The Leaky Pipeline

November 23, 2009 in Education, Grad School, Science by Kris | 1 comment

The Center for American Progress has released a new white paper, in response to a report by the National Research Council which stated that women with terminal degrees were less likely to enter the tenure track, and more likely to drop out before receiving tenure, than men.
http://images2.americanprogress.org/CAP/2009/11/MaryAnnMason_womenandscience.mp4
The CAP study, Staying Competitive, Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences (pdf), addresses factors that contribute to this attrition of highly trained women in STEM fields.

In the life sciences, women now earn more the 50% of the PhDs. However, women are more likely to “leak” out of the system before getting tenure, primarily as a result of family obligation. Getting married and having children are the source of the biggest leak between earning a terminal degree and achieving tenure. Married female PhDs with children are 35% less likely to enter the tenure track than their male counterparts.  So being married and having children doesn’t prevent you from becoming a fully tenured professor, but add being female on top of that, and your chances drop by 35%. And married women with young children who do enter the tenure track are 27% less likely than married men with young children to achieve tenure. Why? Part of the reason women opt-out of the tenure track is the lack of family-friendly work policies, especially for junior researchers.

benefits

From the chart, between 77-87% of junior researchers (graduate students and postdocs) are NOT entitled to paid maternity leave. My graduate institution falls into that ad hoc category. None of the women in my program (14 babies!) were given paid maternity leave. And many took only 4 weeks off before returning to work at least part time.  At that’s just the beginning. Even for those faculty who have protected paid maternity leave, once they return to their jobs, they face more work. What constitutes work?

When combined with caregiving hours and house work, UC women faculty with children, ages 30 to 50, report a weekly average of over 100 hours of combined activities (in comparison to around 86 hours for men with children). This staggering amount of overall work gives a sense of how challenging it can be for women to combine children with a fast-track career in the sciences. [In addition,] the number of care hours provided by women faculty with children stays very high through age 50, averaging more than 30 hours a week of care. By age 58 women faculty with children still engage in 15 hours a week of care, and a full convergence of care hours provided by all of our faculty, regardless of gender and children, does not occur until the age of 60.

These talented and highly-trained women are being set up to fail, thanks to a system that doesn’t recognize the importance and effect of family obligations, and to the detriment of American science as a whole.

To lose talented scholars…because of our failure to provide baseline family responsive policies seems pennywise but pound foolish. If young scholars continue to leak out of the pipeline prior to seeking fast-track careers in the sciences, there is no way to make sure that they are not largely or entirely lost to our nation’s capacity to generate new scientific discoveries.

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Reference: Staying Competitive Patching America’s Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences

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