Women Skip Math/Science Careers To Have Families 616
hessian notes a Cornell survey, published in the Psychological Bulletin, of 35 years of sociological studies that concludes that women tend to choose non-math-intensive fields for their careers not because they lack mathematical ability, but because they want flexibility to raise children or prefer less math-intensive fields of science. "'A major reason explaining why women are underrepresented not only in math-intensive fields but also in senior leadership positions in most fields is that many women choose to have children, and the timing of child rearing coincides with the most demanding periods of their career, such as trying to get tenure or working exorbitant hours to get promoted,' said lead author Stephen J. Ceci... The authors concluded that hormonal, brain, and other biological sex differences were not primary factors in explaining why women were underrepresented in science careers, and that studies on social and cultural effects were inconsistent and inconclusive. They also reported that although 'institutional barriers and discrimination exist, these influences still cannot explain why women are not entering or staying in STEM careers,' said Ceci."
STEM careers are a lot of work... (Score:4, Interesting)
... for on average a lot less pay, I think that's the biggest problem. Why pay a north american a decent middle class wage when you can farm science, technology and engineering careers to lower wage countries?
Re:Less pressure (Score:5, Interesting)
Speaking as a woman who has a successful career in a male dominated environment (not STEM but the military), I can say that it is possible for a woman to rise to the top, if she is willing to make one of two choices (or falls into one of two choices):
1. She has no children
2. If she has children she has a husband who has a work schedule which allows him to be the one 'on call' for the children
I've seen many, many female Colonels who were successful with selection two. I've only seen female Generals with selection 1.
OT: From the perspective of lifetime income for the family--military service is bad for males (it reduces their post-service income by 30% when compared to civilian men the same age when they return to civilian life), but good for females. Post military service a woman will outperform women her own age in the civilian market.
This then is the simple way to maximize your family income over a lifetime. Woman goes in the service, husband stays in the civilian economy in employment that allows flexibility (lawyer, real estate, contracting, consulting, etc) until the children are able to drive, then both enter the economy as full time employees.
Who's forcing them.. (Score:3, Interesting)
Who's forcing them to have a family? it is a lifestyle choice - like buying a washing machine or allocating 14 weeks off each year to immerse oneself into Super 14 Rugby.
Have they also thought that maybe females are actually making the choice to have families over having a career? why is it every time there is a feminist jackass who comes out of the wood works that there is this claim that some how if females aren't career oriented and pumping out kids (they choose one or the other instead of doing both) - apparently it is the man's fault?
Good lord, let people do their own thing and stop trying to think that you need to socially engineer a given field in one direction or another? what next - insufficient gay's and lesbian's in quantum physics?*
* Disclaimer, I am gay myself, I need to put this disclaimer because some jackass will go, "ooh, he's homophobic, I'll mark down his post" *Teeheehee*
Re:Less pressure (Score:3, Interesting)
It's also pertinent to ask the questions of how does this include retirement income, is it just people that retire from the military, and can it be attributed to the desire to spend time with their family since they've already completed one career and are more interested in spending time with the families they may have missed until this point. I know several retired officers and enlisted persons who sought careers that would allow them flexibility and/or face time with their families, such as teaching, with little consideration for pay.
There are many extenuating circumstances to these statistics. Can the females improved performance be attributed to more the mentality and personality required by a military career more than the actual fact she was in the military?
I suspect that military service is more an indicator of future performance than a causal factor.
not just women (Score:5, Interesting)
It's not just women... whichever parent 'takes the hit' to raise the kids runs into this. It's the "kid track" (formerly 'mommy track'). Kids into schoolbus means I'm off to work, rush back before they get home, so less face time and less 'being seen'. It's never about the work.
I've been advised (wisely) to never mention the kids... the other scientists with kids, it's like a secret club where you only talk to other parents least word get out you're soft. In fact, I've been asked by a boss when will my kids be old enough that I can 'get serious about my career' (meaning put them into aftercare so I can work 60+ hours). I have no regrets-- we make a choice, you can't have it all, etc. But it is real-- if you're kid-track, you're not career-track.
Given the salaries in academia/science (medium-low) and that more women (statistically) achieving in the business workplace, more science guys (I predict) will be 'going domestic', so more guys will run into this too.
And while I'm at it, what's with the lame acronomy for Stay At Home Dads, it makes us all sound sahd. Besides, if you work 3/4 time or a rushed 8 hours, you're not staying, you're just at home when K12 is not in session.
Signed,
an At-Home Dad (AHD, similarily to ADHD probably intentional)
Re:First step: Understand why women have babies. (Score:5, Interesting)
"Why do women have babies?"
A good question... my own opinion on the matter is because that's what women are designed to do - procreate, we can backwards rationalize it all we want, but the primary purpose of life is survive and procreate. I think the process is mostly unconscious and instinctive, I've been doing a lot of reading in the cognitive sciences and how they see that most thought is unconscious, most thought is below your awareness... about 98%. So it would not be a surprise that people then backwards rationalize their actions (i.e. I wanted kids for x,y, z). Truth be told people have kids for companionship/economic reasons and (the hope) of old age security I think, that has always been the 'traditional' view imho.
I've thought about this more as I've had to take care of my own grandmother who's very old, she wouldn't have anyone to take care of her if she didn't have her kids and grandkids. I can only imagine what it must be like to be a woman with no kids who is not financially secure and is getting old... we have to remember that for most of history poverty was a significant fact of life.
People have kids just because 'thats what everyone else is doing'. When I asked my own mother why she had kids, she said 'thats just what people did back then'. Personally I think most people don't really think about it, they do it out of habit or instinct.
Correlation != Causation! (Score:1, Interesting)
How many times does this need to be said??
Women are the gender that have children. There are fewer women in X and Y fields/occupations than men. Let's start with the assumption that this is because women have children and find some reasons that fit our already-determined conclusion.
If the expectations are said to be so freakin' unrealistic then why not address the root cause - make the expectations realistic? If someone can only succeed in a certain field/occupation if they put in 80 hour weeks for 6 years then something is certainly broken.
What about the people who do take the 'necessary time' to succeed? The rest of their lives must suffer horribly because of it. Working that much, that intensely means there's nothing left for a life outside of work and there's little opportunity to build a foundation to subsequently build one after the milestone has been reached. The habits are in place. If you've been working that much, for that long, you're not going to suddenly flip a switch and do the 40 hour weeks.
I know this is off-track for the generic "Math is hard, girls can't do math" conclusion but what about the families of those people who do decide to go into these fields/occupations? What kind of spouse and/or parent can that person be if their entire focus is on their work? And what kind of damage does that do to the social fabric?
Sorry. I'll get off my soapbox now but this sort of nonsense is a waste of everyone's time and money. Not only has it been done to death but every single stinkin' time it seems like the researchers have a conclusion they build a case to support and the easiest way to do that is to decide that womens' biological makeup is the determining factor.
Re:Medicine : Where this really gets scary (Score:1, Interesting)
I have three doctors in my family, and they can tell you, that more than anything else, lack of doctors is the main contributor to low quality care. The doctors today are overworked and exhausted, and this leads to errors. What we need more than anything else, are more medical schools. I've seen fellow college students with 3.9 GPAs who've spent their entire summer doctor shadowing and volunteering at hospitals not get accepted into medical school. These people are certainly capable of learning and practicing medicine. Why we aren't utilizing this talent is beyond me.
Re:Paternity Leave (Score:4, Interesting)
I agree.
I think the grandparent post is sexist. I'm a man and I'm very good with children, because I happen to be empathic. I can do just as good a job with 0-8 year olds as any woman, and better than some women who hate children (yes they do exist). PLUS it's good to have balance; it's good to have children spend a year with mom, and then another year with dad, and back again to mom, and so on. It provides balance.
Re:Medicine : Where this really gets scary (Score:5, Interesting)
I don't get how it reduces the quality of care.
There is a tradition of enforced medical malpractice, at least in the US, of requiring residents to work 36 plus hour shifts. Kills thousands to millions of patients due to malpractice directly resulting from sleep deprivation. Anything that interferes with the sleep deprivation and its related malpractice is a "reduction in the quality of care". It's 1984 new-speak not the truth, which is why you don't get it. Most licensed day cares are not legally allowed to hold kids for 36+ hour shifts so something has to give, and oddly enough some moms prioritize their kids above their job.
Re:First step: Understand why women have babies. (Score:3, Interesting)
As a Merkin, I dread the day when the immigrants realise they don't need to speak English any more. Even more, I fear my Redneck fellows who'll probably start some whitepanther subversion and bring down the People's wrath on my ethnic minority.
Re:Who's forcing them.. (Score:4, Interesting)
This paints a very limited portrait of the lives of gay people. Many gay couples adopt or otherwise have kids.
Of course, this could explain some of the support for Prop. 8---employers who don't want to lose their "perfect" employees?
Re:Erm (Score:1, Interesting)
No, its because feminists are now asking for harder stuff. The good feminists(like those at girl-wonder.org) are asking for several things:
If you want to see the modern face of feminism, rather than spouting off uneducated lines, take a look at Girl-Wonder [girl-wonder.org]
Now, lets take a look at some very real issues that face women and men. (I suppose it shouldn't be feminism but gender rights then). Women in leadership positions, if they are strict, like common male leaders, are viewed as frigid bitches. If they show even a bit of a soft side, then they are viewed as wishy-washy. The problem is that similar actions from both the men and women result in very different opinions. This is not right. The same for men in nurturing positions. If they show kindness and empathy, they will invariably be seen as homosexual.
There are specific gender roles for men and women, and we teach these to our kids. But when they feel that they themselves break those gender roles, the confusion and pain is quite large. This is something that needs to change. We don't let boys cry, and we don't let girls play with dirt and sand. We don't let boys wear pink, and we don't let the girls wear masculine clothes until later in her life. The girls are given dolls, the boys are given cars. Is this right?
Who knows, but the fact that the way its being done now causes too much emotional harm to those that don't fit the mold means something has to change.
But this is hard for people to understand. And so feminism becomes a "joke.
Re:Erm (Score:1, Interesting)
FYI, Chauvinism doesn't mean sexism against women, it means "sexism for the group you belong to" (ie: somebody who is sexist against men because she's a woman is a chauvinist). It wasn't clear from your post whether you knew that or not.
Re:Less pressure (Score:3, Interesting)
"Two questions spring to mind: first, how does this differ for officers and enlisted men, and secondly, isn't this skewed a bit by the fact that people with lower incomes are more likely to go into the military?"
I'm a 26-year enlisted retiree and I not only help skew the figures, I've met plenty of other happy retirees who do!
My income at retirement was cut roughly in half to 30K gross/year. This was not tragic because I had many years to plan for it. I don't need to get another job that brings my income back to the same rate, because my mortgage is paid off and all my tools and toys paid for.
I didn't go to work for a year, then took a part-time job at my local community college where I'd previously volunteered to help the welding program. When my (VEAP-victim) year group comes eligible for the Webb G.I.Bill, I'll go back to school for the fun of it. Many G.I.s do this, then move back into the workforce later if they wish.
I'm not rich, but I live in an affordable rural area. (Most bases are in rural areas, facilitating buying a home cheaply before retirement.)
If I'd been a civilian, I'd have to stay in the workforce to survive, but my overall income would be larger.
Uncle Sam needs a young force, so we get put out to pasture earlier than a civilian might. While there are many _individual_ stories to the contrary, most people in their forties or later can't be in shape for sustained military activity because of bad backs, knees, shoulders, and general wear and tear.
Re:Medicine : Where this really gets scary (Score:2, Interesting)
If all women that wanted to work part-time as a physician were going into pediatrics, then we'd be all set. Unfortunately, that's not the case.
Re:First step: Understand why women have babies. (Score:1, Interesting)
I can only imagine what it must be like to be a woman with no kids who is not financially secure and is getting old...
I strongly suspect that most of the old people who die alone in poverty actually have kids - but the kids are either unwilling or unable to help.
While saving for your old age doesn't guarantee care in old age, neither does having kids. Both plans can fall apart.
Also, taking care of kids is expensive - both in terms of the actual cost and in terms of the time commitment (that prevents career advancement). Someone who saves the money they would have spent on kids and who advances in their career may very well be better off in old age than someone who did the kids thing.
If someone were to come to me and say "The one thing I want in life is to be taken care of in old age.", would I advise having kids? Not really. Not because I know whether saving or kids is more likely to result in being taken care of - but because having kids solely to be taken care of seems rather unethical. It's like forcing someone to sign a contract at gunpoint - maybe the contract is fair, and maybe it's not, but a person should have a choice.
So, why have kids if not for retirement - same reason as sex: millions of years of evolution have resulted in it feeling good.
Re:you're intellectually dishonest (Score:3, Interesting)
so i say it to you: why not give women, who bear children, special consideration for that?
Nobody is putting a gun to their heads and forcing them to bear children (at least not in the developed world).
In this day and age, in modern culture, having children is purely a choice women make or don't make, knowing full well the career, financial, and lifestyle consequences. These consequences are real, and trying to "make biology fair"--meaning give childbearing women special privileges over non-childbearing women--is not fair to the people (men and women) who chose not to have children.
Re:First step: Understand why women have babies. (Score:3, Interesting)
Studies have shown that couples who DON'T have children are, on average, significantly happier.
Yeah, you're REALLY gonna need to cite that. I know of not a single person who, in the twilight years of their lives, have looked back and said, "Ya know, having kids was a complete waste of my time."
You may be happier for a few years, but if your last decades are spent wishing you had a family, are you really happier overall?
Re:First step: Understand why women have babies. (Score:3, Interesting)
Wrong. The cost to a professional couple to raise children is huge, because of its affect on their careers. It simply isn't possible to raise children yourself in a proper way and have jobs at the same time. And most middle-class people don't make enough money to hire nannies, due to the high labor costs in this society (plus, would you want certain low-class people raising your kids, and teaching them stupid things like fandom of monster trucks or whatever?).
Personally, I already have so little free time between a professional engineering job, a marriage, extracurricular activities, and side businesses (to hopefully get away from being a wage slave, which is not a stable long-term position), that I can't imagine putting any time into having children. There just isn't any available time for it.
The big problem is biology: we humans don't live long enough, and women in particular are screwed because they can't have children past their 30s. (Well, they can, but the risk of having a Downs Syndrome or otherwise defective child go up exponentially. It's hard enough raising a normal child; a special-needs child requires people with no real jobs.) If people could spend their first 50 or 75 years being single, getting married, building careers and saving money, and then have children after their retirement, then we wouldn't have these problems.
Re:stereotypes (Score:3, Interesting)
My mom was a nurse before she retired. She generally hated it (which is why she didn't bother doing any part-time nursing work after she retired). While she liked working with patients, dealing with hospital management killed it for her. She got injured lifting a grossly obese patient and that was the beginning of the end of her career. Why did she lift a patient she had no business lifting? Because the nurse supervisor ordered it, because the hospital had no orderlies to lift and turn patients like that. (Orderlies are big men who just go around the hospital doing brute-force jobs like lifting people.) Why were there no orderlies? Because the hospital laid them off to save money.
Re:Erm (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:the drivers are not the same (Score:3, Interesting)
This isn't something you think about rationally or even correctly. It's an instinct which might not be ideal for the modern world.
Guys aren't necessarily thinking about girls. They do however act in a way which will tend to impress them, or that would do so if in the right environment.
The guy thinks "accomplishment is fun", but WHY does he think that? Such mental behavior is a trait which has historically been useful for reproductive success.
Re:Sexism or not? (Score:3, Interesting)
Preferring — in statistically significant numbers — fields other than science is innate lack of ability. Ability to prefer science, if you will. There is no difference.
Re:First step: Understand why women have babies. (Score:4, Interesting)
I'm one semester away from a BS in computer science, and I've worked in groups with a lot of people from India and China, mostly graduate students, over the last year or so. I'm not concerned for my future.
I don't mean any disrespect to any of them, in fact in most cases I like working with them and hanging out with them. Their work ethic is fantastic, but in some ways that's part of the problem. Both cultures put a very high emphasis on working hard, but it seems their educational systems place little value on creative problem solving. The Chinese (PRC) education system in particular seems designed to squash any bit of creativity that its students may have had.
I've become convinced that the reason America has been on top is our peculiar form of laziness. We're always looking for a better, smarter, and most of all easier way to do things, and that is precisely where innovation comes from. From what I've seen of Chinese and Indians, they're so concerned with working hard and doing things the "proper" way, that if they ever even notice the places where their processes could be improved, they would immediately discount the thought because that's not how they were told to do things.
A note about Japan: They've always excelled at integrating foreign ideas. Most of what we think of as Japanese traditional things were in fact imported from China and/or Korea many centuries ago.
Re:First step: Understand why women have babies. (Score:3, Interesting)
I've become convinced that the reason America has been on top is our peculiar form of laziness. We're always looking for a better, smarter, and most of all easier way to do things, and that is precisely where innovation comes from.
In fact, here you're echoing a chap called Larry Wall, I think you may have heard of him. From the second edition of Programming Perl (sourced from his wiki page [wikipedia.org]:
The Three Virtues of a Programmer:
1. Laziness - The quality that makes you go to great effort to reduce overall energy expenditure. It makes you write labor-saving programs that other people will find useful, and document what you wrote so you don't have to answer so many questions about it. Hence, the first great virtue of a programmer. Also hence, this book. See also impatience and hubris.
2. Impatience - The anger you feel when the computer is being lazy. This makes you write programs that don't just react to your needs, but actually anticipate them. Or at least pretend to. Hence, the second great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and hubris.
3. Hubris - Excessive pride, the sort of thing Zeus zaps you for. Also the quality that makes you write (and maintain) programs that other people won't want to say bad things about. Hence, the third great virtue of a programmer. See also laziness and impatience.
These qualities, while beneficial to the tech industry, are somewhat at odds with the traditional mindset in some more diligent cultures. :)
Re:A troll with 131 comments? (Score:3, Interesting)
I doubt 131 (or more now) is a record. If you say something controversial, good conversation might ensue (or, of course, it can get you fired...). I didn't understand "troll" either.
Apparently one reason why sociology research is usually done so poorly is that many people can't consider the questions without becoming upset.
You might like this?
A denial of human nature, no less than an emphasis on it, can be warped to serve harmful ends. We should expose whatever ends are harmful and whatever ideas are false, and not confuse the two.
--Steven Pinker
Most people don't handle issues involving conflict well.
The devil take thee, self-righteous cad!