Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?

http://www.nytimes.com/2013/10/06/magazine/why-are-there-still-so-few-women-in-science.html?hp

by wallflower • 13 years ago

33 44 13 years ago

jseliger3• 13 years ago

As an alternate perspective, here's Philip Greenspun: http://philip.greenspun.com/careers/women-in-science .

melindajb12• 13 years ago

I'm curious. did you read the parent article? or do you just post this in reaction to all articles on women in science? What is your response to the original article?

geebee2• 13 years ago

I'm not jslieger, but I did read the parent article.

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.

jseliger3• 13 years ago

Yes. Especially this section:

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.

tapatio6• 13 years ago

Why Are There Still So Few Men in Elementary Schools?

acjohnson553• 13 years ago

Because it's a career with limited advancement opportunities, stressful work conditions, and and low lifetime earning potential? Because we can choose a careers that are far better in all of those dimensions and more AND are demonstrably socially welcoming for our gender?

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)

geebee2• 13 years ago

You may also be describing science careers :(

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.

tapatio6• 13 years ago

Not true. I know several women in education who are pulling in $100K+ per year. Plus they get a pension when they retire. They all started out as teachers and worked their way up. While they are not millionaires they do have a nice lifestyle. And from the Greenspun article mentioned in this thread: "Even a public schoolteacher actually does better than a scientist. Consider the person of unusual ability who takes that bachelor's in science and decides to become a schoolteacher instead of going to graduate school. At age 22, the schoolteacher is earning a living wage and can begin making plans to get married and have children. By age 30, when the scientist is forced to start moving around to those $35,000 per year postdocs, the schoolteacher is earning $50,000 per year. By age 44, when the scientist is desperately trying to switch careers, the schoolteacher is making more than $90,000 per year for working nine months (only the better school systems pay $90,000 per year, but remember that we posited a person with a high IQ and motivation sufficient to get through graduate school in science). Being a public employee and a member of a union, the schoolteacher cannot be fired but may at this point in his or her life begin thinking about a comfortable early retirement and some sort of second career."

melindajb12• 13 years ago

Why are you spamming the comments with multiple silly questions?

tapatio6• 13 years ago

Why do people keep posting silly articles that talk about how we need more women in STEM?

tapatio6• 13 years ago

"As so many studies have demonstrated, success in math and the hard sciences, far from being a matter of gender, is almost entirely dependent on culture — a culture that teaches girls math isn’t cool and no one will date them if they excel in physics; a culture in which professors rarely encourage their female students to continue on for advanced degrees; a culture in which success in graduate school is a matter of isolation, competition and ridiculously long hours in the lab; a culture in which female scientists are hired less frequently than men, earn less money and are allotted fewer resources." RANT_START This person is delusional. Women are encouraged everywhere to be bold, be strong, be independent, go to college, blah, blah, blah. Who here has heard anyone tell a woman math isn't cool and that no one would date them if they excelled in physics? This is unbelievable bullshit. /RANT_END

acjohnson553• 13 years ago

It's called "lip service". It's quite possible for people to assert one thing but in actuality be part of a system that systematically drives contrary to that assertion. You know, kind of like how our founders held those truths to be self-evident that all men are created equal and then codified slavery in the next breath. Just because we say women should do X doesn't mean we've actually created an environment that nurtures that outcome.

tapatio6• 13 years ago

Sorry, I don't buy that. I pushed a lot of young women into STEM. I've told them many times that it would be a great field for them to get into. 99% of them ARE NOT INTERESTED. They don't care about how exciting it is or how much money they'll be making. Kind of similar in vain to the women who pick "hot" dudes to marry even though they are losers/deadbeats and later complain about said dudes.

melindajb12• 13 years ago

Just because you haven't seen it or heard it doesn't mean it doesn't happen. You can't derail a discussion of facts with one statistical data point.

eli_gottlieb8• 13 years ago

The word where you made a mistake was "everywhere".

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.

patrickg_zill2• 13 years ago

template for article:

"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.

ameoba• 13 years ago

Nor are there articles asking why men aren't nurses, waitresses or receptionists.

melindajb12• 13 years ago

see my comments on low status occupations.

melindajb12• 13 years ago

there's a good reason for that. in a good and high paying field an absence of anyone (women or POC) is worth considering.

In underpaid and low status occupations, it's obvious. I don't see how you can ask that question.

patrickg_zill2• 13 years ago

Shaming language doesn't work on me. I'm shameless )))

People say that elementary school teachers are important, but there is no pressure to have more men in that occupation... why?

tapatio6• 13 years ago

And another: Why Are There Still So Few Men in Pharmaceutical Sales?

melindajb12• 13 years ago

For a profession that is all about being an meritocracy, the willful blindness displayed here in the comments to the actual data presented in the article, is disturbing, if not unsurprising.

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.

eli_gottlieb8• 13 years ago

We have a shortage of scientists in this country.

Not according to the labor markets we don't.

melindajb12• 13 years ago

Do you include computer science in your assessment?

spalecti• 13 years ago

It is true that no system in the world has or could ever have a perfectly accurate merit assessment system... but has any one noticed that improvements in merit assignment and lower barriers to entry lead to less representation of women at the top, not more? In highly structured environments with statistical ranking systems, the portion of women at the top is miniscule. For example, women make up about about 55% of registered players in the American Scrabble Associations raking system, but on some occasions there are no women in the top 50 ranked (the most there has ever been was just a few) [1]. Currently, I count 6 women's names in the top 100 [2]. The only places where women are highly represented at the top are places with strong diversity programs. For example, Rwanda leads the world in terms of women's representation in parliament, but that is because a very large number of seats are reserved exclusive for female candidates, while the rest are open to anyone [3].

1. http://rcm-papers.net/scrabble-ratings-gender.html

2. http://www.scrabbleplayers.org/cgi-bin/ratings-byrank.pl

3. http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/7620816.stm

jleyank2• 13 years ago

Got pissed enough to log in..,

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.

melindajb12• 13 years ago

thanks for being pissed off enough to log in. we need more scientists, of all kinds. Lately I've been reflecting on the work of Dr. Carl Hart of Columbia University. He's a neuroscientist focused on the science of addiction, especially for crack and methamphetamine.

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...

Why Are There Still So Few Women in Science?

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