The Unequal Impact of Parenthood in Academia (2021)

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7904257/

by pepys • 3 years ago

55 48 3 years ago

ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

bell-cot2• 3 years ago

If 1% of the effort that goes into re-re-re-verifying systematic sexism in academia was re-directed to actually doing something useful about the problem...

But ([re-]^n)verification is a PC and peer-friendly source of funding for endless studies. Vs. actually doing anything would involve confronting actual academics over their behaviors, biases, ...

So fat chance.

myrmidon• 3 years ago

"Actually doing something about it" is easier said than done.

I don't think that 1% of the effort of a few studies would get you very far at all-- you would already exceed that by basically sending the whole staff (not just the people doing the studies, but the whole university) to a (mandatory) one-afternoon-awareness-raising event, and even without trying to ridicule the concept, that does not sound like it would achieve ANYTHING...

We're probably best off with the Max-Planck approach of advancing non-discrimination one funeral at a time...

bell-cot2• 3 years ago

If you believe many of the studies - just swapping male-sounding and female-sounding applicant names on resumes and papers submitted for publication would do a great deal of good. The Max-Planck approach does not actually work WRT human sexism.

(Yes, know that awareness-raising events are only useful for wasting staff's time while covering management's *ss.)

Mezzie• 3 years ago

I'd be really interested to see this broken down further:

* Single mothers, married mothers, single fathers, and married fathers - does being married have an impact on productivity? If married parents produce more, then perhaps the issue is the mothers not having as much help as the fathers in aggregate.

* Same sex couples vs. Heterosexual ones. Do lesbian mothers suffer from the same productivity penalty? Or do gay male faculty members take a similar hit to mothers since they're acting as primary caregivers?

* Adoptive/non-biological parenthood versus giving birth: Is it being a mother that causes the dip or birthing a child?

marcodiego• 3 years ago

There was a place I worked at where it was well known that if you were a parent you had higher chances of getting higher pay. I asked why and people explained me that employees who are parents are more willing to make extra efforts to keep their jobs.

gnarbarian2• 3 years ago

I think it contributes to a renewed sense of purpose and dedication that comes from knowing you are responsible for other people and a desire to show them a positive role model.

mandmandam• 3 years ago

Maybe it does - but does that balance out the sleeplessness, tiredness, extra stress, less free time and mindspace etc of parenting?

I'd be confident the extra leverage on parents is a larger factor.

analog31• 3 years ago

It works the other way too. The only people I've known who wanted the thankless but higher paying jobs like middle managers were parents.

In some cases it helped compensate for a spouse's loss of income.

I became a project manager when my daughter was born.

influx• 3 years ago

After having kids, I know I can be a better manager after thinking about someone else's needs 24/7, anticipating how to coach them, grow them into successful individuals, and having coaxed a 3 year old to get dressed and put on shoes, I'm way more confident I can help software engineers ship product ;)

sdwr• 3 years ago

Or it's need-based - parents need more income to support dependents.

pc86• 3 years ago

This is close to "we're going to let $A go instead of $B because $B [needs the job more/needs the money more/will have a harder time finding another job]" when by any objective measure $B is the lower performer. It has no place in this type of decision-making (both the bad side with layoffs, and the positive with raises or promotions) but it is still probably there.

Zach_the_Lizard• 3 years ago

Some of the other comments have some good ideas as to why that is--motivation to earn more, management not wanting to fire parents as readily, etc.--but I wonder if on top of all of that, parents have some other selection effects going on.

Maybe whatever hoops must be jumped through to get married and have children are similar in size and shape to hoops that help in the workforce, so group averages move a bit in some positive way.

Time for some light reading...

photochemsyn• 3 years ago

The researchers should have asked whether their metric, publication count, is all that great for assessing a professor's actual academic productivity:

"If the productivity gap between men and women is entirely caused by gendered parenthood effects, then the productivity trends of men and women without children should be indistinguishable. To investigate this hypothesis, we examined each professor’s publication history and calculated their cumulative productivity over the 5 years before and 10 years after beginning their first assistant professor position."

First, publication inflation is a common tactic in academia, in which a study that really could be published in one or two papers is broken up into two or three times as many in order to pad the professor's CV. Some academics have taken this practice to fairly ridiculous extremes, and that is going to skew the results.

Second, there are multiple other plausible productivity metrics, such as the number of graduate students the professor has successfully mentored through a Master's or PhD program, the amount of grant dollars brought in, and the number and/or quality of courses taught at the undergraduate level (all adjusted to time spent as a professor).

All these measures are also value judgments of some kind - the university administration may have its eyes on the grant dollars above all else, but in the larger societal context, well-trained young engineers, doctors, scientists etc. might be the more valuable academic product.

goodcanadian• 3 years ago

I take your point, and even agree with it. However, publication count is by far the most important metric considered by hiring committees and is thus critical to advancing your career. We can argue all day about whether it should be the case, but it certainly is the case.

djoldman• 3 years ago

It is interesting that it seems studies generally consider "academic productivity" == "number of publications".

fwungy2• 3 years ago

It's actually the impact of the paper that matters, how many cites it gets.

neogodless• 3 years ago

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35716768 The Wealth Gap in Science: How Your Parents's Income Affects Your Career (youtube.com - 1 day ago, 86 comments)

dekhn5• 3 years ago

When I was an undergrad I worked with a prestigious professor whom I respected greatly.

One day, I stumbled into lab, apparently looking fairly love-struck (i'm a man, and was seeing a new girlfriend), and he said: "dekhn, if you want to be successful in science, you can't have a wife or a girlfriend or kids. They are a distraction and to be successful, you have to dedicate your whole life to science. Nights, evenings, everything. A wife and kids will just waste your time".

I'm glad I ignored his advice and got married to that new girlfriend (and had kids, after establishing my career). He later narrowly missed out on the Nobel Prize and married his postdoc. But he was right: to be truly successful in science today, unless you're a charismatic genius, requires an extraordinary level of dedication- and a lot of family support.

That said I'm surrounded, in my job, with successful women scientists who came from academia and have kids. This sometimes leads to weekend meetings where both of us end up saying "Oh, I have to go now to take my kid to soccer"...

[edit: I realized I left out an important bit. Both my wife and I got phds and have professional jobs. But I optimized for high salary and status, while she optimized for "freedom"- the freedom to drive kids around to activities, etc. Which in some sense, I guess, is just another anecdote supporting the paper.

chrisbrandow• 3 years ago

That's incredibly stupid advice. I got my Ph.D. at Caltech, and as far as I know, every Nobel Prize winner in the chemistry department had a wife and children.

Misdicorl• 3 years ago

Its callous, not stupid. Consider whether those individuals best work (nobel prize granting e.g.) came before or after they started families. Consider how involved they can be with their families given how often you likely saw them around the department. Yes, it can be done. But its hard. And you're unlikely to be ultra successful if you devote the time your family deserves (not to mention the luck/charisma/skill/dedication needed on top of that).

strangeloops854• 3 years ago

What exactly does 'truly successful' mean here? If Nobel prize is the standard that's ridiculous. As someone who is a fairly successful (by conventional metrics) tenured academic at a top-10 school in the physical sciences, this was really dumb advice but not atypical from previous generations (along with: "make sure you have a wife at home to take care of everything" which, btw, was the more common advice to get, since almost every male academic had a wife and kids)

It is quite possible to get grants, do valuable work, advance your field (and get awards, if that's your jam) and still live a pretty normal life. In my case my spouse is also a successful (by conventional metrics) academic, and we have kids. It's not without challenges, but it's quite plenty of positives. And neither of us are charismatic geniuses. We have talents, sure, but the more important thing is that we are organized.

The unequal impact highlighted here is very real. As the man in a dual-career academic couple, I have actively worked (along with my wife of course) to counter it. Simple examples include strongly encouraging and supporting a spouse, including crucially owning/ being the primary point person on childcare - especially needed when they are in the midst of grant applications or important conference presentations, even in early childhood years.

dekhn5• 3 years ago

are you a professor at a tier-1 university (you say "tenured academic at a top-10 school in the physical sciences")? Is it in an expensive city? what's your h-index? How much time do you spend writing papers and going to conferences, versus doing research. Is it lab work or theory? how much money do you bring in? Do you work weekends? Do you ever have to go to a conference and it means your spouse has to do extra work around the house?

1letterunixname3• 3 years ago

No true Scot would ever be caught dead making claims about "success" like that.

lbeltrame• 3 years ago

I was told the same: that if I weren't able to give up everything "I would not be successful". 8 months later and with a breakdown, I was fired from that lab. Better, because people were forced to work (literally forced: even if you had nothing to do you needed to stay until 8pm) at least 12 hours per day, no weekends, no days off, nothing. And my scientific productivity tanked.

I managed to somehow continue to a PhD and then I even got a permanent position, but for that mindset I am "failed scientist": I'm over 40, I don't lead anyone, I don't have grants (only two failed ones that caused me so much stress that I didn't want to do them again), nor I have a teaching position (I would gladly get one if it were just teaching, and not the hell of grant seeking). I do the same stuff I was doing during my postdoc years, with a little more job security, of course.

FTR, I made sure that my connections outside work were nowhere near labs, and nowhere around science. Much better for work-life balance.

Academia seems so obsessed with "excellence" it's not even funny. And that excellence needs to be obtained at absolutely any cost. Probably I wouldn't have chosen this career had I known beforehand what I was getting into.

1letterunixname3• 3 years ago

Perhaps he was either a) jealous, b) skewing to anti-social, c) rationalizing obsession in one area to the detriment of another, or d) lacked time management skills.

What's the point to achievement if you have an empty house and empty life? That is another kind of poverty.

JoeAltmaier• 3 years ago

Young Professor driving candidate (friend of mine) back to the airport after being interviewed by faculty. "How do you think I did?"

Answer: "The moment they learned you had kids, you were out. They're going to hire a man; you had no chance."

That was years ago. I hoped it was better now.

crackercrews2• 3 years ago

As of 2015 it is.

National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for women on STEM tenure track [1]

1: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112

meepmorp• 3 years ago

A preference for women isn't the same thing as no longer penalizing people with kids.

gadders• 3 years ago

I'd be interested to see if this gap still prevails in the social sciences. I would expect (given how progressive they are) that this gap would not exist.

OldGuyInTheClub• 3 years ago

The snark during my grad school/postdoc years was to have both a spouse[0] and a sidepiece. You tell the spouse you are with the sidepiece, the sidepiece you're with the spouse so you can go to the lab and get stuff done.

[0] Updated for current norms

fwungy2• 3 years ago

How about an article on the unequal impacts of prison, suicide, and homelessness?

zubiaur• 3 years ago

Quoting Russ Roberts, discussing Charles Darwin's musings about this topic:

"So, the Darwin thing is a somewhat--well, a number of thoughtful people have written about it, including Agnes Callard and others. We have access to Darwin's journal. You can get online and you can look at Darwin's own handwriting in his journal. And, he's trying to decide whether to get married. He's 29 years old and he makes a list of pros and cons.

And, he's smart enough to know that there's a lot at stake for him because he is going to have a chance to be a serious scientist. I don't know if he knew he had a chance to be one of the top two or three scientists of all time, but he's worried about how marriage might bite into his productivity as a researcher. And, he's worried about whether he is going to have to go visit his wife's relatives a lot. He's worried she might not like London, so he's going to be stuck out the countryside. He's worried he's going to have to spend time with her or the kids instead of his work. And, he makes a list of the pros and the cons and--unbelievably embarrassing list in 2022--one of the pros is female chitchat, and at one point: There's someone to come home to, parentheses, 'better than a dog anyway'. So, it's a little bit awkward. He'd be canceled.

He may still be canceled when my book comes out, but let's take him as a man of his time for a moment.

Anyway, he makes this list. And, what I thought about when I looked at it was--and by the way, sorry, important point: the negatives way outweigh the positives. And, they're bigger. It's pretty clear that he shouldn't get married if he's going to make a rational choice based on his list. That kind of bothers him. And so, at one point he comes back to the list and he has this stream of consciousness, and he says, 'Ahhh, got to be in a dingy apartment by myself, late in life, no one to talk to, no kids--ehhh, I'm going to get married."

And he wrote on his journal... MARRY MARRY MARRY Q.E.D.

Darwin's journal: https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/tags/about-darwin/family-lif... https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/tags/about-darwin/family-lif...

The Unequal Impact of Parenthood in Academia (2021)

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