googling around to find your work. Computer science is nice in that researchers can get jobs in industry, and not just academia. But you have to be discoverable first.
Can you recommend a tool for building academic webpages? The last time I did web design was making a shitty Pokemon fanpage in the 1990s, so I'm kinda out of date on what to actually do.
I'm afraid I'm not aware of any tools for creating academic webpages, but you don't really need one. An academic webpage is really just an online CV. You should say what you interests are, talk about the projects you've worked on (and are working on), papers published (including thesis). Oh, and, of course, how to reach you. A single page should suffice. For my current one, I use WordPress because I want to have a blog, too. You can look at the remnants of my old academic page for structure: http://people.cs.vt.edu/~scschnei/ I used to have a h1 for About Me (where I listed interests), publications and projects.
How good it looks is secondary. It's just important to get that information up there, easy for people to find. You're actually approaching the time in grad school when industry internships are ideal: you'll be done with classes in a year or two, you've done a research paper or two, but you have a few more years before finishing your dissertation.
By the way, having even publications under submission by the second year of doing course work is great progress. Rejections happen. Where did you submit, by the way?
But he said he never encouraged anyone to go on in math. “It’s a very hard life,” he told me. “You need to enjoy it. There’s a lot of pressure being a mathematician. The life, the culture, it’s very hard.”
When I told Meg Urry that Howe and several other of my professors said they don’t encourage anyone to go on in physics or math because it’s such a hard life, she blew raspberries. “Oh, come on,” she said. “They’re their own bosses. They’re well paid. They love what they do. Why not encourage other people to go on in what you love?”
which reminds me of Greenspun. The more interesting question, which he raises, is that given the hours, job prospects, and pay, especially relative to the alternatives, why does anyone want to get a PhD in the sciences?
That being said, the NYT's discussion on how other cultures view women in science was most interesting to me.
I never said that Greenspun's "perception" is mine, or that I agree with it.
"Why Are There Still So Few Women in [high paying or high status job]"
note: there are no articles asking why there are so few women in a dangerous and/or underpaid or low-status occupation. Such as commercial fishing, oil and gas fieldwork, "ice road trucking" etc.
In underpaid and low status occupations, it's obvious. I don't see how you can ask that question.
People say that elementary school teachers are important, but there is no pressure to have more men in that occupation... why?
People say that elementary school teachers are important, but when it comes to actually committing their own resources to raising the status and resource-base of elementary school teachers, no-one gives a damn.
You might as well ask why there aren't more millionaires going into fast food or Ivy Leaguers in migrant farming.
(my point of view, as a former high school math teacher and current software engineer)
Science PhD programs have a 50% attrition rate. Getting in is hard, and getting through is hard. If you get through, you compete for post-docs. Then you compete for faculty positions, and then you compete for tenure and funding.
To end up with a tenure track physics position in Berkeley, Palo Alto, or Cambridge means you have truly survived repeated cuts. The reward is a salary almost certainly too low to buy a house and raise a family in any of those locations.
This isn't the only problem for women in science, but it's silly to discuss it without talking about these problems.
At 22, a highly competent software engineer who could have gotten a PhD is now earning, let's say, $75k/year. They have an abundance of job offers compared to anyone else in this recession, and if they move to a place like Seattle or the Bay Area even for a while, they can be swamped in high-salary offers. By age 30, the software engineer can be earning six figures. By age 44, the software engineer has long since either settled into a comfortable BigCo and bought a house on their six-figure salary or gone for a start-up moonshot; if the former, their various accumulated vested stock-options are going to help them think about a secure retirement, even possibly an early retirement. Even without stock options, they can definitely afford to max out their 401(k) or IRA accounts.
Yes, it does have hype, fad, and ageism problems. That is why you get your moonshots done young, and when you're looking for security, you can go to a BigCo.
Basically, compared to the typical professions chosen by either gender, software engineering makes you very wealthy if done wisely. So why don't people go in?
Well, admittedly, the working hours can be long, and the hype/fad problems are severe, and the ageism, I've heard, can get pretty bad. But it's nowhere near as bad as trying to get a law or medicine degree nowadays, let alone a PhD!
I make roughly twice as much as an engineer than I did as a teacher. I may work year round, but work is faaaar less stressful. As a teacher, you might wear many hats every day, including that of performer, improvisor, tutor, coach, mentor, surrogate parent, administrator, behavioral therapist, crisis manager, decorator, and so on, and so on. Add to that the putting up with the constant flak you receive from being in a profession that's just frankly not valued in this country's culture.
If you really care to learn what it's like, I journaled my brief career as a teacher: http://alanjayteaching.com.