Thanks, Karen Morenz, for providing a unified, panoramic view of the ways that the standard academic career progression short-changes many female scientists, even if each step along the way seems to make sense.
It's worth taking a look at three other professions with long, high-intensity pathways from apprentice to master --all of which have been wrestling with the same challenges. They are management consulting, law and medicine. I've written about them elsewhere.
In medicine, there's been a surge of female participation (and leadership) in specialties such as dermatology, psychiatry and radiology, where it's relatively easier to rearrange hours and training regimens to be family compatible. There's been less progress in surgery, where hellish hours are considered part of the journey.
In law, some firms have been experimenting with a blurring of the boundaries between associate and partner, so that there's a middle level at which women can enter into motherhood without tanking their career chances. (In the traditional model, close to 40% of entry-level associates are female, but few of them stick around to make partner.)
I'm wondering if either of those models is transferable to STEM academia. Are there particular sub-disciplines where professional success and sane hours might be more compatible? Similarly, are there tenure-track or quasi-tenure track job titles that split the difference in tolerable ways?
I haven't researched these well enough to have clear answers. But it's worth discussing.
I agree with this and the subtlety of the OP’s argument. There is clearly a problem, there are clearly many contributors, I have personally seen The OP situation play out with my female friends/colleagues in STEM (and other “high power” sectors). This does NOT discount that sexism still is a problem nor that there may be cultural/societal norms that influence the family planning issue.
It’s a complicated issue, it needs to be tackled on many fronts. As men in the field we should advocate for those things Karen recommends, namely flexible hours, obscenely convenient high quality childcare, and other supports to make a career not the death of family.
Even if you disagree that there’s a problem here (and I think you’re wrong) how would these changes cause harm? Wouldn’t it just be a better world if people were less stressed by these things?
> As men in the field we should advocate for those things Karen recommends, namely flexible hours, obscenely convenient high quality childcare, and other supports to make a career not the death of family.
Flexible hours impose large costs in terms of increased difficulty of coordination and communication and if you’re really serious about them you need to completely upend the organizational structure, like changing an on premise company to a fully remote one. There’s also a hard upper limit on your career because managers are the bottleneck for communication so they almost have to be available when active else is. Arrangements to make flexibility economically profitable are also often denounced, see Uber.
> Even if you disagree that there’s a problem here (and I think you’re wrong) how would these changes cause harm? Wouldn’t it just be a better world if people were less stressed by these things?
It would be a better world but flexibility imposes large costs. Obscenely convenient childcare is also far from a panacea. Sweden has cheap to free childcare and it’s available 24/7 for those whose jobs demand it. But while Sweden’s employment rate is very high it’s among the most sex segregated in the world and fertility isn’t noticeably different from countries that aren’t so generous, suggesting the effects on family formation are minimal.
This point of view keeps coming up and it completely misses the point that _this already happens to every single women who has given up their career to look after children_.
This flexibility and cost you are talking about is borne entirely by them as they rearrange their lives and attempt to make things work while men continue with barely any disruption.
I'm my opinion this is deep, unintentional, structural sexism. It is the biggest issue I have with articles like this.
Stamping out overt workplace harassment and sexism is barely the beginning. There are deep structures in place that have benefited men like me for millennia.
These need to be considered not as complicated side issues but as the core barrier to achieving equity (as opposed to equality) in these fields.
If you or I were to take off a year to be a stay at home dad, would we suffer the same career consequences as women? If the answer is yes, then the issue is that we don't let anyone have children without harming their career, and that sounds counterintuitive and should be fixed.
If the answer is no, then bigotry is at play. It's impossible to know this answer, so we should just make it painless to take time off. I know of plenty of academics who go on sabbatical, fall off the face of the earth, and ignore every department email for a year or however long. This process actually improves their career, not hinder it. Taking time off is harmless.
Saying that women give up a career to look after their children is like lamenting the fact that people are giving up drinking to look after their liver.
The French word for work, 'travail', comes from 'tripalium', a medieval torture instrument. It's bad for everyone, and I definitely think a society where only one parent has to work instead of two is better.
A 'career' is something pop singers and top athletes (male or female) have. They even have agents to manage those careers. But most people have a job; they do work, travail, tripalium.
The fact that people confuse the two is just capitalist propaganda.
How is it a problem that women are looking at the biological realities and choosing motherhood over a 9-5 job? Most people were originally sold on the “problem” being the supposed sexism that prevented women from doing what they really wanted. Now we’re seeing that women don’t really want to work for the man over their children, and suddenly we’re supposed to believe that equal outcomes is the goal in and of itself. Seems like a bait and switch.
Solving this supposed problem with “convenient” (aka tax-funded) childcare is a huge misapplication of resources from the perspective of the family. It benefits big business by increasing the labor supply and driving down wages. It benefits big government by adding taxpayers and creating a problem to be solved with more bureaucracy. Meanwhile, the family is trading the value of motherhood (an untaxed $160,000 according to the article) for an average 9-5 job in most cases, plus losing out on quality mother-child time. If a family really wants to make that trade then they can pay for it themselves, but it would be unconscionable to push people toward that outcome by subsidizing childcare.
I am not so sure that the suggested availability of high quality childcare really helps those numbers in STEM.
In Nordic countries (I live in Finland), which are quite well known for having good quality childcare available to all families at low cost, the situation has not increased placement of women in STEM professions.
In fact, quite the opposite: the more "gender-equal" a society, the fewer women study STEM subjects.
Is it possible that the problem there is the amount of women starting studies in stem fields? I don’t have any numbers but anecdotal evidence of two Helsinki based schools in CS related programs had very lopsided gender ratios in bachelors and masters levels.
The correlation of women in STEM graduates and Global Gender Gap index is negative: the higher gender equality, the lower the proportion of women graduating from STEM subjects.
Lost in the modern rush for status and money, "obscenely convenient high quality daycare" used to be called "Motherhood" and was supplied by Mothers themselves. Some would argue, the most valuable contribution to society, even if not directly monetized.
To sustain a healthy population, we used to need 10 children per fertile woman, which made "stay at home Mother" an obvious necessity for the vast majority of women. In modern times, we get by with 2 children per fertile woman, and that frees up a lot of female energy to be channeled elsewhere. It is high time to recognize that 2 children is still a lot of effort and make room for Mothers to take care of their own children.
Instead, we are soft forcing Mothers to drop their kids in the care of poorly paid strangers at the earliest convenience, to spend their full time energy enriching faceless shareholders. And have the gall to call this arrangement "female empowerment".
Non-working mothers is a modern anomaly. It used to be a sign of wealth for a man to have a non-working wife. That is why the newly affluent men of the mid-20th century wanted it so much. They came out of the great depression, fought a great war, and wanted a wife at home. You should not judge all of history by this one era.
The work of child care used to fall on the entire extended family. The nuclear family reduced the flexibility in raising children. It was further reduced by a lack of work-life balance for both fathers and mothers. When women started working (again) the lack of flexibility fell on the mothers to fix.
In my own life - I worked, my mother worked, my grandmothers worked, and my great grandmothers worked. I had flexibility through daycare, my awesome husband, my awesome mother, and my awesome employers. I know they are all awesome because when my daughter (a software engineer) faced the same issues, her employer was not at all flexible. She quit work to stay at home with her three boys. I have a bunch of engineering friends who faced the same issues as my daughter. I originally thought they left the workforce out of choice and now I know they did not.
Of course! But that's only a tiny minority of wealthy women. Nobody is claiming that, historically, women did not work. It's just that female work was performed in proximity of their young children and interweaved with their care. Which is work in itself as well.
The historical norm of peasant societies is gendered work roles. Roughly speaking, the male works in the fields and the female works around the house / village. This pattern is even present across age groups, not uncommon to see 10 year boys herding the cows to pasture, and 10 year girls milking the cows at home. While I'm aware there are task and/or region and/or period specific exceptions, we're talking of the general pattern of [european] peasant societies here.
Women working away from their house and young children is the prevalent modern anomaly.
Working around the house/village is still work. Male peasants for the most part don't work outside the house/village either. They usually work on fields that relatively close to where they live. And a large fraction of the women work alongside them. Older men and women - grandpas and grandmas, etc. - do a lot of the childrearing while the younger women work.
Not sure about the US but here in Eastern Europe our peasant grandmothers were definitely working on the fields themselves, most of the times even longer hours than the men. It was the job of the very old women around the house to stay at home and take care of the eventual infants, but even then, that was an exception rather than the rule. I know that one of my grand-grand-mothers wanted to go and work the fields until her late 80s, together with everybody else from the extended family, staying at home was a sign of weakness and was seen as almost courting sickness/death.
Prior to industrialization, most women were home-makers.
And home-making was no slacking off either. Managing expenses, food (storage & cooking), raising children (feeding, teaching, playing), social bonding (neighbors, communities) etc. It kept their hands full.
> Non-working mothers is a modern anomaly. It used to be a sign of wealth for a man to have a non-working wife.
Running an aristocratic, bourgeois or farming household is a full time job, just as much as being an office manager. Post WW2 mass affluence with lesser time demands for running a household due to domestic appliances and other convenience led quickly to women exiting full time household management and joining the labor market.
Just a small additional comment - if a company creates an environment that encourages community then they will keep women. I was lucky to work at two companies like this - Xerox and early Apple. I don't think they set out to create a family friendly environment. They were trying to have an environment that encouraged creativity. They were part of the zeitgeist of the Bay Area. It just happened to also be family friendly. Those days are gone (sadly).
> Non-working mothers is a modern anomaly. It used to be a sign of wealth for a man to have a non-working wife.
You really need some data to back it up here. "I worked, my mother worked, my grandmothers worked, and my great grandmothers worked." is not good evidence. For one, there is a representative issue. For another, there is a huge difference between part-time work and full-time work. We don't know how many hours your mother, grandmothers, and great grandmothers worked, or worked for how many years.
Apparently the data contradicted with your own personal experience. This is why we should try to avoid general argument based on our on personal experience.
Labor force does count the actual workforce. They only count "wage slaves". One grandmother was a farmer. She took over from my grandfather when he got sick and he became the house husband. So she would not have been counted. I am not clear if it would have counted my other grandmother since she was a business owner. She owned a beauty salon. She also opened the first health food store in Berkeley with her sister to put my mother and her cousins through college. I doubt either would have been counted as labor force participation. My mother was counted.
> She took over from my grandfather when he got sick and he became the house husband.
Neither would have her husband been counted in the non-farm labour force survey. Thus swapping husband for wife would not have shown up as a change in the first place.
This is an interesting discussion. I remember my economists professor talking about how in Alberta during the 2006 boom labour force participation dropped as wages increased. In that case it was an example of the in-elasticity of labour demand.
From the social aspect it was an example of how for many families 2 working parents is not optional. A situation was fully true earlier in the industrial revolution. As the revolution progressed and labour had more negotiation power over capital real wages rose and duel working parents decreased.
Thus my pet theory is that the reduction in real wages is a non-trivial driving force for the current historic high labour force participation stats.
>One grandmother was a farmer. She took over from my grandfather when he got sick and he became the house husband.
I'm not sure what you think this proves. When the choice is "do something or starve" people do all sorts of things they would rather not do, from farming to prostitution to selling their children:
Most people for most of history were peasants. Peasant women don't just raise children - they usually contribute to almost everything else that the farming economy requires, as well. Think of old photos of peasants/poor farmers. Do the women look like they have been spending their time just raising children?
My family on both my mother and father's sides were farmers, including my parents for most of my early childhood. On the farm, women would work mainly during harvest season and a few other moments, but I remember quite vividly a conversation where my aunt got pregnant and other adults in the room we're angry that the birth might fall too close to harvest season so she wouldn't be able to help out. She said what was she supposed to do? To which her mother replied that you get pregnant at so and so season and that this is how it had been done for generations. At that moment I realized that most of their birthdays did fall out of harvest season (including mine!).
Your comment brought back those memories. I know an anecdote is not data but in my case (we're not American however) most women were expected to help out with the harvest and sowing. Children also helped out during harvest (some of my worst and best memories!). I also would say that at least in my region, some would help only seasonally in the farm. The rest of the year they're expected to be "managing the home" and any women that wanted to study would be met with very sexist attitudes and responses. Also worth mentioning that raising children does take a toll on you. If you think peasant women look bad because of hard work on a farm, it's probably not. Think hard work off the farm, combined with poverty, stress, anxiety, etc.
If by modern you mean common for the lower middle class in 1850 sure:
>And here occurs a curious inversion. It is a fact of common observance that in this lower middle class there is no pretense of leisure on the part of the head of the household. Through force of circumstances it has fallen into disuse. But the middle-class wife still carries on the business of vicarious leisure, for the good name of the household and its master. In descending the social scale in any modern industrial community, the primary fact-the conspicuous leisure of the master of the household-disappears at a relatively high point. The head of the middle-class household has been reduced by economic circumstances to turn his hand to gaining a livelihood by occupations which often partake largely of the character of industry, as in the case of the ordinary business man of today. But the derivative fact-the vicarious leisure and consumption rendered by the wife, and the auxiliary vicarious performance of leisure by menials-remains in vogue as a conventionality which the demands of reputability will not suffer to be slighted. It is by no means an uncommon spectacle to find a man applying himself to work with the utmost assiduity, in order that his wife may in due form render for him that degree of vicarious leisure which the common sense of the time demands.
It's worth noting that the amount of time parents (more so mothers) spend with each child has increased vastly, with relatively little evidence to suggest much increase in attainment. Most studies show that it's quality of time, not quantity, with parents that really matters.
The evidence suggests we don't actually need to parent so much.
Personally I see absolutely nothing wrong with sending kids to day care. We should focus on high quality family time, not high quantity. Unfortunately this view isn't acceptable in the age of helicopter parents.
Young children are information sponges. Think about how easy a 2-3 year old picks up language. It is not that hard to believe that 2-3 year olds also pick up behavioral patterns from their surroundings. For life. Do we want Mothers to shape their young children's behavioral patterns, or low paid child care workers with no skin in the game?
8 year olds? Send them to school with a key around the neck. They'll figure it out.
The math: 2-3 kids, spaced 2 years, up to 3-4 years old = a career break of 5-8 years. That ought become social norm and be encouraged.
> 2-3 kids, spaced 2 years, up to 3-4 years old = a career break of 5-8 years. That ought become social norm and be encouraged.
This is what a lot of wealthy people already do, because they can afford it due to one spouse's very high income, so the other spouse has a sort of vanity job (i.e. serving on the board of a charity).
But for the working and middle class, this is a bit of a pipe dream. Two people working are needed to pay the mortgage for the house that gets you the "good" public school.
Universal extended paid family leave and health care are a good way to encourage people to take time off to raise their young children. Many European countries do exactly that. I have friends in such countries who continued their academic careers part time while raising their children. It didn't hurt that they never worried about health care coverage for their families. It is a reason why European academics move back to their home countries after stints in the United States.
But things like that that will require raising taxes, and well, are we actually ready for that conversation?
Solving this by regressing to a society that discourages women from doing jobs outside the home is backward. Instead, change the system so that working parents have more freedom to make that choice to stay home with kids if they want to without imposing unreasonable struggle and risk upon their families, just like the wealthy have that option today.
No matter how well-trained and passionate the childcare workers are. At least in my country, a typical daycare has around 6 kids per caregiver for children less than a year old, 10 for 1-year-olds and maybe 15 or so for 2-year-olds.
If you have ever cared for a less than a year old child, you will surely know that caring for six at the same time, and doing it well, is simply impossible. So most of the time they end up sticking them into "baby holding devices", largely ignoring them (as they have no time to pay attention to all the children), or what's worse, hypnotizing them with videos on a smartphone.
I don't blame the childcare workers, I would do the same (or worse) because it's physically not possible to do better with such numbers of children. I don't blame the childcare managers, childcare is already a significant expense for most parents and if they multiply the cost by 2 or 3 by hiring much more personnel, most parents just wouldn't be able to afford it. It's a problem that really needs either heavy public spending or societal change to fix.
Those are pretty high ratios - and I agree detrimental to children and very hard on the caregivers.
As we're talking about stem mothers, I was thinking more of ratios I've seen in the SF for more affluent parents:
* Private nanny offering 1:1 time until kid is 2 or so (better option than daycare) or daycare with 1:3 ratio for infants
* Preschool for kids older than 2 with a 1:6 ratio.
My general read is that some childcare providers can outperform some parents. Yes, it's not their kid, but the higher passion for education can more than outweigh that.
That's not necessarily an argument against daycare, it is an argument for high quality daycare.
Studies show that boys with working mothers are less sexist and have more positive relationships with woman in general. Picking up behavior patterns goes both ways.
Yeah here in Iceland we have state run kindergarten’s open to kids from 18 months. They are staffed by degree educated people specialising in child development as well as assistants. They’re nothing but delightful in my experience. They are definitely underpaid though and I would absolutely like them to be paid more.
I’ve also heard horror stories of private daycares from my friends who have lived in the US though. Particularly those studying so without particularly high incomes.
They do have skin in the game. As shown in many studies, people generally are good. Therefore, most daycare workers would prefer if the children they worked with turned out good rather than bad.
While daycare workers may be underpaid, in many countries they work requires at least some education. They would also accumulate experience in proper child care the more years of experience they have in the profession. I.e. it is not a given that mothers are better than professionals in raising their own kids.
Do you have any citations here? I've always assumed that mothers on average spend less time with their children than in the past, especially the far past, where the men were often abroad fighting wars.
>"... One analysis of 11 rich countries estimates that the average mother spent 54 minutes a day caring for children in 1965 but 104 minutes in 2012. ..."
This is analysis is just hard to believe.
Between reading books, preparing food, driving to activities -- a full-time parent spends probably 4-5 full hours, except when another parent takes over or there is a continuous split.
The interrupt costs are also very high (and affect negatively ability to work).
Conversely, day care should be exceedingly expensive to account for the cost of having high quality labor (vs minimum wage caregivers) tend to children, with the end result being day care is a last resort, not something provided universally (when taking into consideration the volume of “bullshit jobs” in the marketplace); your job should be of an exceptional nature to be preferred over childcare obligations.
Given that daycare effectively pools more than one family's children per adult caretaker, it should still only cost a fraction of an equally good job's salary.
I argue current day care costs don’t reflect living wages for caregivers, and it’s already out of reach for a lot of people. When wages rise, even less will be able to afford it.
I've re-read your comment a few times now, and I don't see anywhere you've written something that implies you think women ought to become mothers due to some moral standard you have. So I don't think the downvotes are warranted.
It sounds like you are highlighting the contradiction between the fact that women are now increasingly expected and needed to do the job of full-time motherhood while also somehow, miraculously, contributing financially to the family through their careers. I agree that this places increased burden on women, and is due for a correction, both via new programs/regulation and a cultural awareness that this is being asked of them. Your point about raising children as 'unmonetized value' is something I think culturally we need to grapple with, much like we need to grapple with things like the externalities leading to climate change. We need to be able to price the value of child rearing into our capitalist society in a much better way, so women have clearer incentives and more freedom in choosing the path they take as they become parents, regardless of what path that is.
edit: I should state that while this article is about women and hence what I wrote above focused there, the same problems apply to men who want to allocate their time between parenting and their career. Society needs good parents, because we need good adults, and this value exchange is woefully un-accounted for in our current system. In practice, both parents suffer from having to make this trade-off, including those who have someone other than the mother take on a large part of childcare.
While implication versus what was literally written is quite muddy with this comment, what is missing from the entire comment is why it has to be a mother and not a father. The ending part also shows a lack of understanding of how childcare actually works today as well.
Implication, grammatical choices (such as capitalizing mother consistently), and topic focus are of course not the full picture, but they are not mind reading either.
The internet can lose a lot in translation, and I think I was quite charitable with it, and only addressed the explicit parts.
If a full time caregiver is needed at home, dads can step up as well. After being laid off shortly after we had our first kid, I decided to give my wife a chance to get back into her career while I stayed at home until the kid was ready for daycare. There is no reason to put all this burden on moms, dads have an equal part in this either way.
I read a study (from Rutgers I believe) about men who scale back on work to care for children. The conclusion was that while women are more likely to incur a “parent penalty”, this is partly explained by e fact that many men simply don’t scale back. The comparatively small number of men who do take time off or scale back to care for children face unusually severe career penalties for it. Some ideas explored were penalties for violating gender norms. Employers penalize women but in the end kind of expected this. When the men do it employers treat it as a kind of misrepresentation of intent and respond punitively.
I know a cite would be particularly helpful here, I’ll try to dig it up.
Gender norms are reflection of society expectations.
Society expectations evolve/change with economic and war conditions affecting a particular society at that time.
Those things, unfortunately, go in waves.
So we can pick different parts of history and we will likely see 'gender norms' are being adjusted for the particular environment at that time period.
On top, there are biological projections, and genetic predispositions that are projected on 'gender norms'.
Things that 'change less' are genetic traits and biological differences.
Combining economics/war conditions, with genetic traits + biological differences, creates a sort of 'superposition' that we are observing.
As a society, it makes sense to accommodate the desire of individuals, but not force people into particular choice.
Accommodating a variety of legal choices, is what we should be striving for, rather than trying to influence a particular path.
It is sort of like trying to introduce new type of species (animals or trees) into a new environment -- and expecting that we know about the ecosystem, to predict the effects of invasion.
Most of the time, with our current knowledge and prediction capabilities -- we fail.
---
Which is why, I think accommodating choices (and not predicting or promising outcomes) -- is what we should be doing.
It is not a burden, it is a privilege. For dads to step up, as feminists demand, mothers would have to give up that privilege.
And if you believe the feminist narrative that it is dads forcing mothers to take care of the kids, consider that most women chose their jobs and the expected salary long before they meet the future father of their kids. Man choose careers that pay less, so the fathers end up having to earn the money. Them staying at home would simply mean less money for the family, often not enough money.
Being able to stay at home is a privilege. My brother, my dad and some of my friends took a few years off to stay at home when the mother worked, I don't see how being able to do that is not a privilege, all of them did it because they wanted to and liked it.
However all of them experienced a lot of sexism from being a stay at home dad. So an alternative explanation to the skew between men and women at work could be that men face so much sexism at home so they have no other option than to just slave away for 40 years. The people I know were lucky to have a progressive wife with a high paying career and enough mental fortitude to shrug off the constant verbal jabs at you, most men are not that lucky.
I don't think the person you are replying to is either agreeing or disagreeing it is a privilege. They are just pointing out the increadibly bad argument they are replying to.
A brand new account posting self-contradictory nonsense like For dads to step up, as feminists demand, mothers would have to give up that privilege. sounds like a troll to me.
I think the comment "no, you see, I can't possibly help you with this, because it's such a privilege for you." captured the contradiction pretty well.
(I "stepped up" and took time off when my child was born. It was both a privilege that I was able to do that, a burden that it needed to be done, and one of the hardest things I've done in my life. Trying to make it an identity labelled "feminist" move is insulting. I too experienced the sexism you referred to - I mean I bought dipers that say "only a mother knows" on them.)
No - what is going on is that feminists point to statistics of dads not staying home, then claim it is because dads "don't step up to help in the home". That's a feminist lie - several, actually. First lie: it is a burden to take care of your kids. Second lie: dads are lazy slobs oppressing the mothers to do all the awful work, while they chill in their comfy careers.
It's not even a question of "I can't help you with that because of your privilege", it is that the question is not even the question.
Of course there are dads who wouldn't like to stay at home, or who don't even consider it because of societal traditions. Likewise mothers who don't want to stay home (less often). Overall, it is a question of money (privilege), and a private matter between the parents.
While women experience a "parent penalty", the one men would/do experience is much more severe because rather than being seen as necessary or expected, it is a character judgement: you chose to walk away and didn't have to so you have demonstrated you are wiling to be a traitor. (fair or not, this is the judgment).
If one is to advocate for men "stepping up", one must at least understand what they are asking.
"What, just step in front of the cavalry charge, they'll go around you don't worry you're just chicken hehe checkmate".
And while it might be unpopular to suggest this is so, I agree with the parent poster that the first thing that seems to get lost in these discussions is that taking care of children is not a burden. Work, yes, hard, yes, a burden? Only if you didn't want them in the first place. I say this as a father of 2 who sometimes sacrifices work to take care of my kids. It's a privilege the days I do so and I am currently undertaking a Herculean effort to modify the shape of my career and my income in order to do so more often because I love them and want them brought up right instead of leaving them in the hands of some daycare. Burden? WTF?
And it seems to be an absurd argument: "Caring for the children is a burden that holds back women therefore men should do it so women can work." Wait what? How does that fix anything?
This is why I largely stay out of these discussions. It seems to be impossible for them ultimately to be realized as nuanced. This problem is hard and a balanced, equitable solution is multifaceted. To state the solution as "well men should just...." in any context whatsoever does a disservice to the discussion.
As someone with kids I can verify it's a huge amount of work taking care of them! It's incredibly hard work, by far the hardest thing I've ever done. If you want to call that a burden then so be it.
For you to call that a feminist lie makes it sound more like you are trying to make this an ideological argument rather than anything based on experience. All your arguments are based on some strawman argument if feminism.
Why do you think mothers "less often" don't want to stay home?
It's hard work, but not a burden. People have kids because they like having them. Keeping with the Ferrari analogy, cleaning your Ferrari is also hard work, but nobody would pity you for the "burden" or having to clean your Ferrari.
Not sure if you are aware, but if you don't like them anymore, there are ways to get rid of them. You could send them to a boarding school (or at least to a school where they have to stay at school all day), hire a nanny, or give them up for adoption, for example. If your parents are still alive, you could ask them to take over, too.
As for feminism, the whole discussion only exists because of feminism. Therefore, yes, it is about feminism.
Please don't use HN for ideological battle, regardless of which ideology you're for or against. It already looks like you're using HN primarily for that, and we ban such accounts, as the site guidelines say.
Not sure I follow. Given two mothers (gonna leave aside some of the baggage here, fathers can do child care, not all women/people are straight or fit in the conventional framework): Amanda wants to have kids but also wants to be a Supreme Court litigator. Jane wants kids and wants to stay at home to raise them. Why is giving Amanda the option hurting Jane’s ability to chose her preferred outcome?
Should we force Amanda to chose? How is that empowering?
It's hurting in some ways, for example in increased prices for housing. If families with two income earners compete with families with one income earner, the outlook is bleak for one earner families. Prices simply rise to what the two earner households can afford. In fact many families can not afford the single earner model anymore.
There are also changed expectation, although presumably those can be managed. But once daycare is available, pressure can be on women to actually work. Where I live, you get strange looks if you don't give your kid to daycare from age one.
Apart from that it seems to me if somebody has a well paying career (like Amanda), they should be able to afford daycare anyway. If they don't, I'm not sure if society should pay for daycare just so that somebody can go to work to satisfy their ego (if their work yields less than the cost of daycare).
What you fail to mention though is the whole host of benefits to society that comes from gender equality, equality that is a direct result of woman working.
Unfortunately it seems to be fundamentally difficult to make both models of the family work equally well simultaneously.
> whole host of benefits to society that comes from gender equality
Can you give me some examples? Not disagreeing, just would like to know.
I can see how there's a lot of benefits to society for men and women to receive equal amounts of esteem and respect for the work they do, but I'm not convinced it has to be the exact same work in the exact same proportions.
I think technological progress has freed women to do other things than, say washing clothes and other household chores.
That doing other things can of course benefit society, if they so chose. A washing machine saving 16 hours of labor per week can bring society a benefit of 16 work hours per week.
As for childcare, I am not sure I agree that organizing childcare so that fewer people can take care of the children is necessarily a benefit. It can be, but there seems to be a limit, too. For example few people would say "one person is enough to take care of 100 toddlers", which would free 99 people (mothers, mostly) to do other things than childcare.
Also, if we think in terms of "benefits to society", wouldn't there be other worthwhile targets? For example, what if instead of watching TV, people would do something useful for society? It would be a huge net benefit - so maybe we should outlaw TVs?
Meaning we neglect that people may have children because they like having them, not because they want to provide a service to society.
The two income trap you mention was the subject of an Elizabeth Warren book sometime in the early 2000s. It’s a real issue, I’m not sure how to solve it, but it seems like a different larger scale issue. Also at this point its a little late. That societal evolution has already created facts on the ground such that in most larger cities it’s impossible to afford a good middle class lifestyle without two incomes.
Given that, what’s a simple thing that we could do to make life better? Make it easier for people to cope with that. Good, easy childcare is one clear way to do it.
It’s also wrong to suggest this is a rich people problem. If anything the lack of childcare is an even more acute strain at the lower end of the wage scale.
Completely free childcare for everyone may be unworkable or undesirable for a variety of reasons, but it seems clear we can do a whole lot more, and we would benefit in the aggregate. Not the least of which because more people from different backgrounds in the workplace is a great way to build empathy and creativity.
The "we" who benefits, would that include the children?
Essentially, the going theory seems to be that society would be better of if it would delegate childcare to less people per child, contrary to the "traditional" one on one of mothers and their children. (Thinking about it, in the old days mothers had more children, so it was rarely one on one either).
Also, it seems to consider having children merely as a productive factor for society, rather than something people do for its own sake.
I like to compare children to Ferraris, as both are expensive (children probably even more so than Ferraris).
So in analogy, people like to buy Ferraris, but society would be better off if those Ferraris would be parked in somebody else's garage. Think about all the time people waste driving their Ferraris, which they could have otherwise put to productive use for the benefit of society.
It's hurting Jane in the sense that her family has to get by on one income vs two and due to 'keeping up with the Jones' her family then feel poor and disenfranchised because they can't have all the same stuff Amanda can. Forgetting of course that they then have the privilege of Jane being able to raise get kids personally.
If we use a tax to pay for the child care, then depending upon how the tax is structured it could be that an increase tax on Jane (either directly, or on the partner in the relationship who is working) can make it so that it makes more economical sense for Jane to work and use the subsidized child care. Just like today the opposite often happens (child care costs so much that the lower earning parent can have a hard time justify having a job). I think it is possible to find a balance but we haven't managed to do so yet and I wouldn't bet on it anytime soon.
> and make room for Mothers to take care of their own children.
Whoa, 50's regression much? Why not make room for fathers to take care of their own children?
> in the care of poorly paid strangers
Or you could leave your children in the care of educated professionals in child development, who will ensure your children gets age- and stage-appropriate stimulation, as well as socialization with other children in a safe environment, something that very neatly complements caring for children at home.
> And have the gall to call this arrangement "female empowerment".
Actual studies from countries that have a longer and better history of this than the US show that it does increase gender equality by quite a lot.
Yup. My wife and I were faced with the option of her contributing financially to the home and we pay for child care, or her being an at home mom. If she went to work, she would net $20 a week after paying for child care. Yeah, nope.
When we had just one kid, the math of my wife working or not worked out to basically what you found. If she was feeling engaged in what she was doing, we probably would have found someone to watch our daughter. But she wasn't really, so she stayed home.
Then we had twins.
There is a daycare just down the street that we looked into just for shits and giggles. A mere $550 / week if we wanted all three there full time.
My wife earned negative income for a few years but kept with it. I didn't agree with her decision but supported her in it. She just didn't want to be out of the work force so long that she would have trouble getting back in once the kids were in school.
Considering you usually have better salary with 2-4 years extra experience there is more to it than that. I guess universal daycare is a non starter in the US, and even though we have that here in Sweden women still opt to stay at home more than men, but that difference getting smaller every year. One of the measures says 30% of childcare days are used by fathers, but that is only paid time. The statistics for the unpaid time is usually a lot worse.
>Exclusive breastfeeding is recommended up to 6 months of age, with continued breastfeeding along with appropriate complementary foods up to two years of age or beyond.
It doesn't work like that, because the "complementary food" is just that: complementary. The main source of nutrition according to the WHO should still be breastfeeding until two years old. The typical recommendation is to start each meal by breastfeeding first, and then give some food afterwards as a "second course".
The mother can still go to work by using a breast pump to extract milk and leave it refrigerated or frozen, but the logistics are quite hellish and breast pumps not even always work.
All in all, and I say this as a parent that ideologically supports equality and believes that both parents should share parenting efforts equally... nature just doesn't work that way. At all. :(
Worked nicely just breastfeeding during the nights/mornings for us and most people I know after 12 months, and earlier should not be much of a problem IMHO, it's something you should be able decide on your own. It's not something to demand from mothers, because the stigma of not breast feeding can be pretty hard for a new mother and it is completly unnecessary to put that psychological pressure on someone..
That is excessive, and is a troublesome outcome from the https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nestlé_boycott I only have anecdotal data but this advice does not help families that have problems with breast feeding.
It's not a matter of being disallowed, it's a matter of convenience and comfort. If a woman is working a factory or a large department store, she may have to pump in the restroom. That's not exactly a comfortable or convenient place for it. Far different from an office which offers a quiet room with a comfortable chair or couch for her use.
Beyond that, there's also the matter of storage. Breastmilk is unpasteurized and needs to be refrigerated immediately for safety reasons. In an office, it can be as easy as putting the bottle in the fridge in the staff room. A fridge may not be available in other workplaces.
There is actually a 4/4/4 rule of thumb; 4 hours at room temp, 4 days in fridge, 4 months in freezer (source: newborn baby care class at large hospital in CA)
Still agree with the rest of your thoughts about other hurdles to overcome in the work place
They are solutions, but would people choose them? This story is about what women are choosing to do with their lives. From what I gather, they’re not choosing the hard, inconvenient, uncomfortable way without a good reason.
That’s because people in many countries don’t have access to clean water. There’s no reason to pressure women in developed countries to breastfeed for 2 years.
Unless you’d like to push them out of the workforce.
No, it's because there are a lot of scientific results correlating it to all kinds of better health outcomes both for the child and the mother, also in developed countries.
Whether this benefit is worth the great burden two years of breastfeeding imposes on women is, of course, debatable, and each woman should choose and not be questioned on their decision (as people often do). But sweeping the issue under the rug by denying the proven benefits of extended breastfeeding is not helpful.
Not when you adjust for education and SES and nothing beyond one year. Which is great news, because as you say, it can be burdensome.
(Not a knock on extended breastfeeding itself. I think mother and baby should breastfeed as long as it’s working for both of them - well into the toddler+ years if that’s what mom wants. But claiming unproven benefits is actively harmful to women.)
Mothers have the first pick because they invested more into the kid coming into being. They risked their life and invested 9 months into bearing the child. So they get first pick to also be the person spending time with the child.
If the birth and childbearing is being compensated by being able to spend time with the child, why give any consideration in any other field (say custody, parental leave, etc) if its already paid for.
Sorry, still not quite sure what you mean (I'm not a native speaker, maybe that's why).
Childbearing is of course not the only cost of having a child. Custody and parental leave just make it a bit less expensive (at least for some).
However, the initial investment is usually mostly by the mother. Other expenses come later. I think you could discuss who has the right to the kid if, say, the mother abandons it after birth and the father lovingly raises it for 10 years. I suppose that is also what happens in custody lawsuits?
I like this comparison, but only because I haven't found a better one yet:
Suppose you dream of sailing, and you start building a sailing boat. You work on it for a year, building the boat with your own hands.
The day the sailing boat is ready, your husband takes it from you, says "thank you, now you may go back to your normal career again", and sails off to unknown lands with your ship, while society applauds his sacrifice for the sake of your career.
That millennia long track record contains very high numbers of infant death, and the only thing pushing those numbers down is our ever-expanding collective knowledge of best practices regarding child-rearing.
Women aren't born with innate genetic knowledge of how to prevent SIDS, it's taken generations of studies to figure out causes and develop working practices to counter it.
I you put a baby in safe environment and you don't touch it, don't play with it he widdle and die. Think about that for a moment. One thing for sure we were able to reproduce for millennia but let science do it for a while and see what happen.
>It is high time to recognize that 2 children is still a lot of effort and make room for Mothers to take care of their own children.
It's high time that fathers start putting in some more work in that department too.
Sweden has 480 days of paid parental leave, and each parent has exclusive right to 90 of those days. Have fathers spend some time raising their kids instead of just letting their wives do it and you'll see that things should get better.
This is a very feminized view of child rearing. Fatherhood's traditional gender role in raising children is to provide resources and protection. If you don't recognize that as "parenting" then you are missing the plot. Hugs are great, but not nearly as great as food and shelter.
So you think that if a father is just working (and essentially doing what he'd do if he didn't have a child) then that should be considered good parenting because he's providing resources? Might as well call every working man a good parent then even if they barely even interact with their kids.
There are very important emotional aspects to parenting that you people who constantly complain about feminism seem to completely ignore, I'd much rather have a father who's there and who I can spend time with than a father who's working two jobs because "more money earned == better parent".
This is privilege speaking. As a upper middle class it is easy to scale back.. have more time blah blah
Now try that if you are under the mean. Good luck. It is absolutely the case that SOMEONE has to pay the bills. If you are making 40-60k and alone you can live pretty ok, now try that with 3 kids.
Making so much money you can afford to relax, take time to hangout with kids, take them skiing, buy PC for them, take them travelling, feed them good food. Put them in school where they will make connections for the future. You will absolutely makes a better parent, period.
Today, just providing "resources and protection" is indeed considered parenting but inadequate. Any man can help with hugs and the household given the reduced work hours.
1 in 7 children in America may not know where their next meal is coming from. Many children live in unsafe neighborhoods.
I think perhaps a better way of putting it is that men are primarily responsible for the lower tiers of Maslow's hierarchy of needs while women are primarily responsible for the upper tiers. Obviously that doesn't mean a man can never change a diaper or a woman can never pay a bill.
I remember reading that in a nordic country they had 1 year of parental leave to be shared, and men got 1 month and women 11 months. There goes your gender-equality.
There is certainly something to be said about the way stay-at-home mothers are perceived by many in our society. They provide one of the most valuable contributions to society and should be praised. The issue is: many females take this issue at a personal level. Being a stay-at-home mom is a choice and most people don't look down on women who choose a different path. Also, some women can't simply cope with the fact that they have a biological clock and their careers may be on the way to their motherhood (or vice-versa). I wish there were more honest conversations about this.
Males also should equally share the burden here I must say, as more and more of us run away from life responsibilities. The 30 year old basement dweller meme is real.
With such a large percent of this generation destined to be childless you don't think that conversation is coming? I'd bet on it once more start to realize the reality of their decision. Men or women, really.
Absolutely. And there is a gap here to be bridged. In the current political discourse, I see a narrative of men and women being put as adversaries, as if they were competing for something whereas in most cases they are complements and their whole is greater than the sum of its parts. And I repeat, males are just as guilty here. Divorce has gone through the roof, single mothers are an ever increasing share of the parental composition. Men are running away from their responsibility which is to raise their children in conjunction with their partner. I hope we turn a corner sometime soon.
You’re talking about a history that never really existed except for a few decades in a few western countries. Look at countries where women actually have many children. They’re not “stay at home moms.” They’re agricultural societies where men and women work alongside each other, and groups of very old or very young women in the village take care of the children.
> Instead, we are soft forcing Mothers to drop their kids in the care of poorly paid strangers at the earliest convenience, to spend their full time energy enriching faceless shareholders.
Is there any evidence indicating that this is actually true? What makes you think that the existence of out-of-home childcare is forcing mothers to work? This seems backwards; I think it's much more likely that the existence of mothers who worked would lead to alternative childcare options being offered, not vice-versa.
The market is a feedback loop, not a static system. Daycares may have started appearing because some mothers wanted to go back to work earlier. But, as more and more families started using them - whether to gain a financial leg up, boost the mother's career, or for personal reasons - they've become established. At the same time, the market started pricing it in - what was perhaps once a trick to boost your material status, now became the default, and these days sending kids to daycare isn't a way to boost anything - not sending them is a way to have less money. Similarly, daycare is expected in careers simply because there's more than enough mothers doing it that not doing it puts you at a competitive disadvantage.
The market rewards being above the mean, but otherwise works to make the mean cheaper. If a few % of people find a way to move above the mean, they reap great rewards - which encourages others to do the same; the mean starts to move up, and competitive pressure starts to push its value down. In the end, "the new way" becomes the default way, and initial rewards from doing it are erased.
there is this latent assumption here that men are reliable breadwinners and/or that they generally do not use their economic power in this arrangement to abuse their partners and families.
Women working is a way of evening out the power imbalance that has led to suffering for women all over the world since the beginning of time.
When you have no economic power you are dependent on your husband which is why unpaid labor is so dangerous. The husband calls the shots. Not all husbands are good guys. It's only reasonable for women to want to reduce their exposure to this problem via things advocated for by feminists over time: birth control to avoid unwanted and forced pregnancies (far more common in the days of having 5+ children) and of course death during childbirth, literally their own income stream so they can pay for things a husband might not value equally: healthcare, tuition, clothes, and more, an income stream to enable a divorce should the husband be an abuser, problematic addict or worse...
in less shitty scenarios, the sudden death of a male partner can result in financial ruin for a family with a 'non-working' mother. Again, its economically reasonable for a woman to want to hedge against being stuck at 40 years old with no advanced skills in a career.
What about letting every woman decide for herself on where she wants to direct her work instead on keeping on making definitions and deciding what is good for them.
But a majority of women do fit into that category, so if you want to have more women in professional positions, their needs will necessarily dominate the conversation.
You're excluding women who are not straight but want or are having children! Seriously though, I find the post you replied to to accurately distinguish between women and mothers. The women who are not bearing are included in those numbers! If we peg the share of women who don't have children at ten percent the child-per-women number of 2 means a child-per-mother ratio of around 2.2. It doesn't change the argument and is an unnecessary detail.
(I disagree with the thrust of the post and think that letting mothers participate in society outside home an important factor in female empowerment. But please let's talk about that, not haggle over definitions.)
> Instead, we are soft forcing Mothers to drop their kids in the care of poorly paid strangers
What is a "Mother"? Is it different from a "mother".
And I was a bit surprised by your conclusion - initially I thought you were going to argue that high-quality daycare, childcare, and maternity leave, are so valuable to society that they should be provided as a service by the government and/or guaranteed by law to be provided by employers.
There is an unfortunate distinction between those other professions - STEM fields rarely pay even close to what consulting, law and medicine pay. Peers of equivalent talent in those 3 professions are generally making double to triple (if not more) by the time STEM graduates reach the same moment in their personal lives. And that 'moment' is generally delayed in STEM compared to those professions; you start generating your first real paycheck in STEM, with some stability in your career path at your early-mid thirties. Even medicine (which is longer than consulting & law), stability can be reached before that.
> STEM fields rarely pay even close to what consulting, law and medicine pay. Peers of equivalent talent in those 3 professions are generally making double to triple (if not more) by the time STEM graduates reach the same moment in their personal lives.
These statements couldn't be further from the truth. You don't need to hang out on HN for long to figure out that FAANG SWEs comfortably make upwards of 400k in their late 20s[1]. Barring FB and perhaps Netflix, most tech companies tend to have fantastic work-life-balance if you prefer to take it easy. L5s at Google make what Partners at McKinsey make. If you normalize by the number of hours worked, SWEs make a hell of a lot more than their peers in consulting (management or the Big4) and about the same as the median cardiologist with maybe 20% of the effort.
SWE at FAANG is only a minor, frankly irrelevant, portion of STEM. Most people in STEM cannot transition to being a FAANG SWE. In fact, the OP article of this thread is about progression in an academic career, which doesn't pay well unless you become a full professor at a research uni. First time you break low 6 figures in this career is when you become assistant prof in early/mid 30s.
And of the SWEs at FAANG, the ones making $400k in their 20s are yet another tiny slice. So we are comparing a tiny slice of a tiny slice of STEM professionals.
> In fact, the OP article of this thread is about progression in an academic career, which doesn't pay well unless you become a full professor at a research uni. First time you break low 6 figures in this career is when you become assistant prof in early/mid 30s.
Is an assistant professor different from a "full professor" in your usage here? I'm not sure how you define "paying well", but low six figures is significantly above average in the US (which is where I assume you're talking about, but also most likely above average pretty much everywhere else too).
Doctors are also a tiny slice of medicine. Nurses make a fraction of what doctors make, and other roles like Clinical Laboratory Technologist and Radiology Technician that make healthcare possible make even less.
Law exhibits a bimodal distribution in compensation as well. Paralegals make even less than poorly compensated lawyers.
Also, the super well compensated doctors are a small slice of doctors overall. Most doctors end up doing family practice, which isn't super lucrative. Once you factor in the hundreds of thousands in loans, there are many non-doctor career paths that have better outcomes than that.
I think your example of a biologist is a bit disingenuous. By 27 they've probably just wrapped up their PhD and were making a paltry stipend to work in a professor's research lab. If they're inclined to continue working for academia then it's not surprising that they won't break past 6 figures. You could just as easily pick people from different fields that are pursuing a career in academia and find that professors at the top-tier make a fraction of what their students make at top-tier companies.
I also think the remark about "stability" was hand wavy. What is it about non-SWE STEM roles that make them so unstable compared to consulting or law?
> By 27 they've probably just wrapped up their PhD and were making a paltry stipend to work in a professor's research lab
followed by 2-4 years at a postdoc, asked for in every job application for a 'biologist II' which has an average salary of ~77k (per indeed). This is for industry, not academia.
So how am I am misrepresenting the fact that being a biologist takes over 7+ years of being grossly underpaid relative to a SWE at FAANG to wind up being a little less grossly underpaid than a SWE at FAANG?
Forgive me for I live in a bubble so I don't know a great deal about why someone would spend that many years in school to land a 77k job. I also don't know much about compensation structure (ex: is comp == salary or are there other components?)
I do know a couple of friends that work at Genentech who comfortably pull in > 200k so there's that.
> Forgive me for I live in a bubble so I don't know a great about why someone would spend that many years in school to land a 77k job. I also don't know much about compensation structure (ex: is comp == salary or are there other components?)
comp pretty much == salary (plus benefits, like insurance, 4% 401k match, maybe small bonuses). My take is that the low salaries is primarily due to the appeal of the work - kids grow up wanting to be biologists, (chemists, physicists) so there is a labor oversupply. A strong secondary contributor is overhead - a scientist can easily cost 2x salary in overhead for equipment and reagents (very field dependent).
To your point it is possible make decent money in big pharma, but they are essentially the FAANG of the bio/chemistry world and still come with 7y postgrad prereqs.
to your last point, top companies hire before PhDs even defend all the time. In fact it's nice when that happens because then you can go to your committee with the job offer and they will pass you without too much fuss or revisions, sometimes a year early. Post docs are pretty optional in the industry these days, and the prerequisites on job applications for phd science positions are going to be a bit fast and loose.
The trick is to angle your skillset to the industry skill set, network network network, even collaborations with the company directly can happen when you are a grad student. When you show up to the interview and are recommended by the people you networked with and understand their technology since you've been all over it in grad school and have some papers published to prove it, suddenly you are the top candidate in the pile. It's not impossible to do this if you angle your grad career from the start, and go to a school in an area with a lot of these companies and other good research schools nearby.
There's also less room to move. It's much harder for someone whose been doing PCR for the past 6 years to go "You know what, screw this..." than there is for someone whose been working on the analysis of large datasets in say, physics.
And, perceptional-wise, leaving for industry is often seen as a failure.
People doing PCR for 6 years are probably generating a pretty big dataset for analysis...
Bioinformatics is an entire field. The lines between molecular biology, genetics, physics, chemistry, statistics, and computer science are getting very blurry these days. Plenty of bio phds get hired for data scientist roles in industry.
No one is going to knock you for leaving for industry these days. Anyone who is a big deal enough in academia to have that kind of ego is already going to have started a company or three themselves on the side.
And as someone who works in the field, there's definitely a stigma against students not aiming for PI positions at R1 institutions. There's some practical reasons for that - students who go into industry are less useful for "empire building", but it's also cultural.
I'm lucky enough to be in a field where this isn't as true, but I'm faculty in a multidisciplinary center, and the closer you get to pure biology, the worse it gets.
There might be a stigma in certain places that are becoming isolated from the field, but I would be flabbergasted to hear of any stigma in biology existing on the west or east costs where biotech is, where professors are regularly collaborating directly with biotech companies, where professors are regularly founding their own biotech startups, where graduate programs are offering internship opportunites with private companies, where graduate programs are regularly hosting symposiums with industry representatives, and where departments regularly see the majority of their graduating classes go into industry rather than academia. I think this worldview is two decades out of date.
Really? You don't understand why someone would want to become a PhD and make contributions driving a field forward? It's not something I want to do personally, but I find it odd that someone couldn't see _why_ someone would choose to do that. Additionally, positions in academia come with a great deal of prestige.
This is why I have a bit of an aneurysm whenever all of these wildly disparate things are lumped together under the umbrella of "STEM". Notably, we keep medicine in the acronym, but in almost all discussions, doctors and nurses and everything else that would fit under that heading are forked out already. - Edit: derp, it's Math, not medicine, but there's an indication of how brain-rotted I've gotten trying to follow this subject.
Each of them is it's own world with it's own context and it's own problems.
The article (and my experience) both deal with the "Science" part of STEM, and specifically in biology/biochemistry, and specifically in academia (professorships at universities in hard-science fields).
And defining those boundaries of discussion should be very much a starting point for any of these discussions.
What’s the median salary for STEM engineers versus medical doctors? FANG pays in the p90, but the vast majority of STEM make decent but unsurprising salaries, and that salary requires them to be in a handful of major cities.
As opposed to a physician, median salary almost double of a software engineer, and can live and work in much cheaper cities.
This is simply not true. I have friends and colleagues in all these categories and the tech workers on the coasts easily make the most money, especially if you balance for hours worked. The only exceptions are at the partner level, but the number of people who actually make it there is minuscule in comparison to the number of people who easily make it into 300k+ total comp roles in tech.
There is also the tech cycle. When is the last time you heard of a doctor suddenly losing 40% of their salary? Medicine is a licensed field with an artificially constrained supply. So is Law (to a lesser extent). Everything is cool in 1999, not so much in 2002.
> In law, some firms have been experimenting with a blurring of the boundaries between associate and partner, so that there's a middle level at which women can enter into motherhood without tanking their career chances.
Of counsel[1] isn’t an intermediate rank, it’s a recognition that you’re almost certain never to make partner but that you’re capable of working with close to zero supervision. Non-equity partners[2] are closer, given that in some firms at least they get both a voice and a vote on firm wide decisions.
In academia the equivalent to Of Counsel is probably either a post doc or a Visiting Assistant Professor, both of which are contingent positions, like being Of Counsel. The closest to non equity partner is tenure track teaching faculty, often called lecturers in the US, or maybe staff scientist, which is more or less being a post doc with job security.
These positions already exist but post docs, adjunct faculty and grad students are cheaper, so they’re comparatively rare.
In law firms, partners are primarily those senior lawyers who are responsible for generating the firm's revenue. The standards for equity partnership vary from firm to firm. Many law firms have a "two-tiered" partnership structure, in which some partners are designated as "salaried partners" or "non-equity" partners, and are allowed to use the "partner" title but do not share in profits. This position is often given to lawyers on track to become equity partners so that they can more easily generate business; it is typically a "probationary" status for associates (or former equity partners, who do not generate enough revenue to maintain equity partner status). The distinction between equity and non-equity partners is often internal to the firm and not disclosed to clients, although a typical equity partner could be compensated three times as much as a non-equity partner billing at the same hourly rate.
"I'm wondering if either of those models is transferable to STEM academia. Are there particular sub-disciplines where professional success and sane hours might be more compatible? Similarly, are there tenure-track or quasi-tenure track job titles that split the difference in tolerable ways?
I haven't researched these well enough to have clear answers. But it's worth discussing."
One of the easiest, and most important things, academia could do is make pausing tenure clocks have both less stigma and be easier to do. Like, automatically opt-in for both men and women.
Unfortunately, it's much harder to pause grants, which is its own problem.
I think careers in IT/software can have exactly the same issues of work/life balance, though it's very dependent on which industry and company you work in.
For an extreme example, just look at the AAA games industry.
Having said that, I think you could say the same about most industries unfortunately. I don't know if it's just because that's what competition forces us into, but I would guess that is a big part of it.
I think the author buried the lede here. My biggest takeaway from the article is that you'd have to be an absolute sucker to work in academia given how poorly you'll be treated. Each person that puts up with this only makes the problem worse, giving at least tacit approval to the status quo. If folks were to start opting out of academia in larger numbers for jobs in private industry, schools would be forced to improve working conditions.
Unlike lower-skilled workers, the kind of person who even has the opportunity to get a PhD is also likely to have other good opportunities should they choose to take them. Academics should improve their lot and that of others by voting with their feet.
>My biggest takeaway from the article is that you'd have to be an absolute sucker to work in academia given how poorly you'll be treated.
Every now and then I get an overwhelming sense of guilt when I talk to/think about my friends who are engaged in academia or pursuing advanced degrees (I'm 28, for reference).
The crazy workloads they have, the insane restrictions on how they can do their jobs, and the cut-throat nature of the industry means that they're working so much harder than I am, and are either doing their part to advance the grand sum of human knowledge, or are training to literally save peoples lives...and I'm sitting here, a college drop out, getting paid _way_ more than they're making, in an industry where I will never have any fears about job security, playing with networking equipment and writing about it.
I worked in a company for a while that hired lots of people out of academia. The fascinating thing was that despite the vast majority of candidates being smart and incredibly well qualified, a massive chunk of them had been so tuned to the stupid hoops you have to jump through for academia that they were near worthless in industry. Whether that was the complete inability to treat other people as equals, or just completely unable to apply themselves to actually build something that could ship. Academia can be a real trap.
If I had a dollar for every time someone mentioned prestige for why we should be doing something I'd have had enough to fund one of those dumb projects.
From what I can see, tenured professor at an elite school is a pretty good gig. But it's a really tough gig to land, may not pay very well compared to private industry (assuming it's in a well-compensated field), and may force their partner to live somewhere the other employment opportunities aren't great because your own job mobility is likely pretty limited.
Feels almost like the minor league / major league situation in professional sports. Minor league baseball players are generally not paid a living wage, and major league players start around half a million dollars a year. Obviously many players are doing everything they can to reach that dream job (even if most fail).
That idea of being a comfortable tenured professor at a great school is a dream for many. And obviously, many don't make it, lot of folks are going to just drift around as adjunct professors, scraping by, taking second jobs. But as long as SOMEONE is getting to be a full professor at Stanford, lots of people are going to think, "that could be me", and get exploited along the way.
Yeah. I forget what the term is but there are a number of occupations where's there's a big gap between the "lottery winners" and the hoi polloi.
Arguably even the winners in academia don't make that much in terms of money but they're still viewed as successful professionals, have a decent lifestyle, and do OK--especially if they're not in the highest cost areas.
I had the opportunity to work with a dozen or so phds as an undergraduate, both in academia and in the industry, and what I saw was that the vast majority of them were not happy with their careers. Even the ones who were gainfully employed in the narrow field of study they specialized in. It definitely influenced me to skip the phd and go a different route.
Working longer/harder doesn’t mean more efficiently. And the idea of the visionary idealist scientist upon whom humanity rests is a romantic idea from the past.
The only folks over 45 I've met who cry ageism are those whose skills stopped growing 10 years prior, yet they continued to demand wage increases year over year. The worst offenders were "QA Professionals," who would get paid $200k to write a JIRA claiming that a page wouldn't load because the favicon 404'd.
> My biggest takeaway from the article is that you'd have to be an absolute sucker to work in academia
The first thing I thought as well. When you read all these horror stories about burned out phd students, why is anyone doing this?
If a woman in STEM wants to combine family and work (or a man or anyone else really) there are many jobs in the industry that are actually relatively 9-5, and pay really well.
I don't understand academia at all. It sounds like a combination of paperwork, flying to conferences, endless networking, publishing papers for publishing's sake. It's like a Kafka novel.
You can also be working on stuff that has no impact whatsoever. There are a lot of physics PHDs working in cosmology trying to figure what's going on on the other side of the universe. Sure they are doing some interesting engineering setting up experiments, but if they find the answer to their scientific question they have to find something new to research and get grants for which is a big hassle.
I think the joy of pure research is that you only have to engage in occasional bullshit academic politics and otherwise have a completely pure existence in a monastery of scientific spiritual ideological purity of sorts. This is probably why some of the most sought after jobs under communism were non-political professorships at Universities, like being a math professor. Many of the post-soviet oligarchs were professors at universities during the soviet union times.
Being a professor in USSR gave one not only a rather high state-mandated salary, but also an opportunity to be bribed for passing an exam when a student would otherwise flunk it.
> I don't understand academia at all. It sounds like a combination of paperwork, flying to conferences, endless networking, publishing papers for publishing's sake. It's like a Kafka novel.
As an academic, your description is rather accurate regarding the research part of academia (you left out the teaching).
Some of us put up with all that because we love the science, the sense of discovery, of doing what no one has done before, advancing human knowledge, the feeling of working for public good and not for some profit-driven corporation. Flexible hours is also a plus (although also a double-edged sword).
(I confess I do like the "flying to conferences" part as well, though).
> If folks were to start opting out of academia in larger numbers for jobs in private industry, schools would be forced to improve working conditions.
This is exactly what is happening! (Well, the leaving, not the improving).
The argument is that men are more willing to put up with the particular nature of the poor working conditions in academia, hence women disproportionately leave.
I have no question why a reasonable person, woman or not, might stay away from academia.
I wonder why there are few women in engineering, where the conditions and the pay are so much better. I've seen a number of women in IT industry, from junior developers to CTOs, and most of them were brilliant and sharp. But they are still a minority in the field. This puzzles me.
Like you almost all women I've seen in tech are brilliant. The best explanation I have for the imbalance is lack of interest on average. Having a son, we could see the difference even from around age 1. Boys really are drawn to things that move while girls seem to react more to social interactions. We really tried not to influence e.g. with the choice of toys. I find it no surprise that 20 years later the same boys fill up IT and engineering while the girls are working in HR and corporate communication. There's always outliers, and I we need to take care of them especially because their contributions can be very valuable (on both sides), but I think trying to evening out the gender gap in all jobs is like chasing an invisible dragon.
Mine ended when I realized professors were graduating more than 1 PhD student apiece on average, and that I’d almost certainly need to wait for someone to die before I got a job. (Ok, die or retire, but profs don’t just retire at 65.)
At my work (state University), we hire at least 4 faculty a year, graduate between 15 and 20 PhDs a year, and have a policy to not directly hire and of our own PhDs into faculty positions right after graduation. They need to first work at another institution as faculty or lecture. We have at 3 faculty which completed their PhD in our program. I think we have around 40 faculty.
In the UK at least, there has been a huge exodus from academia, but it’s not really visible. Great post docs rarely stay, because either they’re enticed elsewhere by better wages and no nonsense, or they’re pushed out by awful treatment.
But there are plenty of other people willing to take their place, so the only consequence is that research standards drop, which is something most of society will only notice over the very long term.
So I disagree with the idea that individuals leaving will somehow fix the problem. The real solution is to change the terrible culture imposed on academic by the people at the very top. Turning it into a business espousing KPI driven nonsense rather than a vocation. This culture began in the USA and is now widespread in the UK, and it has destroyed goodwill and IMO resulted in dramatic drops in teaching and research standards.
The solution is to scrap REF, restore direct government funding, rebalance funding from grants to departmental funds, reverse the centralisation of administration and the lop-sided admin-academic balance, remove admin workload from academics, provide proper teaching and research career tracks, and cut the number of students attending university.
This is a problem that can only be solved with intelligent thought at the top, not by people acting individually. Market forces are the problem in academia, not the solution.
Suppose I want to research a $topic, and get recognition for my research. As a recent graduate or soon-to-graduate undergrad student the traditional path to "doing research for the public good of the mankind and personal glory as a scientist" in academia is much more salient and easy to take than in private firms.
Sure, I maybe have the mental faculties to become an engineer. Do I want do so, however? If I go to work in a firm, I need to do what the owner of the firm wants to in exchange for the monetary and other rewards. In academia, you write grant applications and research proposals for something you want to do (or to be practical, something you and you advisor agree on, but usually the opportunities are much larger than "client wants a webshop").
And what I would be doing at a $firm? Building more applications and other products and optimized adverts of products for other people, when majority of my free time I try to avoid unnecessary apps, adverts and consumption of useless products that waste natural resources of our planet for no good reason at all?
Sure, there are some companies who offer opportunities at doing basic research, but a) getting into those jobs you need to be exceptionally exceptional (getting into a PhD program, mere "exceptional" is enough), and b) would I really, really want to work there? I am reasonably sure that I have less ethical dilemmas if I am funded by a government or foundation to do research at a public university than getting a paycheck from $big_name_company, to produce value for $big_name_company.
You should also add to this that increasingly, large tech companies have access to much better data for nearly any area that is interesting for research.
Further, companies can go from research to product that ostensibly makes a difference at scale with a speed that absolutely no University could.
I'm really not seeing any reason to stay in academia whatsoever if you want to do the most exciting applied research today. Maybe if you want to do basic science or something more obscure where the applications are very far off.
I would seriously quibble with the anarchic independence you describe in #3 because (depending on the field certainly) you need to fund that work with grants and postdocs etc... Do you might feel like you can but it's generally largely dependent on convincing other groups to fund that work.
I'll Grant that The above doesn't really apply to pure math or philosophy
I'll admit that I managed to find a position with an abnormal degree of freedom in a fairly applied field (epidemiology) but I don't think that's any more atypical than people with particularly nice jobs in the private sector.
But right now, I'm working on projects in emerging infectious diseases, healthcare associated infections, some philosophy of science stuff, some algorithmic work in network science, and something that can best be described as "digital humanities".
I have a friend who’s a physicist-turned machine learning researcher working on health issues. I asked him about why he decided to say an academic researcher instead of going to the industry where (to me) there’s clearly more data. I was told that academic institutions tend to land better partnerships that companies don’t tend to get maybe due to privacy concerns.
I think your friend's impression is pretty accurate.
Industry in healthcare, especially the tech industry, has a long road of trust building ahead of it.
I think we're also a little jaded. We've been talking about how big, real-time data streams like pharmacy sales data, social media, etc. are going to change the game for disease forecasting since I was an undergrad. We're still not even close.
For researchers at University of Toronto as well as within Google, neither (probably) wants to directly work on a product.
However both would certainly (At least in my experience) like their work to impact humanity on a wider scale then simply the number of citations their paper has. Again primarily thinking about applied researchers here.
So in that sense, both researchers are insulated from the producing of something business related based on their research. However one of them has a significantly greater chance of their research being used to actually affect people at large scale in their lifetime.
The problem would be that they would no longer be academics.
For a lot of people who head down that path, they consider it more of a vocation than a job. It may well be a good thing for all the next folks who consider the path, but it choosing that would come at a large personal cost for them.
There's a big tendency to ignore the price at which career success is sold. You have to give up more fulfilling and creative work, perhaps, or spend long hours in front of a screen on difficult yet boring tasks, or put in years and years of all-encompassing work in various qualification gauntlets. Not having paid the price for fame in academic STEM, I have no jealousy of the success these people have found - they have their fame, I have my free time.
I think a big issue in the study of gender differences in work is that it is much easier to quantify the salary earned than the price one must pay in order to be successful in the field. About the best you can do is compare sub-populations that have paid roughly the same price - eg, urban childless single college-educated adults. At that point, studies generally show an insignificant gender difference in wages and success.
So, why is there a gendered component to participation in high-pay/high-sacrifice fields? I've not seen any sort of hard data, so I'd have to speculate. If you made me single out a candidate for investigation, I'd have to look into the how the heterosexual dating market will asymmetrically treat career success. People respond to incentives, and dating success is one hell of an incentive.
Yeah, I'm super uninformed here, but single men's expectations of potential partners are totally the prime suspect here.
Anecdote: My uncle explicitly stated on his dating profile that he was looking for women with masters degrees who were willing to stay at home. I have no idea why he wanted that or why my dad's sister agreed, but this kind of demand is oddly common.
> single men's expectations of potential partners are totally the prime suspect here.
It's both genders; women do not lack agency in the dating market. It'd be as fair to make "my partner should be willing to give up their career to start a family" as the default and blame the dynamic on women - after all, they prefer men who are unwilling to compromise in the pursuit of their career.
I try to avoid either, and just mention that this axis has a gendered component in terms of both what people do and desire.
One thing that she touched on that I've thought a lot about recently is the age at which we have kids. My father passed away a couple of weeks ago, and I compare him to his brother. My uncle had his first kid 10 years younger than my dad, and he ended up with the fourth one being older than me. He's got 10 grandchildren, the oldest of which is an adult now. My dad's grandchildren will never know him in any real way.
Since the funeral I've thought about this a lot. Our later-life relationships will be affected by the age at which we had kids. I'm sure this is in the minds of a lot of people in this economic age. There's a lot of "investing in your career" where the equation doesn't account for this.
I wish we could have an economy where this was easier. Say you could have your kids early, in your 20s, yet still progress your career. Perhaps pay for it with working to an older age, which should be possible with some improved health outcomes. Along with a flexible education system that allowed you come in and out. And perhaps incentives for firms to let people in and out, instead of the constant career grind that requires people to constantly push. Some of the finance and legal tracks seem to be for people who are expected to die at 45, like some weird victorian dystopia.
I think about this a lot as well. My wife and I decided to have our first child at 30, which is fairly early compared to our peers. Economically it would have been better to wait, we’ve each had career opportunities we couldn’t take advantage of because of having children, and if somehow we could have waited until 40 I think we would have had an easier time economically.
But, physically and emotionally, I wish we could have had kids at 22 or so. Of course we hadn’t even met so this is pure wishful thinking. But still. Raising a family is a real joy, but it’s also very physically demanding (even for men), and the younger you are the easier the physical aspect is. Also, we know a small number of people who had children very young, and now in their 40s their children are grown. It’s a really fascinating relationship, with somewhat more ability to relate to each other and a really cool ability to live life together. Especially when this is across generations, it’s amazing to have an extended family with three generations not just alive but still well.
I have no idea how society could ever adjust to make something like that work out - I think it might be easier to “fix fertility” to give more people the option of starting a family in their 40s. But still, I wonder about it often.
Nah economy is just one part of the puzzle, society has moved on from the "you need to have kids to live a full life" mentality too. Good luck finding an interesting career driven woman who wants kids at 20 something.
Also, imo- for the most part kids degrade life experience significantly before they improve it, often in the part of your lifespan that you can actually enjoy life the most. Are you going to be taking risks and travelling to far flung countries in your 40-50s? most probably not by choice.
Hanging out with my kids at 40 isn't gonna happen even if i had chosen to have kids. Kids nowadays will be in school/tutoring programs/hanging out on social media not have time for me as a father to teach them outdated cultural mores(that they will ignore anyways just like i did).
It is possible. I myself just turned 26 and my wife and I have our third coming in July. Having kids is a sacrifice, one of the greatest sacrifices one can make.
I know many other young families. While I am a well-paid software engineer most of my young family friends are middle/high school teachers.
> I wish we could have an economy where this was easier. Say you could have your kids early, in your 20s, yet still progress your career. Perhaps pay for it with working to an older age
And who will pick up for missed work, absence, and economical expenses of such a model?
I think it's still a form of sexism to assume women are the ones who need to care for a child. That's something that very few diversity-in-STEM folks are really thinking about.
Many years ago an ex-girlfriend, who works in STEM academia (and is otherwise a liberal, progressive feminist), expressed concerns similar to the author about having kids. When I brought up that it wasn't written in stone that she would need to be the primary caregiver, she said she'd never even thought of the alternative!
(Anne-Marie Slaughter touched on this in a 2012 Atlantic article called "Why Women Still Can't Have It All" for anyone who's interested.)
It is almost never mentioned but most men won't respect other men who are stay at home parent. So there is also an expectation on the man to be the bread winner.
Also many women tend not to want men who earn less then them:
>> It is almost never mentioned but most men won't respect other men who are stay at home parent. So there is also an expectation on the man to be the bread winner.
That too, is sexism, of course. Sexism also harms men.
I don't agree it is sexism. It is the simple fact that our species is sexually dimorphic. This guarantees that there will be asymmetry between the genders regardless of the social engineering that is attempted.
There is about 4 billion years of evolution and the thinking that it can be socially engineered away is a folly.
> Sexism also harms men.
Yes it does. But this is not one of those circumstances. However that is a completely different conversation.
How is it not one of those circumstances? Men find it extremely difficult to make a career as a nursery teacher, for example, because nursery schools and parents of young children don't trust men as a nurturing caregiver. It's a clear cut example of how a sexist view of men - biologically inspired or otherwise - is harmful to men.
That isn't sexism. There is a far higher likelihood that a sex offender is a man rather than a woman. While unfair it isn't unfounded fear and parents are naturally protective of their children.
That doesn't justify that sort of systematic pressure. An African American is much more likely to be a [edit: convicted] murderer than a white American, but that doesn't make it ok to cross the road whenever you see one.
> That doesn't justify that sort of systematic pressure.
If I were a parent I would be trying to mitigate the risk to my child. As I previously stated it is unfair but not unfounded.
It cannot be sexism if it is based in fact.
> An African American is much more likely to be a murderer than a white American, but that doesn't make it ok to cross the road whenever you see one.
* I don't live in the US, I am from the UK. The term African American doesn't really mean much here.
* If there was a young guy dressed in sports gear and appeared to be somewhat of a lout, no matter what the colour of his skin I would cross the road.
It is unfair. Sure. But when I was a younger man (I am almost 40 now), I used to be followed about and stopped by police and security because I was simple 1) Male 2) Under 25. People are simply mitigating the amount of risk to themselves, business and family.
The statistic for how likely a sex offender is to be male strikes me as unjustified here in three ways.
Firstly, I doubt many parents actually do do their research on this and use such a statistic to inform their decision. More likely it will be based on gut feeling.
Secondly, the probabilities are the wrong way round. More relevant how likely a given man is to be a sex offender, vs the likelihood for a given woman. If both probabilities are very tiny then despite their relative magnitudes there are other things to worry about.
Thirdly, "sex offender" is an extremely broad term and the great majority of those offenses would not have involved nursery age children.
Oh, give me a break please. You explicitly brought up young, shadily-dressed men on the street as a subpoint in the context of talking about black people.
No you are accusing me of racism when I made no comment about race what-so-ever. This "well you are secretly talking about black men" is you inserting your own prejudices and assumptions into something I've never said.
This maybe be an American thing. I am not from the US, I've never been to the US so I don't know. There are plenty of groups of yobs in the UK in poorer areas. Outside of London and the big cities these tend to be white. In my own home town (which is 99% white) there are 4 or 5 problem areas where you don't walk through at night because you get surrounded by youths. It happened to me at least once or twice when I was in my 20s and I only got left alone because one of the guys knew my brother.
I get so bored of this "well you secretly meant something else because I want to label you a bad person".
> Of the 13,455 cases from last year in which the FBI listed a victim's racial information, 7,039 victims – or 52.3 percent – were black. That compares with 5,854 cases – or 43.5 percent – in which the victim was white, an increase of about 8 percent from last year.
> It's a disparity that becomes more pronounced in the context of population, as 2015 Census estimates suggest that whites account for 77.1 percent of the overall U.S. population of roughly 321 million, while blacks comprise 13.3 percent.
It isn't my assertion. The crime statistics in both the UK and the USA back this up. It is something like 96% of all prosecutions of sexual assault are men.
EDIT: In fact it is higher at least in the UK
> In 2011, males accounted for the vast majority of prosecutions for sexual offences
(98.2 per cent).
Bad take! There's no distinction between "biology" and "social engineering". Our biology underpins us having these discussions. Our biology underpins our society. Our biology underpins our thinking that things can be better. Our biology encourages us to improve our own quality of life and that of others in ever larger social groups. Everything we do is true to our biology.
Woman give birth, men cannot breastfeed. That are indeed biology. Kids being picked up from school predominately by woman is a social arrangement, the kind we hopefully at least try to change if we consider there to be better options.
But yes, many kinds of social arrangements come up naturally and woman taking care of house and kids seems to be one of them. Another one is "the powerful rule over the weak"... something we nowadays generally think should be kept in check to the benefit of society and thus spend effort doing so. But spending effort to keep pre-defined gender roles in check must be somehow bad?
> Kids being picked up from school predominately by woman is a social arrangement, the kind we hopefully at least try to change if we consider there to be better options.
Define "Better". Why should we be trying to change it? Why should we be meddling with other people's lives? People aren't being harmed here.
> But spending effort to keep pre-defined gender roles in check must be somehow bad?
Both men and women at least in the western world enjoy the same rights and discrimination by gender is not only frowned upon but can be brought before a court. I seems to me that they are already kept in check.
Well, the author is saying that she is considering giving up her career in reearch which she very much wants to pursue to have children because she can't find a way to reconcile the two.
That is clearly harmful and if it is affecting women at a large scale as the author suggests then it is definitely something that should be corrected.
> Well, the author is saying that she is considering giving up her career in reearch which she very much wants to pursue to have children because she can't find a way to reconcile the two.
I disagree. Unfortunately you have to make decisions in life on what you want to prioritise. You can't have your cake and eat it.
Also I don't consider having to make a choice harmful. Being harmed mean things like being assaulted, having your house robbed, being abused by your spouse. What it does not mean is coming to realisation that you may have to make a choice between family and career.
You know what does allow you to have both, wealth.
Not at all. I should have expected such a reply though tbh.
Many men work long hours and miss out on their family time. Also men typically work more dangerous jobs and are more likely to die on the job. They are also more less likely to win custody in separation. Men are more likely to commit suicide. Nobody has it easy and your sort of glib remark that ignores all the issues men currently face isn't helpful.
> I seems to me that they are already kept in check.
To a degree, yes. But are you really trying to pretend it's already perfect?
Though you seem to not believe in systemic injustice, so I doubt we will be able to find a shared consensus.
Custody is a more widely known example were us men fight an uphill battle. Obviously not everyone is unsatisfied with societies default roles, but I'd certainly consider this a harm, if I ever end up in such a situation.
Again, it could be worse. And I'm not trying to meddle in your life. If you and your SO want to live by traditional roles, that's great. But I don't want those thrust on (and thus being meddled with) my life. And I don't want to live in a society that doesn't even try to improve anymore.
> To a degree, yes. But are you really trying to pretend it's already perfect?
Perfect is the enemy of Good.
> Again, it could be worse. And I'm not trying to meddle in your life. If you and your SO want to live by traditional roles, that's great. But I don't want those thrust on (and thus being meddled with) my life. And I don't want to live in a society that doesn't even try to improve anymore.
Everyone is trying to pin an opinion to me here because I am just questioning the underlying assumptions. I don't really have one other than "You can't have it all" unless you are extremely wealthy or extremely gifted.
> But I don't want those thrust on (and thus being meddled with) my life. And I don't want to live in a society that doesn't even try to improve anymore.
Neither do I. However there will never be a utopia. I find it actually pretty immature to think that you can make everything perfect, there are trade offs to everything.
Gender norms are partly genetic. Historically women were either breastfeeding or late-stage pregnant their entire adult lives and so to survive they needed men to work, so that is what our gender norms reflect. For example, men who doesn't take care of their women are still seen as scum. Not because there is any need for that any longer, but because our genes tells us that such men are trash and should be shunned. So you wont find any society which doesn't pressure men to become a provider and take care of women.
Some norms are generic indeed like breastfeeding, some are not like "being seen as scum". Do not undervalue the power of cultural norms, they shape us social apes as importantly as genes.
Indeed, it's been said (by paleontologists and ethnologists alike) that for humans (a social ape with complex language) cultural evolution have been more influencial than generic evolution.
So bad we learn so much about genetics at school and comparatively so little about sociology and/or primatology.
You're suggesting we should arrange society a specific way because of some connection to "biology". I am saying that the arrangements you seem to be for are no more rooted in biology than the arrangements you seem to be against.
You called the expectation of men to be breadwinners a natural consequence of sexual dimorphism, and said it was folly to "engineer" it away. That is a statement about how you think society should be arranged and why.
Also, if you believe _all_ arrangements of society will eventually fall, then wouldn't that make any arrangement acceptable to you? Including the one you were dismissing?
> You called the expectation of men to be breadwinners a natural consequence of sexual dimorphism, and said it was folly to "engineer" it away. That is a statement about how you think society should be arranged and why.
No it isn't. It is a statement of what I believe to be the truth. All the evidence and arguments around the topic I have seen and heard seem to lead in that direction. If you disagree with that conclusion that is fine.
However it doesn't mean that I believe that things should arranged in such a manner.
> Also, if you believe _all_ arrangements of society will eventually fall, then wouldn't that make any arrangement acceptable to you? Including the one you were dismissing?
I don't know. I wasn't saying anything about that. I was simply disagree that it is sexism. I don't buy into this the notion of "unconscious sexism".
The competitive aspect? Males in plenty of species compete for status and low status males are getting chased away from the pack, so evidently genes are expressive enough to encode gender norms.
You probably believe that your views about genders is coming from observations of "males in plenty of species", but have you considered that maybe your views about "plenty of species" could come from your views on genders?
How is competition between males a consequence of sexual dimorphism?
Note that males in species with low sexual dimorphism compete for mates as fiercely as males in species with high sexual dimorphism.
Also note that the human species has very low sexual dimorphism relative to other species. E.g. our females are not many times the size of males, as they are in Black Widow spiders, our males don't have different colours of body coverage, like many species of birds do, etc etc. And of course many humans can easily pass for the other sex by changing their hair-style and clothing as evidenced by numerous cases in history where females passed as males by cutting their hair short and wearing pantaloons etc.
It isn't seen as "real" work by other men. Men have been the bread winners for almost all of human history and thus other men don't think they are doing their bit.
The flip side of the coin is that women overwhelmingly prefer higher-paid, more successful, higher-status, equally-or-more-educated men as partners. Then the choice of who should stay at home is pretty obvious (or no choice but necessity brought to you by brutal economic reality).
I became the primary care giver for my daughter for a number of years (My wife died - some years ago). My experience is that there is no flexibility in IT jobs - if you want to work not 9-5 5 days a week then tough luck, when you have a kid to look after, pick up from after school etc this just isn't possible.
I envied doctors at the time, they could just name their hours, some other professions can - but not STEM fields for some reason. I'd say the reason is sexism - its a bunch of guys who are married to women who look after the children, so flexibility is not built in to the system.
That does not sounds like IT jobs, it sounds like most jobs. In every sector, I'm sure you can find employers who are more flexible than others. I work at a software company and there are single parents leaving early or coming in late or both due to raising their kids. Consider finding a better employer.
Yes, I used to say that before I experienced it - but the system is built around workers that will work long continuous hours - you have to beg for the exception, and you take a pay hit - forget any thoughts of promotion - the glass ceiling women complain about. The attitude is oh yes we're being generous by letting you leave early - it shouldn't be that way, work should be planned around life.
While the plural of anecdote is not data, my director of engineering started as an individual contributor on my team. As a single mom, she has been promoted multiple times. She works two days from home and leaves early to beat traffic so she can do kid stuff. She is also very good at each role she has had.
Thats great it may be changing - my story was about 10 - 15 years ago now. I was sharing my experience, and I still see it everywhere. I would imagine that it takes extreme time management for her to achieve this, which is great, and kudos to her but this is definitely the exception. I have known people that can do this, they usually have very impressive Filofaxes with things scheduled to the minute in my experience. While there are people who can do this, and who want to - they are the minority.
I was thinking more along the lines of shared half time jobs, or 3 or 4 day a week jobs, jobs that allow women (or men) to work, look after their kids without becoming automatons. They exist in medicine, in law, in accounting, I've known a number of doctors that do 4 hour days in the office, and a bit at home. The only other choice I've seen is cafe jobs, or minor admin jobs. I don't see any reason that a lot of IT jobs couldn't be structured this way. As has been said many times - there's an IT shortage - of young white males who'll work cheap.
It's not six months, it's 9 months of pregnancy + ideally another year to recuperate, bond with the child and care for them.
Children don't magically become independent when they turn 1 either, they need a lot of investment from both parents in order to develop harmoniously.
Starting at this point one could wonder if fathers couldn't spend the same amount of effort as mothers. Technically they could, but by that point they probably aren't very good at some kinds of care and bonding, nor is the baby used to them in that way, unless they already did it during the first year.
It's also not something that is appreciated by others, except maybe the mother, if she can get over their clumsiness and has the patience to teach them what to do. All in all, there's no benefit for the family if the fathers instead of the mothers work part time or stay at hole.
You can work during a good deal of those nine months on pregnancy with only minor adjustments towards the second trimester.
> they need a lot of investment from both parents in order to develop harmoniously
Completely agreed, I said nothing against this except that the assumption that the mother had to be the one to stay home was odd.
> Technically they could, but by that point they probably aren't very good at some kinds of care and bonding
No citation here, this really just seems like repackaging assumptions as fact.
> It's also not something that is appreciated by others, except maybe the mother, if she can get over their clumsiness and has the patience to teach them what to do. All in all, there's no benefit for the family if the fathers instead of the mothers work part time or stay at hole.
I am positive many fathers and close family would beg to differ.
A woman would still need almost a year of special work consideration for the pregnancy, appointments, and post-birth recovery, even if they're not a primary care giver afterwards.
Your point (and there is truth to it) might work in industry, but in academia there is an expectation (as is mentioned in the OP) that you move around a lot.
Even if the husband takes care of the child, doing your masters in LA, your PhD in London, and a postdoc in Sidney, why on earth would anyone want to drag a child along with them?
I’d just like to echo some of the other comments; my wife is currently pregnant and it’s already clear that the burden is largely with her. I simply cannot get the vaccines and blood tests she needs, my hormones aren’t loosening all of my joints and I’m not exhausted most of the time. The challenge isn’t just who is going to look after them once they’re born.
Where is it becoming more acceptable? In Germany I read an article about a stay at home dad and their life sounded quite miserable. They couldn't even hang around with other mothers because their husbands became suspicious.
> I think it's still a form of sexism to assume women are the ones who need to care for a child.
Well, certainly nature is sexist in that only one of the sexes is able to gestate a child. Perhaps that will change someday. However, for now, (biological) women face a unique reproductive burden that is worth recognising and compensating for.
Biology aside, there is an important difference between assuming women must bear a disproportionate responsibility for childcare, and recognising that women do bear a disproportionate responsibility for childcare. The former is sexism, the latter is pragmatism. Saying "my house is on fire" doesn't make you pro-fire.
> That's something that very few diversity-in-STEM folks are really thinking about.
I'm not sure how that can be true. What you're describing, the assumption that men work and women stay home, is the foundational stereotype that sparked second-wave feminism. Unless the argument is that "diversity-in-STEM folks" aren't familiar with basic feminist ideas like gender roles?
In any event, here is some evidence that this is, in fact, something that people are really thinking about:
> The boundaries of the gender division of labour between productive and reproductive roles are gradually being crossed as women have started to enter formerly male-dominated areas of work and men have started to accept greater responsibility for domestic tasks, including child care. However, changes in women’s roles have been greater and much more rapid than changes in men’s roles.
> Take measures to increase the participation of men in caregiving both within households and in care professions, such as information and awareness campaigns, education and training, school curriculum, peer programmes and government policies to promote men’s participation and responsibilities as fathers and caregivers, and to encourage men and boys to become agents of change in promoting the human rights of women and in challenging gender stereotypes, in particular as they relate to men’s roles in parenting and infant development
> Labour market policies that offer men access to paternity and parental leave, especially when coupled with Scandinavian-style incentives which encourage men to actually take leave, are a critical signal that men have responsibility for their children. However, gender norms are strong and pervasive. [...] Through community-based organisations and educational sessions supported by social protection programmes, health clinics and schools, fathers should be actively integrated into childcare activities and helped to see themselves as central to their children’s development.
> The time-use and labour force data presented in this chapter make a compelling case for inequalities in unpaid care work and inequalities in the labour force being deeply interrelated. This not only confirms the “unpaid care work–paid care work” connection discussed in Chapter 1, but demonstrates also that no substantive progress can be made in achieving all dimensions of gender equality in the labour force before inequalities in unpaid work are tackled through their effective recognition, reduction and redistribution between women and men, as well as between families and the State.
> Rather than focusing only on increasing women’s workforce participation, it is also important to increase men’s participation in
caring responsibilities. In countries where family policies incentivise men to take caring roles, the impact is seen both in the rate of men accessing leave and in societal attitudes towards parenting.
Women are more likely to want to be the primary caregiver to something that actually came out of them. It's biological and there's nothing sexist about it.
It's partly biological but there are still many existing cultural attitudes that discourage husbands from performining traditionally "feminine" roles/tasks when caring for their kids.
The author's point about being over-critical of sexism is well-taken, but by reducing the sexist attitudes towards, for example, stay-at-home dads, it may be possible to help more women in STEM have fully productive careers.
"It's biology" has a long history of being used to justify everything from sexism to racism to genocide. Please provide a source for your claim (and for the implied claim that men do not have the same drive).
The source is looking at nature and all the species?
But that doesn't mean we, the smartest of them all, can't make some changes. Nature is also killing the weaker etc, things that we don't agree on as humans.
I disagree with the poster you are replying to, but I also disagree with what seem to be the implications of you comment -- that someone who prefers performing childcare over STEM work is a "lesser being"?
Maybe some people value spending time with their children and seeing them grow up more than chasing a stupid meaningless promotion at a mundane STEM job somewhere. If you have one child then you have only one chance in life to answer all their curious questions when they are 6 years old, only one chance in life to see them learn how to swim, etc. etc.
Life is about collecting wonderful memories with the people who you love, not about maintaining some idiotic excel spreadsheets in an open plan office. Maybe we should measure how many women are happy with their life rather than measure how many of them have a certain job title in a certain field. If we can maximise the former then who gives a shit about the latter.
>Maybe we should measure how many women are happy with their life rather than measure how many of them have a certain job title in a certain field. If we can maximise the former then who gives a shit about the latter.
Because if women don't participate in the industry, the men who do will continue building a world designed for men.
A lot of people would argue, imo correctly, that this is just a different form of sexism. The idea that progressing in your career means sacrificing work/life balance and more importantly family could absolutely be construed as the end result of a sexist mind state that doesn't value motherhood and family rearing to the degree it should. Obviously this affect men who want to be present and active participants in their children's lives as well, but as the author points out in many cases the inflection point at which ones career can really take off also overlaps with prime childbearing years.
There is a lot of pressure on woman to have families and in circumstances where their right and ability to both do that and progress in their careers isn't respected and protected we end up with the current system. One in which woman drop out of less flexible fields earlier, and even in them don't get promoted as fast as their male counterparts who don't need to bow out of the field for months at a time to have a child.
I think people have been hinting towards the point that it's generally maternity and not sexism that mostly creates the differences in career progression. Of course there was a time in history where sexism played a major role, but I think that in modern times this is mostly gone (although I know of recent cases).
We can take several actions to balance the books, but the important point I would like to ask is: Do we really want to stop/de-incentivize intelligent women from having children and having an active role on raising them?
Of course there are lots of compromises that can be made to balance the work-home life, but ultimately a decision does need to be made. Spending time with your children in those crucial fundamental years before pre-school is incredibly important and rewarding.
Time spent raising children should be shared in a way that the parents mutually agree on. Society has no legitimate interest in which gender does the work, as long as it's a mutually agreed to arrangement that both parties are equally happy with (or, probably more accurately, equally least-unsatisfied with).
> Society has no legitimate interest in which gender does the work
That's not really true. If all women chose to raise children instead of working, many products would have poorer design due to lack of diversity in ideas. And if 95% of women chose not to work, the 5% who want to work will have a harder time in many respects.
> And if 95% of women chose not to work, the 5% who want to work will have a harder time in many respects.
Why should the preferences of the 5% override the preferences of the 95%? A widespread norm of two incomes per household makes it much harder for women to be homemakers and full time mothers (since single income households have to compete with dual income households for positional goods like housing).
> We spend billions of dollars training women in STEM. By not making full use of their skills, if we look at only the american economy, we are wasting about $1.5 billion USD per year in economic benefits they would have produced if they stayed in STEM. So here’s a business proposal: ...
With all due respect, I don’t understand this call to action. Faculty position is basically a zero sum game. If more women end up as faculty, fewer men will. So, unless it costs more to train women than men, I doubt any “investment” would be saved (and that’s not the point of gender equality anyway).
Btw, this maternal wall idea is nothing new. I talked to my mother about gender inequality in hiring many years ago and she was quick to point this out (didn’t call it “maternal wall” though).
> With all due respect, I don’t understand this call to action. Faculty position is basically a zero sum game. If more women end up as faculty, fewer men will. So, unless it costs more to train women than men, I doubt any “investment” would be saved
The assumption is that aptitude for these positions is roughly the same between genders, so if there's a significant imbalance, society doesn't get the best people on the given set of seats.
The later calculation is along the lines of "society is pouring so much money both into these positions and into getting-women-into-STEM programs without reaching this supposed goal, so here's a counter-proposal to use this money more wisely"
> Btw, this maternal wall idea is nothing new.
She's quite upfront that she borrowed the term as well, so the idea can't be new. But it might be time to reiterate that point (as opposed to the popular reduction of the problem to sexism only), and since she did a good job (IMHO) to collect sources...
>The assumption is that aptitude for these positions is roughly the same between genders, so if there's a significant imbalance, society doesn't get the best people on the given set of seats.
An assumption which I have to point out is absolutely not verified. In fact, there are mountains of circumstantial, statistical, and biological evidence to the contrary - which policy makers in the west are increasingly ignoring as they ram gender parity down industry's and academia's collective throats, possibly to the detriment of the institutions and society at large.
It should also be mentioned that general statements or studies about the relative mathematical or technical abilities of men and women do not necessarily have any direct bearing on specific groups of men and women, like “people who have successfully completed a STEM PhD”. In fact, it’s quite plausible that any differences between men and women disappear once you only look at those people who have a PhD, even if those differences did exist in the general population (which is debatable, and even if it is true, it is not clear which factors are responsible for it). Since this article talks about gender disparity in the population of people who have a PhD, statements or studies which apply to the general population are not really all that relevant.
There's no biological evidence to the contrary, and the statistical, circumstantial evidence can all be convincingly explained by the kinds of structural issues raised in the OP.
Are you sure about that? Consider the following non-inclusive list:
1. Differences in hormonal expression and response affecting behavior and interests, e.g. testosterone and competitiveness (biological)
2. Measured differences in performance in different types of intelligence, e.g. spatial reasoning (statistical)
3. Consistent differences in achievement and specialization between men and women across almost all societies and all of human history (circumstantial)
The truth may be inconvenient but the idea that men and women are on average equally suited to all tasks doesn't really hold up to scrutiny.
If you are going to claim something as harmful as that, I want you to present clear evidence and peer reviewed studies to support your claims.
What you were suggesting is that men are better than women at STEM. Simplg saying men have more testosterone doesn't cut it as evidence. (Besides, competitiveness doesn't make you a better researcher or employee, and can even be harmful in a team).
I also need data for the number 2 in that list. At what are men better at than women by a significant ammount? And how does that thing relates to STEM?
And number 3 doesn't prove absolutely anything. Women were subjugated throught history and basically no opportunity to do anything. Even with their limited possibilities, you still have women like Hatshepsut, Ada Lovelace, Marie Currie, Sappho, Ann Lister, Hypathia of Alexandria, etc. And now that they are finally allowed in higher education they outperfom men in terms of degree gained. So there is clearly not something that holds them back from studying. If they have the ability to get a PhD, then they can also be good researchers. Simple as that.
If you are going to continue with this subtle sexist talk (implying men are better than women at STEM), I want clear examples. Thanks.
Start here [1]. This is delving dangerously close to flame war territory, so I probably won't respond further. But I'd like to point out that because of attitudes like this
>If you are going to continue with this subtle sexist talk (implying men are better than women at STEM)
You're probably unlikely to find too much on the subject - it's dangerous to academic careers to even propose research which could potentially justify any aspects of classical sexism. I'd just like to point out three things:
1. You're aware of the massive differences in physical capabilities, on average, between men and women, right? Which make men and women better suited, on average, to certain tasks? Why would sexually dimorphic specialization stop above the shoulders?
2. This isn't about inferiority, it's about specialization over thousands of generations. We see it in practically every other sexually reproducing species. The fact that humans have some ability to override instinct doesn't preclude gendered differences in average behavior.
3. This doesn't say anything about individual ability. We are talking about distribution statistics. What that means is that differences in average performance lead to different proportional representations in various fields. That doesn't justify discrimination or mistreatment, but it does suggest that, say, forcing gender parity in industry is unrealistic and potentially harmful.
I see nothing there but speculation about evolutionary history. It would be a shame if the potential STEM contributions of half of the human race were left fallow because of a half-assed evolutionary just-so story.
Regarding 1: Sexual dymorphism in hominids is not regarded as large compared to other close primates. I don't know where you take this opinion that physical abilities between males and women are "massive", but certainly not from actual measurements.
Here are some, conveniently in a single table, for those interested:
(Note:
We are homo sapiens, pan troglodites is our closest relative still alive the social ape chimpanzee, pongo pygmaeus is the solitary orangutan, gorilla gorilla is the small group living usual gorilla, others are extinct relatives)
Ok, I know I said I probably wouldn't comment further, but the extent to which people will bend over backwards to deny reality is, frankly, infuriating.
If you narrow your definition of sexual dimorphism to body mass, as in your link, then sure, the difference isn't huge relative to other primates. But even a cursory internet search produces results which absolutely, unequivocally demonstrate that physical performance of males across all measures of strength and endurance is in a league far above that of females, both trained and untrained. By some metrics, like grip strength, the bottom 10th percentile of males outperform the upper 90th percentile of females. Female records for 100m sprints are regularly beaten by teenage boys. Men are approximately 50% stronger on average in measures of both upper and lower body strength - and the gap widens enormously among elite athletes. Lung capacity, injury resistance, training response - I could go on, but I would say that this is more than enough to fit the definition of massive - particularly considering that in practical terms even trained females compare poorly to untrained males by most metrics.
Sorry, it may be an uncomfortable truth, but there is simply no ambiguity regarding the degree of physical specialization among males and females, and I've yet to come across any compelling evidence that the same specialization doesn't apply to the brain. In a truth seeking society, this should not be a controversial topic - the facts are absolutely undeniable, not to mention they almost universally match anecdotal experience.
I am not denying that men have a stronger body than women (endurance is more debatable though). Part of this difference is biological (as noted by the table cited in the previous message, which, as you noted rightly, indeed underestimate the difference by focusing only on body size while it is true that men's bodies have more muscle than women's), and part of it is cultural (men do more physical works, more sports, etc).
Physical specialization is obvious to everyone and an "uncomfortable truth" to no one.
What makes me uncomfortable is how some men use these largely obsolete differences inherited from a time where childbearing was constraining our species so much more than today's world where this is a solved problem (like feeding or keeping ourselves warm) to justify that men with such stronger muscles must also have a better reasoning and therefore be better in STEM positions, or leading positions, at taking decisions, at leading people starting with heading a family, and so on. There is no evidence of this, neither factual nor anecdotal (actually, anecdotal evidence suggest a negative correlation between development of muscles and that of brain). This is just patriarchy, plain and old, aka the ideology behind which men hide their domination. A domination that is not justified by men having a better brain but merely by men trying to control women in order to control their body that they are so dependent of. And this is the real controversial topic in my opinion.
I'm not comfortable with this ideology despite being a man not only because I'm ashamed of it, but also as a father of a daughter whom I hope won't be limited in how she will experience life because the other half of the species try hard to maintain an obsolete domination, and I sincerely hope she will kick the ass of all ape-like men thinking that it is "absolutely undeniable" that more muscles means better brain.
Once women started demanding equal rights, their IQ scores—which had lagged slightly behind men’s for decades—not only caught up with men’s, they surpassed them. According to IQ expert James Flynn, women now outscore men on intelligence tests in Europe, the US, Canada, and New Zealand—and women scored higher everywhere. “The complexity of the modern world is making our brains adapt and raising our IQ,” Flynn says. “But women’s have risen faster.”
■Women are more sensual than men.
According to researcher Israel Abramov of the City University of New York, women have a much more finely tuned ability to see slight variations in color than men do—which is why no straight men know what “mauve” or “taupe” are, but all women do. Women also have a superior sense of hearing and can distinguish between different scents far better than men can.
■Women are better at finding things than men.
Everyone knew that already, but it took psychology professor Diane Halpern to establish that women are better at navigating any given area by using landmarks, which makes them better at finding the lost keys and the missing remote control than men are.
■Women have better immune systems than men.
Estrogen gives women a better natural defense system against bacteria and viruses, according to a study at McGill University.
■Women tolerate pain better than men.
After all, they have to endure the equivalent of a bowling boll popping out of their vagina every time they give birth. But an episode of the show MythBusters proved that women can hold their hands in freezing water 19% longer than those crybaby men.
■Women have better memory than men.
A study at Aston University in England concluded that are better than men at remembering things two minutes, 15 minutes, and 24 hours after learning them. A Mayo Clinic study said that not only do women naturally have a better sense of memory than men, the gap widens with age.
■Women handle stress better than men.
Researchers at the University of Western Ontario concluded that women are far better than men at handling the stress of job interviews. Female brains also secrete more oxytocin—AKA the “cuddle hormone”—than male brains, making women calmer under fire than men are.
■Women are better at multitasking than men.
Multiple studies on multitasking have shown that women are far superior to men when it comes to handling multiple jobs at once. This must be why no man in world history has been able to simultaneously cook spaghetti, talk on the phone, and change a diaper.
■Women are better computer programmers than men.
This goes against every possible sexist stereotype, but a study at the University of Sussex found that girls created much more highly sophisticated coding systems when designing 3D games than boys did.
■Women make better doctors than men.
A Canadian study concluded that female doctors are much more likely than male doctors to adhere to physicians’ guidelines and to prescribe the right drugs for any given ailment.
■Women make better leaders than men.
The International Journal of Business Governance and Ethicspublished research concluding that female-led companies are more successful than ones led by males. A Pew Research poll found that the public agrees—women make fairer, more compassionate, and more trustworthy leaders than men do.
■Women are better drivers than men.
Studies show that male drivers are 77% more likely to die in car accidents than female drivers. A study of car accidents in New York City found that over five years, a staggering 80% of crashes where pedestrians were killed or seriously injured involved male drivers. This is why women pay lower car-insurance premiums.
■Women make better cops than men.
Authorities in Peru and Russia have begun switching over to female-dominated police forces because women’s superior psychological, communication, and negotiation skills make them better than men at handling volatile situations.
■Women make better students than men.
A joint study by the University of Georgia and Columbia University found that female students are better at acquiring and retaining knowledge than men. And Department of Education stats show that men are more likely than women to drop out of college.
■Women are better with money than men.
A study conducted by Barclays Wealth and Ledbury Research found that female investors experience a higher return on their investment than men do mainly because testosterone impels men to take unnecessary risks. A 2005 study by Merrill Lynch said that women also sell off their bad investments more quickly than men do.
You can claim there are differences in the physical body between men and women and no one will deny you that. However, it is just ridiculous to claim that me make better scientists than women without supporting your claim with rigurous data. Saying they might have better spatial isn't enough to make them much better scientists than women. Especially when there is evidence that women excel at learning and the highest IQ score ever recorded was that of a woman.
The studies I've looked at for 1. aren't convincing. If you have any in mind and want to share, I might take a look, because I find the topic mildly interesting.
2. and 3. can be explained by structural issues, as I said.
It's not really a question of the distribution of capabilities in men and women today which interests me the most, but the potential malleability of those capabilities given the right social structures, because if there's a way to bring a larger fraction of the population into STEM work, we'll have a much more creative and prosperous society.
> The assumption is that aptitude for these positions is roughly the same between genders, so if there's a significant imbalance, society doesn't get the best people on the given set of seats.
Aptitude can be exactly equal and aiming at equality can still be a poor choice if men and women are different. Among medical school graduates women are more likely never to practice, to work part time, to retire early and less likely to work past retirement age. If working more hours leads to more productivity and we value productivity rewarding productivity makes sense.
The article argues about roles in academia and how women drop out during/after PhD programs.
If your goal is to maximize the number of hours worked in the medical profession, you should optimize for that _much_ earlier in the pipeline because all those post-PhD women who then move into part time work already took away precious college resources from those hard working men who are more likely to work past retirement age (if they don't die of a heart attack long before reaching that still-working-at-80 panacea).
I think the idea is to keep the rules of the competition basically the same, but make it feasible for more people to compete. The same number of winners might result, but hopefully they'll be more talented, because they're selected from a larger pool of competitors.
> And yet, if you ask leading women researchers like Nobel Laureate in Physics 2018, Professor Donna Strickland, or Canada Research Chair in Advanced Functional Materials (Chemistry), Professor Eugenia Kumacheva, they say that sexism was not a barrier in their careers.
— is such a bizarre argument to make. How can one conclude anything about sexism by asking leading women researchers whether whether it has been a barrier in their careers. The very fact that they’ve achieved leading positions says that it wasn’t; it says absolutely nothing of whether it was for those who have left.
_(I am not claiming anything about sexism; I was simply mystified by this paragraph)_
Good point, this seems like a case of survivorship bias. However, I think it does seem to show some sort of upper bound on the
level and pervasiveness of sexism? That it's at least _possible_ for women to achieve at the highest level in these fields means sexism didn't stop everyone.
Seems like much of the problem could be solved by just having the working world chill the f' out for women and for men. For example, a 32 hour workweek along with generous paid parental leaves. Everyone should have time for a life outside of work, not just women of childbearing age.
Also, The whole idea of having young people work like dogs in order to have a shot at making partner, or gaining tenure, or gaining a medical degree is both outdated and ageist.
32 hour workweeks might work but there will always be the issue of defection.
If a company allows employees to take unlimited leave, then worker A who avails him/herself of it, will be at a disadvantage to worker B who keeps working like a dog, when it comes time for promotions.
If company A mandates 32 hour workweeks, then they will eventually lose out to their competitor company B who mandates 40 hours (or more informally).
If country A says ALL companies must have <=32 hour workweeks, then country B, with no such law, will become more productive. And on and on. There will always be some less enlightened competitor to take advantage -- and do we really think America is ready to stop being #1?
That assumes that working like a dog is more efficient than having a 3 day weekend and free time to interact with your family and coming back in on monday fresh and alert.
It also assumes that workers A and B both working 40 hours (or more informally) are both working like dogs, trying to earn a promotion before the other. This is definitely true in some fields like finance, but not all.
The last assumption is that there is no economic benefit to added free time. Where would we be if the world was solely workers who didn't have the free time to engage with their own thoughts? We certainly wouldn't be on this website, or a computer for that matter.
We aren't computers with a job queue that can be maximized. We are animals that get exhausted easily, distrust our own warning signs, and have been known to do foolish things like jump from buildings if an artificial number dips below some arbitrary level. I think we can all afford to slow down just a little.
> That assumes that working like a dog is more efficient
Naw. Efficiency is only one variable. Working like a dog is usually marginally inefficient, but the first 6 hr/day are still roughly as efficient to the 3-day-weekend-er. Working more hours absolutely increases productivity even if per-hour-productivity decreases (except in extreme cases of burn out). This is pretty obvious when you look at how any high-achiever spends their time. It's amazing how often people claim the opposite on HN.
> Also, The whole idea of having young people work like dogs in order to have a shot at making partner, or gaining tenure, or gaining a medical degree is both outdated and ageist.
You can't dictate this though. Say you have a well-run engineering team where everyone spends exactly 40 hours a week and only 40 hours a week on their jobs. And everyone does this.
You hire one new person who just LOVES THEIR WORK and they work 80 hours a week. Their output is through the roof, they get recognition, raises, bonuses, and promotions.
Now everyone chases them. Goodbye work/life balance for the entire team.
And before one suggests "make it against the rules to do that", good luck seeing how long your group or business lasts with such a policy. Probably NOTHING could be worse for morale.
Even being generous and kind, you end up with that situation. So your solution must work with that tendency, not assume it out of the problem.
Shorter workweeks would unavoidably lead to lower economic growth. People get better at things the the more they do them and the more hours they work the more they get done. The marginal value of an extra hour worked only turns negative around 60 hours.
No one is forcing people to work that hard to gain money and social status. They do it to themselves.
> Heck, let’s spend 99% — $1.485 billion (in the states alone) on better support. That should put a dent in the support bill, and I’d sure pick up $15 million if I saw it lying around. Wouldn’t you?
According to PEW (https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/2018/01/09/diversity-in-the-...) there were 17M STEM employees in 2016, so this leaves less than $1000 per employee for childcare. According to Fortune (https://fortune.com/2018/10/22/childcare-costs-per-year-us/) the average cost per child is $9K/year (probably more if you adjust for the distribution of STEM careers?). I'm guessing STEM employees have at least one child on average (some have none, others have multiple, etc), so that only covers about 1/9th of the bill. That's a dent in the bill, but I'm not sure it's enough to make even a proportional dent in the pipeline.
Note that this assumes the money finances a benefit that must be offered to all employees; if you can target the women in question, the calculus clearly changes; however, I suspect that would be difficult under current US discrimination law (IANAL).
That said, I'd rather that money go to employees where it would certainly be useful as opposed to the current programs which, as far as I can tell, is squandered (to put it nicely).
I wonder how often women in STEM have children with men who earn significantly less?
I ask because my partner Is a software engineers. She plans on continuing to work and I plan on staying home with the kids.
Practically speaking it doesn’t totally make sense since I currently earn more being a few years older in the same career. It’s just what we both have wanted since we found one another and we’re willing to make the life adjustments necessary to make it happen
I can’t help wonder how often women partner with men with lower incomes. Obviously the physical toll of baring children tips the scale a little but given couple where the woman makes significantly more than her partner I would imagine the decision would be logical for her to continuing work and wonder what percentage of women leave stem in this particular subset of the group?
My only quibble with this article is that the fact that there is a wall related to child bearing and rearing IS institutional sexism.
It's just a different form of it than the "my coworkers constantly stare at my tits and don't take what I say seriously" variety.
We've put women largely in charge of child rearing duties. Obviously, men aren't able to get pregnant and bear children. We are, however, perfectly capable of changing diapers, singing lullabies, and doing laundry.
I'd bet that we would see the same kind of impediments to women rising to the tops of their professions in many demanding fields, fields where if you take too much time to have a life, you are considered broken and uninterested in excellence.
The absence of the significant additional support required for women to both have children and get tenure as a professor is not sexism. That support was never there in the first place and men don't get any support either, so there is no discrimination happening.
The author is missing the forest for the trees. She argues that a specific
kind of sexism (harrassment) is not sufficient to explain why so many women
are forced out of their careers in STEM academia. She argues that the real
reason is that those women want to start a family and they can't do both at
once. She herself is considering leaving academia to start a family (she wants
to have two or three children). Yet she never for a moment stops to wonder why
it is that a woman like her has to make a choice between family and career,
why that is a choice that so many women have to make and why it is a choice
that so few men have to make. The answer to all that is sexism, of course, the
kind of sexism that the author is so used to she doesn't even consider it
sexism anymore, just the normal order of things. Yes, of course a young,
talented researcher _has_ to leave academia to raise her kids. Because she's a
woman. And that's what happens to women.
That is sexism. It is clear sexism, it is classic sexism and it will not go
away by pretending that it is not. And I agree very much with the author that
it is the real reason behind the constant stream of promising female
researchers leaving STEM academia.
How is it biology that only women are expected to leave work to care for children? I don't follow. Is there some biological reason why men are not expected to do the same?
Do you mean something else by the "it" in "It seems to be just plain old biology"?
You are missing purposely the fact that women have to bear the child, which is quite incapacitating especially in the last months. Then there is a recovery period. All in all that already about a year.
So yes, it’s totally normal that the expectation of caring for children fall on women because it is the prolongation of their pregnancy. Actually this is not even disputed except by a minority of people in a minority of countries (the Western world).
So you are talking about leaving work to give birth and recover from it? That indeed is required, but I'm talking about leaving work to _raise_ the children that one gives birth to.
I'm saying that it's only women who leave work to _raise_ their children and that _that_ is sexist. There is no reason to abandon your career to raise your children, there is no reason that this is never done by men (who can do it just as well as women because it does not involve special biological characteristics) and there is no reason that women are expected to do it.
In the western world of course we have such things as maternal leave and in some countries even _parental_ leave which is an attempt at a solution to exactly the problem we're discussing here: that women are expected to leave their careers _permanently_ to raise their children even though they only need at most a few months or so to recover after giving birth (a year is an absolute extreme), and that men are not expected to do the same.
EDIT: So, I say "in the western world" but it turns out that's not _all_ the western world. From wikipedia's article on parental leave:
The United States, Suriname, Papua New Guinea, and a few island countries in the Pacific Ocean are the only countries in the United Nations that do not require employers to provide paid time off for new parents.[6]
EDIT 2: "You are missing purposely the fact".
I'm not and I could assume you are wilfully misunderstanding _me_. And where would that get us?
> that women are expected to leave their careers _permanently_ to raise their children even though they only need at most a few months or so to recover after giving birth (a year is an absolute extreme), and that men are not expected to do the same
1) This is a conversation concerning those in a relationship as to who will be raising the child (if it's not a shared effort)
2) I know a few guys that are stay at home dads, share the responsibility with their spouse of parents, or use caring services and nobody needs to be a stay at home parent.
3) If they are permanently leaving their career then it sounds like there's something completely unrelated that's affecting this other than some sexist issue.
4) How's what you're saying any different than some women expecting the man to be the bread winner and provide for the family? Or expecting them to be the one to defend the family if there's an intruder in the house? Or expecting the guy to fix things around the house or be the one to hire a contractor to do it? Or expecting the guy to take the garbage out or change a tire or talk to their son about sex, etc.
Yes, some (many? few? I don't know) women do have that kind of expectation from a man. More to the point, there are societal norms that nurture those expectations in women and in men themselves. There's no question to my mind that this is exactly the same kind of sexism that is keeping women from having successful careers in STEM academia (and elsewhere).
Like I say in another comment, sexism harms men too.
It really is not a matter of men-vs-women, here. My understanding is that these are traditional ideas about manhood and womanhood, that were useful in the past because they helped ensure societal stability and perhaps a sensible use of limited resources. But, in today's world, especially in the Western world, where the majority of men and women don't e.g. have to work the fields or do the washing by hand, these traditional ways of seeing each other only help to restrict our options. In the end, most women and most men have loved ones in the other sex (wives, sisters, mothers, daughters, husbands, sons, brothers and fathers) and it just doesn't make sense to stick to archaic ideas that want us to be somehow adversaries. Most women want the men they love to do well in their life and vice-versa. So why not work to maximise each other's options, rather than restrict them? We can work together rather than against each other to achieve our full potential, as individuals and as family units.
The article literally talks about this. The problem is unborn children, i.e. pregnancy. That's solely a burden for the mother, who will not be able to travel and keep up with strenuous work schedules for most of the duration of their pregnancy.
Pregnancy lasts nine months and for most of that period a woman can very well travel and keep up with work. Then recovery after birth takes a couple of months (lochia, marked by bleeding, lasts a month and a half). So that's less than a yaer overall, let's say a whole year to cover cases that have a more difficult delivery than usual (although there are still outliers that will suffer problems for many years after).
So a year off work, at most. Let's say three if you want to have three children (most women in the Western world today will have one or two).
How does that square up with giving up an entire career, that lasts considerably longer than three years?
If it turned out that it was just women’s breasts that caused the disparity... that women who have mastectomies do just fine in Academia, would you consider that to be “case solved, situation normal, plain old biology, no sexism here”?
Or would you keep looking for a solution that allows women, who have the very normal female attribute of “having breasts”, to also be catered to and be able to get work done and be compensated despite the whole “breast having” thing?
Try to think of it more in this way. Men are under-represented in breastfeeding and giving birth. How come we aren't looking for solutions to these issues? It's easy to claim this is plain old biology, not sexism. We need to be looking for solutions that allow women to also contribute to child births and rearing in these ways.
Agreed. How many times have you heard a man say he had to choose between his career and having kids? The fact that it is predominantly women who feel they have to choose between children and career IS institutional sexism. We say we've achieved "equal opportunity" when women are allowed to participate in career fields that had originally evolved around the male workforce. Is that parity? That women can succeed in certain industries as long as they are like men in that they never become pregnant? Jobs and industries designed by women for a female workforce would look a lot different.
We need to--as much as we are able--change societal expectations, workforce expectations, and the way jobs are structured so that women are not at a disadvantage. These changes can also benefit men (eg, equal parental leave and other policies that it more affordable and feasible for people to have children). It hurts both sexes when workplaces are biased towards this archetype of a male breadwinner that is content putting in long hours away from his family.
You could view this as anti-family bias, which, due to society and biology, disproportionately affects women.
>How many times have you heard a man say he had to choose between his career and having kids?
I agree with your sentiment, but there's a big biological difference here in terms of the fertility age. As discussed in the article, this question is very urgent for women in their 30s, but men can delay reproduction until their late 40s with no major issues. As such, men don't face an ultimatum on this, the way that women do.
> As such, men don't face an ultimatum on this, the way that women do.
But at late 40's do these men feel like they have to choose between children and early retirement?
Furthermore, most men don't just wait around until their late 40's to find a young woman to reproduce with. Human relationships aren't this calculated. You don't get to plan when you end up meeting the right person. Life happens. There are plenty of men in their 30's in committed relationships with women in their 30's. Just because he can delay reproducing doesn't mean they can. Usually this is a decision that a couple makes together. And I haven't heard a man say that he had to choose between his career and having kids because his wife's biological clock was ticking.
There is a difference in fertility age, but men don't start leaving STEM academia in droves when they approach their fertility limits- only women do. So the part about it being urgent to have children at a certain age may be a biological difference, as you say, but the part about leaving academia to have children is not a biological difference.
Or, to put it more simply: why don't men leave their careers to have children at any age?
Pregnant women can work except in the last stages of pregnancy and the recovery period after birth takes at most a few months (normally a month and a half should be enough).
But even assuming the whole business of giving birth took a whole year (the full nine months for carrying a baby to term and another three to recover) there is no reason that this has to be the end of a woman's career for good. It's one year. People take one year sabbaticals and go and gawp at Machu Picchu. It's not the end of the world, especially if you're young and even in a fast-moving career like STEM academia. it's not like you can't ever read the latest publications again because you have to lie in bed for a few days after giving birth.
The care you say men must give to their wives lasts at best a few months of a year. After that a man is free to leave work to raise the kids and the woman can go back to work, if they so wish.
In an easy pregnancy the woman may work until the end. In Germany for example women are expected to work until 6 weeks before the birth.
Then there's 8 weeks of recuperation after birth, paid by the health insurance which are more or less mandatory and it would be stupid not to take them. Even if the body's not fully recovered at this point, the woman can work.
The question is, why would a mother leave her newborn in order to work, when the outcome will be worse both for the mother (weaker bonding, working through recuperation) and the baby (missing its mother during the day)? That's why it's common here that women either take one or two full years of parental leave or they stay at home N years. This can also be and is mixed with part-time work.
In any case, that would be an easy pregnancy. Childbirth over 30 becomes harder and over 35 it's classified as a high-risk pregnancy.
"After that a man is free to leave work to raise the kids and the woman can go back to work, if they so wish.
So why don't they do it?"
One reason could be that by the time those months (in reality a year) are over the mother's better at caring for the child than the father.
I've also seen that women tend to like spending time with their babies(!) so they prefer working part-time or staying at home.
Finally, it's often the case that the husband earns more. Women also tend to prefer men which are successful.
In the case where she earns more, it makes economical sense for the husband to work part-time or stay at home. I read an article about such a case a while ago, and being a stay at home dad looked like a sad existence: besides the social disdain and emasculation, that person wasn't even welcome to spend time with other parents (i.e. mothers), because they were looked on with suspicion.
>Yet she never for a moment stops to wonder why it is that a woman like her has to make a choice between family and career, why that is a choice that so many women have to make and why it is a choice that so few men have to make.
She literally spends 25%+ of the post explaining the fertility wall that does not affect men.
The fertility wall explains why women need to take time off to gestate and give birth before they are in their 40's. It does not begin to explain why womeen in their 20s are expected to give up a career that lasts considerably longer than either gestation or giving birth and recovering from it.
That's what the author is failing to discuss. Why do women need to give up their career to _raise_ children when the business of _having_ children takes a tiny portion of the duration of a career in STEM academia.
I agree with you. However, I think slicing up the various types of sexism in the way the author does is tactically useful for solving the issue in the fastest possible way.
In full agreement. It's frustrating that increasing paternity leave and encouraging new fathers to spend more time caring for their children is not highlighted as a potential solution.
The goal is not necessarily to eliminate that choice, but to stop it falling disproportionately to women. By that measure, Sweden's high female labour participation suggests that it's policies are a roaring success.
The fundamental unaddressed issue in our society is that having children is treated as something that's optional, a luxury, and even though the society fundamentally depends on its constituents procreating, we continue to pretend that having children is not a necessary part of one's life. Which is true individually, but not true on the macro level.
Anecdotally, observing my own family and that of my (mostly well-off STEM) social circle, I can tell you that this is when women really take a hit career-wise. What's less obvious in the graphs is that many of them take it deliberately, and _choose_ to focus on things other than career. This, ironically, puts pressure on men to provide, and compete in the workplace. I know it put pressure on me like you wouldn't believe - we "settled", got a mortgage, monthly expenses went through the roof. I've roughly tripled my earnings between the time my son was born and his 10th birthday. It came at a tremendous personal cost - I basically didn't have a life for a decade, and our marriage nearly fell apart. I like where we are today, though, thanks to all that effort. My wife took a couple of years off work, and did not aim for a quick career progression afterwards, preferring lower stress and more family time. Was my career progression done at the expense of someone less motivated at work? Quite likely, yes. Was it worth it to my family? It was, although there were many times when I was in doubt about that.
This is something the workforce percentage graphs do not communicate at all.
Before modern times, the grandparents fulfilled much of the role of watching the kids while the moms worked. In fact, some have posited that this is why humans live long enough to be grandparents - it's an evolutionary advantage.
But in modern society, we tend to cast off our grandparents.
Or we move 3,000 miles away to somewhere more economically prosperous (and also, more expensive) so the grandparent's couldn't financially make it viable to come with.
All of my parents grew up and lived in the same state as their siblings. All of my siblings live in different states, and none of us live in the same state as our parents.
My siblings and I don't have any kids yet, but their family life and amount of time they spend with extended family (aunts, uncles, cousins) will look dramatically different than my experience, and it's only been ~25 or so years.
> Or we move 3,000 miles away to somewhere more economically prosperous (and also, more expensive) so the grandparent's couldn't financially make it viable to come with
Judging from my neighborhood at least, the answer to that seems to be the grandparents get a class A RV [1] or a large travel trailer [2] and move to their kid's lawn for a few months to help with the grandkids.
Probably only can reasonably work, though, if the kids wait until they have a home and decent sizes lawn to have kids of their own.
This also only works if your grandparents are in good enough shape to live in a trailer, and, also, you have a lawn, which many people living in multi-family housing do not have exclusive access to.
People live longer and are expected to work outside of their homes longer. Two generations ago when my grandmother was raising my mom, her mother was not working and could and actually did much of the childcare; but my mom can't watch over my kids much because she's obviously working full time and most likely will do so until my kids are nearly adults.
This might be different for people who have kids much later; however, in modern society there IMHO still is no gap where the grandparents already can look after kids because they've retired and still can look after kids because they're physically and mentally able to do so, because most non-rich people tend to work as long as they can, and when they stop working, they themselvelves need caregivers instead of being able to be caregivers for the extended family.
I wonder how much the feeling is one-sided. I visit my grandparents more often than they visit me (even generously discounting for physical ability, income, and the one-to-many relationship).
I think the way to measure this might be grandparents moving out of state of family (think Arizona and Florida).
Obviously the stigma of aging should get the bulk of the responsibility here.
Any got any advice on how to re-norm grandparents? I'm hesitating on moving out of state during my kids early childhood.
> Any got any advice on how to re-norm grandparents? I'm hesitating on moving out of state during my kids early childhood.
Living in the same neighborhood as your grandparents would be best. I know families that do that, and the payoff is great for the kids, the parents, and the grandparents. The kids love their grandparents, the grandparents love taking care of the kids, and the parents get safe, reliable, and free help. It's a win all around.
Not necessarily cast off, but we’re so mobile now that we move too far away from our grandparents to be able to lean on them for childcare (my wife’s parents live in a different country…)
Why do we care that there are equal women and men again? Why does representation actually matter again? I would find it more exciting to see a field with no representation because I could make a greater impact! This whole ideology of having representation everywhere is very dumb and conformist.
Because diverse opinions lead to better end products. Having homogenized groups of people means you're leaving some viewpoints out, and those viewpoints have sometimes been extremely helpful for me as a software developer.
Sure, however this isn't false otherwise. Non-diverse opinions aren't bad by default, and ultimately the main concern here is thinking the opposite, that diverse opinions are always right.
It's an error to assume any opinion is always right. Ultimately institutional sex discrimination is counter-productive to human life, so you will generally see a higher quality of life, lower violence, better health outcomes, reduced chemical toxicity, in places where both sexes have equal social mobility.
Maybe (although it's hard to imagine how somebody's non-education related upbringing could lead them to optimize software, for example), but at what cost? The linked article is suggesting that it's going to cost billions of dollars (more!) to bring in these diverse opinions.
Yes I've observed that it's useful to have people like physicists or electrical engineers in a software development team, because they have a different perspective on things.
Below this is a comment that is now "dead" and cannot be replied to.
To moderators/downvoters: It is said that defending a cause with bad arguments is the most pernicious way to combat it. Similarly, resorting to authority and censorship to defend a cause must be the surest way to ruin it.
We have seen sexism actually grow in the last decades in this field, and i start to worry that this attitude of dealing with it with the argument of authority or other threats on one's carrier may just be one of the causes that we are slowly losing this ideological battle. Or maybe just a symptom?
'Equal opportunity' I think is a fairly non-controversial concept, much less so than 'equal outcomes'.
To the extent there are factors which systematically work against opportunity, there's both a moral issue, and a pragmatic issue (i.e. losing good talent) at play, before we get into the more controversial issues of representation and equality of outcomes.
Because countries where women are dominated by men both legally and culturally, have higher rates of birth, crime, poverty, etc., than countries where women have a level of social mobility similar to men.
Current patriarchal, near-totalitarian societies have huge percentages of women going into STEM because for an ambitious, smart, strong woman in that environment it's one of the few paths to independence and status obtained through a well paying STEM job.
Countries that are more egalitarian and have more social mobility have STEM percentages that are decreasing as the same society becomes more egalitarian over time because the women have other options, and they choose to take them.
I am uninterested in the actual composition of STEM. I want social mobility for women because such is correlated with population growth reduction, better health and social outcomes.
I find it shocking that people so boldly cite the opposite as being true. I can't seem to discern a benefit to so confidently push a belief that doesn't hold up in reality. It's not as if the Nordic countries aren't doing pretty well, so why are people so resistant to the reality?
It's perfectly understandable that less economic and social pressures lead to people choosing things they actually want. It just happens to be that there's a notable difference in women's choices under those circumstances.
It certainly seems like there's substantial misinformation out there these days.
For the women I know, working at a sausagefest like comp/sci or engineering can be really unpleasant, and I'm sure it sucks 10x for women who believe they have to work STEM in order to gain the autonomy they need. My sister lived two years in an all male house with two male landlords and she almost lost her damn mind: the landlords kept trying to set her up with her creepy neighbor, who himself was trading sexual favors with the landlords in order to get out of cleaning, which my sister did more than anybody. The landlords were always giving special treats and priveleges to "their boys", even the ones who didnt pay rent on time. Obviously, #notallmen, obviously. It is unsurprising to me that the biggest female STEM recruitment is happening in places where women have no other way to get the autonomy they need.
When women have equal opportunity for education and employment, that mobility is correlated with reduced population growth, reduction in violence, better health outcomes. I don't actually care how likely women are to pursue stem careers, or about mathematical diverseness. I am primarily interested in drinkable water, breathable air, edible food, peace, etc. Evidence suggests that sexist gatekeeping ultimately runs counter to my own interests.
I appreciate the author's piece but motherhood is not an alternative argument for why women leave STEM, it is THE argument. It is, in all likelihood, the strongest factor to influence women's decisions to leave the field. The evidence is getting overwhelming, just check the most recent publications by Harvard Professor Claudia Goldin (most recent: https://test.openicpsr.org/openicpsr/project/113672/version/...)
Sexism is real but its importance is far from being large. It is really tiresome to see the news regurgitating the talking point on wage gap without properly giving context.
What is clear to me is that the wage gap as measured by the average earnings by gender (even drilled down by field) is very hard to be fixed given the obvious biological differences between males and females (in which motherhood reigns supreme).
Women also need to be honest about their prospects, it is very hard to juggle a career and motherhood. You can't have your cake and eat it too. So there needs to be an honest confrontation on the trade offs of motherhood and having a career and the cope that comes with it.
Yes, this is what I was thinking. Feminism is ruining women by mistakenly telling them they want something that might make them unhappy. What do women gain by having 50% professional nuclear physicists or 50% coal miners?
Great article, and the same dynamic applies to all genders. I was listening to a podcast the other day where a founder said that the most successful people he knew (eg. entrepreneurs) all had the worst family lives - multiple marriages, bad or non-existent relationships with family, etc.
Work and family is a trade-off, their is no way around it. One can live a balanced life and be moderately successful. But to be among the best, the most elite, something generally has to give.
That's not to say that we can't reform the systems to not make it as "winner-take-all", sort of like how the author suggested.
Does anyone ever stop to consider that? Maybe women are doing what's best for themselves, sticking to things they like, and screw your arrogant western leftist ideas of what YOU think they should do?
Let's just pretend women like shoes and handbags more and men like engines and guns more just for purely random reasons. Despite global perpetuity. Everywhere ever.
Let's just pretend engineers and nurses is inflicted, not chosen, despite what ultra high gender equality Scandinavia says.
Let's all pretend that only the North Koreans are brainwashed and that only they care little for facts and human flourishing.
Let's all just slosh in wierd western religious fervour. Or actually, how about no, and hop on a plane to the civilised world.
The impression you got from the article was that author just isn't into STEM? If you want to make an argument based on women's preferences, you might consider a closer reading of what they're saying.
So... it's not sexism, it's the structurally sexist way that child-rearing is handled?
I mean, it's a more actionable level of detail, but it's still sexism, no? Just maybe more structural rather than at the level of individual hiring or advancing decisions?
I think a larger percentage of society would be willing to call this "structural gender-based inequality" rather than sexism, because most people including myself use the word "sexism" to refer to a belief that one sex is less capable or somehow worse than the other.
Similarly, men live fewer years than women, and so receive less retirement benefits. This is a structural gender-correlated inequality (maybe gender-correlated is even better than gender-based) but I don't think many people would call it "sexism against men". They would just say "oh, yeah, that's odd... maybe we should adjust that now that you've brought it to our attention".
Your framing seems to suggest the entities that established the unequal structure are blameless, which I do not think is the case. The leave policies and overall working environments that most of us have came from the belief that men should be dedicated to work and women should stay at home. Whether the people who established these norms had malicious intent or not, they were incorrect and harmed society.
I do think that shedding light on the way structural sexism in policies regarding parental leave and childcare costs is a very useful thing to do, though!
I have always been skeptical of the need for the intense career paths in management, law, medicine, finance, and academics. I totally understand the need to put in hours to become an expert, but a lot of it seems gratuitous. I wouldn't call it hazing. I think these careers are structured as championship systems, where the winner takes all, for the sake of the winner.
Winner takes all is a very male attitude, and I think it gets back to men being more expendable because their sexual refractory period is orders of magnitude shorter than women's.
But does it make sense? Does the 80th hour on the ward as a resident make you a better doctor? Does the fifth publication make you a better professor? Does another fifteen minutes of billable time make you a better lawyer?
I don't think they do. I think these careers are needlessly intense and stupidly so. I contemplated going down a couple of those paths and recoiled because it seemed so unnecessary and gratuitous, and I didn't want to spin my wheels fitting into a nonsensical system.
Why not look at how we are all similar rather than a unique attribute to explain the leaky pipe?
The Swedish government order a study a few years ago in order to explain why the teacher profession are so gender segregated. The study found that initially the applications are almost 50/50 men and women, but then every year men start to leave. Once graduated and starting to work, every year men are a few times more likely to leave the profession than women. They even called it a leaky pipe.
They had multiple explanation in order to explain it, like how more academic focus rather than pedagogic helps retain men, and how higher salaries might help, and they also did similar to this study and asked the men who left why they did so. A lot of answers were that the profession did not fit their life, they felt the environment to be alien and uncomfortable, and they didn't feel like they fit in the work culture.
What the study also found was that the remaining male teacher that did stay tended to enter specialties such as PE and STEM subject, and away from subjects like langue and social studies. Many who left did so for similar profession outside of the education system such as sport.
So here we have women and men, both being described as a leaky pipe, both leaving at similar rates, both describing similar reasons for leaving, both finding specialties where they are not a minority. Could there be a common theory rather than two separate theories to explain this?
And the government study had such suggestion. There is research that is now about 50 years old that observed that people who are in an environment as a minority does not feel same confidence in themselves as those being part of the majority. When faced with a failure such as a missed exam, and making a decision to continue, being part of a majority increase the probability of the person continuing. The government study suggested that if you apply this theory over the time frame of a teacher career from the point of student to being a long term employee, what you get is a leaky pipe. It also suggested the solution that mentor ship programs helps in reducing this.
I also recall that a while back a women in IT imitative that said that of all their work, what had actually produced results was their mentor program. Seems like a pretty good evidence to me, and as a universal theory it seems pretty good explanation to explain the situation for both men and women.
I'm totally on board with making changes that address concerns for women specifically.
That being said, as someone not in academia, it seems like a crazy path for anyone, male or female. As the article said, you're usually 34 before you have a lab established and the research program really gets going. Is there any way the system could be changed/simplified so that talented researchers could start earlier?
As a male that dropped out of the academic career path I can absolutely confirm that the author has a point. I made the conscious decision not to attempt to become a professor because it would be nearly impossible for my wife to have a qualified career at the same time due to the required flexibility. Add children to the mix and you are pretty much confined to a single-career family. Which would be arguable if it wasn't for the extremely high risk if that particular career path.
One tactical approach: a high achieving woman could prioritize finding a partner who is interested in deprioritizing his own career for the sake of supporting her and raising children. This is a strategy high achieving men have used for a long time.
So, pursue men involved in "child friendly" careers. Nurses instead of doctors; teacher aides over academics; tax preparers over management consultants. Or even men who are passionate about the idea of being a stay at home dad.
The dating marketplace is two-sided; one reason why high-achieving men use this strategy is because there are a lot of women in this niche competing for high-achieving men. There aren't nearly as many men in this niche competing for high-achieving women, likely in part because there are relatively fewer high-achieving women using this strategy.
A big part of strategy in marketplaces is choosing something that has a lot of participation so that you can find enough counter-parties to make your strategy work.
There's also a biological asymmetry in terms of age and fertility. A man who is single until age 45 and then gets a lot of economic success can marry a younger woman and have children.
I think hospital work is unsuitable for people with children. Strangers spilling their blood and guts all over the place; and the hours suck rotten eggs.
Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems to be typical sexism: there's work at work which is paid, and work at home which is not. Men do little enough of the latter, that doing the paid work isn't a problem. Women do such a large part of the former, that they feel the need to chose between which part get done.
Sure, the positive way to change this, is to reduce the unpaid work (child care professionals are paid, cleaners are paid etc) - that is, to acknowledge it as work that needs to be done, is productive, and should be part of what society rewards/share resources to get done.
But the equal rights / equal opportunity path indicates that we also need a (bigger) culture shift so that the unpaid work of running a home is more equally divided.
It's notable that in general, even when paid, "women's work" is less valuable than men's work. The younger a student is, the more likely they are to be taught by a woman, and the less they are likely to make -- but is teaching a high schooler harder than teaching a first grader? Cleaning, child care, and nursing are all both female-coded and low-paying.
Women are often pushed towards professions involving some kind of care -- and it's expected that they'll want it because they have an emotional attachment rather than for money. Being a homemaker is the limit case: absolute attachment and zero pay.
I wonder what would happen if we simply made the purely numerical correction of counting homemaking in GDP. Would we value it more? Would it make it more attractive to men? Would we develop better infrastructure?
I'm not seeing much of a push for women there, but more of a push of men out of there, or satisfying different criteria.
The behavioral stereotype that I'm seeing is that when a man considers a job that they might like, that has some socially acceptable status (teacher is considered a respectable profession compared to running a garbage truck, at least for an educated middle class family) but that pays lousy, then they more often than not discard that option as unacceptable and taboo and go looking for a job that sucks in other aspects but pays better e.g. driving a truck or building houses; women in the same situation more often than not stick around with lower pay.
If a stereotypical man needs to choose between money and reasonable hours that are compatible with seeing your family, they tend to choose money, the sterotypical woman often chooses the opposite (part of which is the argument in this article for the years after childbirth). A particular local example that I see is that the municipal public transport drivers are mostly women and long-range (both scheduled traffic and tourist trip) bus drivers around here are mostly men. The municipal transport pays much less, so men don't apply there; but the long-range drivers work obscene hours and are away from their families for most nights, so women (who have the needed experience qualifications since they're driving the same machine, just locally) don't apply there - there's a self selection.
In management, we can observe a pattern of increasing divorce rates (for the same age) as men reach higher levels of management; suggesting that there may be a pattern that when choosing between a possibility of promotions and not wrecking up your marriage, more men choose to prioritize their work and more women choose to prioritize their home life (which IMHO is the sane choice). The same applies for physical health - women tend to avoid many of the physical jobs that screw up your body or risk your life. E.g. roofing is a job that can be done well by women, but is one of the more lethal jobs in USA - and it has about 0.5% women in there. It's not a well paying job comparing to skilled jobs (e.g. a registered nurse) but it pays significantly more than childcare, but we're not seeing the poorly paid women in childcare joining up roofing just for the money.
Also, if a stereotypical middle class man needs to choose between doing a lower class job and sufficient money, they often choose sufficient money; the stereotypical middle class woman chooses otherwise. I have an observation from some time when our local economy was doing badly - if a man can't get a respectable job that can sustain their family, they'll often get a 'disrespectable' job below their skills or even occasionally commit suicide if they fail. On the other hand, women actually do overwhelmingly continue work in female-coded low-paying jobs like you describe even if other options exist; e.g. we had a local situation many years ago when schoolteachers were very, very poorly paid, but a construction boom (or bubble) had a big need for all kinds of workers. This resulted in almost all male teachers leaving schools and getting construction jobs, including very many that don't have a strength or skill requirement as e.g. painters, and very few female teachers did so (though I know some), resulting in the gender gap in school teaching becoming even more extreme. The same happened for university students picking their course subjects - because of the known problems with teacher pay, boys absolutely refused to study pedagogy degrees, with the gender ratio dropping from something like 30/70 to 1/99, but girls still enlisted. Another local observation is that boys treat the local med school entry conditions as all or nothing - if they can't get in to the doctor's "full medicine" study track, they refuse to go to med school at all and do something else; but girls who apply tend to choose both "full medicine" track and nursing as options, so if they want to be doctors but don't make the cut they consider the lower paying carreer path as acceptable. For career paths that pay poorly at the bottom and well at the top, young men will face an 'up or out' pressure from their families; if it doesn't seem that they'll reach the "good paying" level, then they'll be pressured to drop out of the career and do something menial but better paying; while for women its considered acceptable to stay there and hope to get supported by a spouse.
I could go on and on, but I've probably made my point - there seems to be a difference in preferences in job market. For men, decent pay compared to alternatives is a 'hygiene factor', and they'll sacrifice all kinds of other important job factors (hours, prestige, office vs outdoors, risk and health, family balance, abusive conditions) in order to avoid getting stuck in an otherwise decent but low-paying carreer. For a man, intentionally choosing the low-money path is essentially taboo, their family and society will shun them for that and push them towards various tracks where decent money can be made; but for a woman, it's not so, so they stay in low-paying areas that are otherwise rewarding.
Running a home is boring and not as valuable as learning a STEM degree and helping out society move forward. We can easily imagine a distopia where everyone works and no one has a proper home, but we surely cannot do the opposite which is imagine a world where everybody has a nice home but no one knows how to build anything and there is no electricity or water pipes. STEM is hard and requires sacrifice to get to a point where you are taking on the responsibilities of civilization, and for women that equivalent is simply having a child.
> this seems to be typical sexism: there’s work at home which is paid, and work at home which is not
If it’s not paid, how do those doing it live?
Tax documents call the salary worker + home maker combo “household income”, which may be an appropriate way of thinking about the household getting paid and the household looking after the home.
This applies regardless of the genders of the happy couple, so I’m not sure it’s ‘sexism’.
You are offering a solution to something that is not a problem, and you should probably question why you think that / where this ideology is coming from.
You need resources and work to care for your family. The fact that in some cases you are 'paid' (i.e. you have to trade labor) is completely irrelevant. Beaver families are not paid by anyone to care for their home and family.
You could, and can, completely trade out your labor such that you 'care' for your family by being a couple of lawyers completely outsourcing the work of raising your own kids to strangers. At which point I think you've failed as a civilized society. You're only acting as economic agents maximizing profit, and your country is not a country anymore, but an economy. I think America is already at this stage, and that's not a good thing.
Beaver families are not charged rent, money for food, etc.
Just because housework isn't recognized, doesn't mean it doesn't add value to our society. But it's not priced, and it's not taxed.
At any rate - the interesting part is, if we say there's something like five hours of work every day to run a home - how come men seem fine with dropping that in favour of paid work, and women not?
There's a limited few months of giving birth to a child that only women can do, but we see that disproportionately women seem to end up doing much more. Sure, we can simply reduce the amount of unpaid work, by paying people to clean, cook and watch children - but that doesn't answer why not doing so affects women disproportionately from men.
One plausible explanationis sexism; that our society isn't equal.
My dad spent almost all of my waking childhood at work and I still feel really sad and hurt about that. I suspect everyone has similar repressed resentment towards their providers, and professionals should really consider that when they're planning their families.
There is no explicitly agreed upon objective function for humanity. However there is kind of a default one baked into our DNA and it's the desire to reproduce and see our offspring reproduce.
Modern society is conflicted however because enlightenment philosophy, which is baked into everything, as well as some Eastern traditions teaches us that knowledge or enlightenment is the highest virtue.
So when it comes to agreeing on how to align society from the perspective of governance, time allocation, what to promote socially etc.. we have this existential crisis where people try to saddle the fence between reproduction (aka "family") and enlightenment style "progress."
Mothers--the vast majority of mothers, not the aristocracic ones we model our current family structures off of--have always worked. They'd strap the baby on their back and go to the fields to plow or gather the harvest or cook or weave or chop firewood. Motherhood as as a full-time job is a modern invention; historically, it was a side gig.
I'd love to see a startup tackle this problem: think a benefits platform that allows companies to offer daycare as a benefit, or a Wonderschool-like daycare for working parents. Even an improved work from home policy for new parents would go a long way to plugging the talent "leak" that's prevalent right now.
* most mothers were still with their infants and very young children. The babies weren't being taken care at a daycare where you can have one staffer trying to deal with 4 crying newborns.
* mothers were doing active work, not work that requires sitting in one place, not work that requires long-term concentration, not work that requires being on someone else's schedule.
I have noticed it is no problem doing active work like cooking or the dishes or grocery shopping while bringing along an infant. But I cannot do computer work -- baby goes crazy from lack of stimulation.
Also, being on a schedule while trying to take care of a baby causes immense stress. What if you have a client meeting while baby is crying because he needs to be fed ... or is crying just due to lack of comfort and attention? Or sometimes (oftentimes) baby has a bad night and keeps you from sleeping, but you still need to be up and at work at a given time, instead of being able to nap when baby naps?
Both parents doing a schedule-bound, desk job while raising a newborn baby is not how we evolved to do things, and it's always going to be a source of stress and problems, even if you have "high quality" daycare available.
I run a 100% remote company and have done so for five years, since my first child was born. Everything you said is something I've experienced.
One of the nice things about being in charge of a remote company is that when I bring the baby to our weekly video call, no one says anything, and of course they all feel comfortable doing the same (although right now there are only fur babies).
If I need to take a nap because the baby kept me up all night, I can, as long as there is no meeting scheduled.
We try to do things as asynchronously as possible, mainly because being remote this is a better way to work, but the nice side effect is not a lot of scheduled meetings.
The hardest part honestly is saying no when my son asks, "Daddy, do you want to play trains with me?!"
But my point is, I think remote companies with family friendly policies will help a lot in this regard. There is still the issue of "I need to concentrate for two hours uninterrupted", but a lot of the other issues aren't so bad when people understand you have kids and they might come to a meeting and that you may not be available instantly.
Historically, the extended family and neighbors were contributing to raising children. For a couple that doesn't have family close by and lives in a city, parenthood is at least a part-time job.
Part of the issue her is that society, at least in the U.S., has significantly devalued the idea of living close to one's family. Sure, some people don't grow up in economically vibrant areas, but many others move away from family without giving much thought to what they're giving up.
> but many others move away from family without giving much thought to what they're giving up.
I don't know how large of a population that really is. I've found many people move away because their family lives in a place that isn't approachable for them to live in. (e.g. Grew up in the bay area but not with well to do parents - just ones that barely got by. They aren't in careers that afford them $2m homes)
And many move away because they despise them and never wish their children to encounter their family.
I really do think many people give plenty of thought about moving away from family in one way or another. It's their family - they lived with them for something like 18 years. Everyone gives that thought.
Also, mothers didn't have to keep an eye on the kids all the time past infancy. It was fairly common to leave them on their own with other kids to play, only ensuring they're fed on time.
And once they reached a sufficient age (10 or 12), children usually helped the family with their craft.
Before the industrial revolution, what's considered norm today was the norm only for aristocrats.
I'm 37 and the oldest of 4 kids and your first paragraph is for the most part how I grew up. I don't remember my mom following any of us around past a certain age, like 5 or so. She cleaned the house etc. while we played inside or in the backyard. I remember going up the block to the park with my friends without any adults at the age of 10-12 or maybe a little younger.
It isn't a bad idea but really you are just talking about the cost of daycare services. Some mothers and fathers stay home because they want time with their kids at a very young age. They want to be able to go to every show and tell. Most people who are able to have a stay at home parent is because the other partner makes enough so the don't need to work. You suggestion just makes work possible for a subset that don't work because sending four kids to daycare costs more than they could make. There are other issues for school age kids where they need care close to their school district (for busing) not necessarily where they work.
It may have also been the case, that before industrialization, metal smelting, and anything-faster-than-walking the world was inherently safe.
Daycare only become necessary once transportation, tools that could cut, and exposed toxins became abundant.
Imagine a world were all parents let their children roam the streets from dawn til dinner, child-right-of-way, and any harm befalling a child was universally met with public outcry against the adult responsible for creating unsafe conditions. (If you left a can of gas unlocked and Jimmy burns thing down, you are responsible, not Jimmy or Jimmys parents. Rational precautions etc.)
Kids would be barred from factories sure, highways and other necessarily dangerous places could be fenced off. Contrast this with our blame-the-parents instincts, now.
Can we collectively consider taking a step in that direction?
When our workplaces have a spot for our cars and not our children, should be surprised that car ownership climbs and fertility falls?
> It may have also been the case, that before industrialization, metal smelting, and anything-faster-than-walking the world was inherently safe.
I would disagree: historically, kids had to cope with other threats - illnesses, toxic or otherwise deadly animals, general accidents that are "tiny nothings" today could cripple or even kill you back then because there were no antibiotics...
Back 200 years ago, this only worked because people bred like rabbits. Partially of course because there was no birth control (or its usage, e.g. intestines as condoms, frowned upon by the church) , but also because if you had 10 kids it didn't matter if all survived and losses were expected/built in. Now with people having only one child or two, these must be protected to ensure family survival, and that is where helicoptering comes from.
> When our workplaces have a spot for our cars and not our children, should be surprised that car ownership climbs and fertility falls?
The other idea would be to provide livable wages again. I am 28 now, my father was barely 20 and a fresh police officer when I was born - but he could solely fund me, my sister, my mother and himself, saving enough on the side for a downpayment on a 100+ m2 flat.
Today? Many young policemen have to work side gigs to make rent, and my s/o and I plan for the first kid in 3 years from now because without us both working (she's finishing her MSc) we don't stand a chance to financially survive, and forget about saving anything or buying a place to live if our parents would not support us financially. And that doesn't even include the question "who will stay home for how much time/reduce their hours".
Provide real wages, limit workdays to 4x6 or 5x6 hours a week (and ENFORCE this) and whoops, there are the children that have been missing. If people don't feel safe they don't have kids.
I would expect that if wages wise, that screens-per-person would increase and children-per-person would continue to decrease.
Housing, healthcare, and actual-cost-of-food (because eating out is on the rise) are all increasing beyond any realistic hope of political reform. Best to optimize for children at the expense of any dream of middle class comfort.
My parents had a low income and made 2 kids work. I expect to stretch things thinner than they had to even with our middle class-ish income. (Most meals are homemade and vegetarian for example).
I know a family that's under 30, just had their second, just bought a house, and is a single earner as a middle/high school teacher. It is possible, it just requires some sacrifice.
Daycare isn't an appropriate analogue to your example though. A shift in culture that allows you to bring your children to work would be and would be absolutely sensible for white collar and several blue collar jobs.
A shift in culture that allows you to bring your children to work would be and would be absolutely sensible for white collar and several blue collar jobs.
Young children (under three) babble and screech and cry and explore and try to finger everything and put everything in their mouth and then screech when you take the thing away from them or try to restrain them from getting at that shiny object they really want. They play for a few minutes then come running over demanding attention and screech if you ignore them. They get hungry and cry, they fall and cry. And this cannot be trained out of them because they are too young for that.
None of this is a problem if you have baby proofed your house and they can wander and play with whatever they want, and if you are just doing chores and can give them the love and attention when they demand it and go back to your chore when they go back to playing again. But it is a big problem if you and other people are trying to concentrate and work.
A running car would be equally disruptive I think.
I have worked at places that paid for convenient nearby parking.
I worked at a university that had a daycare just across the street. Given the dramatic pay gap between there and elsewhere it must have been sticky enough for some.
I've had coworkers bring their children into work - they're highly distracting and not good for work place productivity. It's not like bringing a pet into work that just sits on the floor or on their lap - and may as well be close to an inanimate object.
Yup. Back in the day, women in traditional housewife roles were major contributors to their household finances [1]. They used their own unpaid labor to transform raw materials into goods that saved their family from having to purchase them on the market. They also performed services that would have been prohibitive to hire out. But thanks to mass production and household appliances, household production doesn't contribute as much to household finances as it once did. 1950's suburbia was that awkward transition period before middle class families realized that they could have dual incomes--it was never going to last.
> think a benefits platform that allows companies to offer daycare as a benefit
Companies could offer daycare as a benefit today if they wanted to. It isn't their benefits platform holding them back.
In fairness, I can see why companies don't offer daycare as a benefit: it's enormously expensive (particularly in major metros) and it would be very difficult to plan what % of your employees would be utilising it at any one time.
Other countries have solved this problem by making it everyone's problem: the government subsidises it. I won't hold my breath waiting for the US to do the same.
And according to one company, daycare as a benefit pays for itself by reducing turnover ... although Patagonia really stands out by offering such a benefit in the current environment. If such a benefit became the norm maybe people would go back to hopping between jobs at something close to the previous rate.
Oh, I've used them! I just really don't think they're a startup by any definition. Founded in 1986, 30,000 employees, 1,000 locations.
And they aren't offering a benefit platform, they're running actual daycare locations. Their connection to employers is also most commonly providing "backup care", not solid day-to-day daycare. Nothing to sniff at of course, but that alone will not solve the problem for working parents.
Some indigenous North Americans used the strap their babies into cradle boards that could be propped up somewhere safe while parents did whatever. That handles pre-walking children.
I wish we knew more about how children spent their days in pre-industrial societies. Maybe they played out of site of their parents, only coming home to eat. I had a pretty autonomous childhood.
If we imagine that the work of women was craft work that could be safely and comfortably be done in the presence of children, then we can compare that to the places and conditions of the workplace of todays woman.
If yesterdays woman could bring her kids to work and todays cant, then we are pressuring women to have fewer children, and dumping the blame on them to boot.
What does todays idealized woman look like? Who are the role models we assign to our daughters?
I worked for a company that had daycare as a benefit, but were much more reluctant to flex in their more ingrained ideas of work schedule. I guess you could say they were more conservative overall, despite how much money they wasted in make-work. Seemed to more or less be a consequence of having employees with kods before they moved to a big new office.
Her argument just shows how entrenched sexism runs in our society.
Anecdotal evidence/sample size one story:
My wife has a doctorate in chemistry and 2 postdocs under her belt, but she had to leave her field purely due to sexism she encountered during her post docs. The PI (her boss) was quite abusive, outright sexist and a horrible racist. My wife wanted to move on to industry jobs but her wouldn't let her leave. So he kept giving bad references. We didn't know about this until after my wife looked into why she got rejected.
Academic careers in STEM require almost exclusive focus on your career for the first two decades of pursuit. This is simply because that is what the competition does.
My anecdata suggests women are less willing to allow a single aspect of their lives to entirely dominate over all others. Child bearing happens to be one of the bigger alternative endeavors, but it's not the only one.
Supporting women (and men!) who want to pursue an academic career in STEM while raising a family is a laudable goal. I hope it is more effective than I expect it to be.
When I was an engineering manager at one tech company 6 years ago, I fought like hell to get a woman who had a CS Ph.D. to join my team, and I somehow pulled that off. Her husband also had a CS degree (B.S. or M.S., not recall which) and worked for another tech company.
Every time there was a contractor that they needed to have someone at the house for, or every time their kid got sick and/or couldn't go to school, guess which of the two of them always took the time off work to handle it?
Now I had no insight into their family dynamics, and it felt it wasn't my place to pry. But over dozens of "time off" incidents through several years, it was very clear to me that my female employee was the "default caretaker" for anything relating to the house or the child that came up. This was despite the fact that she had a higher-paying position than what he had (based on what I can now see on levels.fyi).
While you are very likely correct, your perception could also be biased. If the father took time, you wouldn't know about it. So from your point of view, it was always her, but it could have also been only half the time.
This is a good model for why women capable of or wanting to have children leave but won't do much to explain anything to women aren't capable of having children, or who don't want children, and still can't break past middle management into product/exec/C-suite roles over younger, less qualified men.
I'm not a fan of this title. Throughout the piece, sexism is regarded as a key factor. The thesis of the article, and indeed the article's title, suggests that sexism isn't the only factor. This isn't an "alternative argument," it's another piece to the puzzle.
This 'scissor diagrams' are a gross misrepresentation of what is really going on in academia. It conveys the the misleading message that 'the pipeline' is only leaking for female STEM aspirants. In fact, if you start with 100 woman and 100 men, so 200 STEM students in total, only around 1-5 people will make it to the end of these scissor diagrams (professorship and alike). Let's assume a very strong imbalance, say we have 4 man and 1 woman making it (80/20). That means the drop out rate (or 'leakiness') is 96% for men and 99% for woman! So yes, in this case it is 4 times as likely for a man to become professor compared to a woman. However, it's still very unlikely (4%) for an individual man to succeed and hence the majority of men also drop out of STEM academia.
I wonder if shorter PhD programs, like they have at Oxford might give women more time in the workforce before they start becoming concerned with starting a family. Maybe starting earlier puts them in a more senior position at a younger age.
Shorter and fewer Ph.D.s (aka constrain the supply the way the AMA does) would actually solve all the problems mentioned here. Might even kickstart stalled scientific and technological development.
One of the possible reasons for lack of progress; too many people. If you look at something like a consensus algorithm, many work much more slowly with "too many participants."
Or it could be an insufficiently high IQ test at present; dumb people get in the way and cause problems.
I do find it interesting that there is so much focus on academia - it's probably natural when the the people that are talking and writing about this are so often academics.
In business, one thing that I have seen a lot of people crash aground on a reef on is that working in professions that require STEM credentials is a night-and-day difference from the process that one goes through to acquire those credentials. I've known a lot of people that loved their computer science programs in university, and then found actually working as a programmer such a shock that they noped right out into something else.
So it seems that in addition to fighting sexism, we need to combat ageism, the viability of non-standard career paths with breaks, and the friendlines of the workplace in general to families.
I remember seeing, I think in Netflix’s Explained series, that the salary differences between men and women were the same as the differences between women with children and women within children, making raising children the primary cause for the average salary disparities. This article rings true with that.
I can’t speak for women, but the pay for science degrees kinda sucks. I’m guessing it would make sense to leave to another field that pays better. My wife was a bio major and her first real job was selling HPLC columns. She ended up not liking sales so pivoted into teaching where the pay is decent.
> When you ask women why they left, the number one reason they cite is balancing work/life responsibilities — which as far as I can tell is a euphemism for family concerns.
At least in america women are, in this way, almost always asked to choose between their career and having children. This is asymmetrical with men's experience because whether or not they are comfortable with it, its considered normal for them to spend most of their time at work even if they have a newborn.
I'm not sure what else you'd call this status quo aside from "sexist." It's a systemic sexism that has deep roots in how we organize the aesthetics of our society.
This frames the decision to dedicate more time towards childcare than work as a something thrust onto women by societal expectation when women would rather work. Studies indicate that only 20% of women would prefer to work full time after having a child, with the rest preferring part time work or staying at home with the children. Furthermore, 70% of women with children that are currently working full time responded that they would rather be working part time or not at all [1]. By comparison the majority of men indicate that they would rather work full time.
Women and men both have to choose between their careers and spending more time with children, and their choices reflect their preferences. One can make the argument that this is indirect sexism - that women's preferences stem from sexist social influence. But the fact remains: most women don't want to work full time, and the lower rates of women working full time after having children is reflective of women's preferences.
I suspect given an economic choice, many men would prefer not to work full time either.
For some reason men don't get asked whether or not this is true. It's simply assumed that men will dedicate their lives to work because it's the only way to pay for a family.
>It's a systemic sexism that has deep roots in how we organize the aesthetics of our society
Or it's a systematic sexism that has deep roots in human biology and thousands of generations of sexually dimorphic specialization, and I can't believe we've successfully convinced multiple generations of westerners now to pretend that men and women are equally suited for all roles, including child rearing.
Now we need an article which takes an honest look at the possibility that gender imbalance in STEM (and other fields) is at least partly a result of similar specialization for cognitive tasks, where researchers like the author of the article are closer to extremes of an ability distribution. But I'm relieved to see a take that questions the tired, pervasive assumption that STEM is simply not welcoming to women because old white men are sexist.
>Or it's a systematic sexism that has deep roots in human biology and thousands of generations of sexually dimorphic specialization
Are you saying women are naturally more nurturing than men? And more inclined towards childcare?
Because I vehemently disagree.
>I'm relieved to see a take that questions the tired, pervasive assumption that STEM is simply not welcoming to women because old white men are sexist.
It can definitely be a factor. And even a more important factor is the fact that women can feel unwelcome in tech. At Oxford only 10% of the undergraduates accepted to study computer science were women. Now imagine being a woman in that class. You might feel like you don't belong, although you might be friends with your predominantly male classmates. Some of them will make jokes at the expense of your gender, others will hit on you, and the list goes on. Obviously not all of them will treat you differently, but some of them will, and that's enough to feel unwelcomed. And thus, you might be more inclined to leave tech for a field with more women, like biology.
Can confirm that I know multiple women who work less then they imagined for themselves or want to, cause their husbands basically finds it more fun to be in work and cant be arsed to go home.
Their resentment is quite real. Their actions looks like choice, until they trust you well enough to vent to you.
That is often true. But the frequent prequel is also “I want a baby” originating from a woman. I don’t have un-anecdata too, but it happened to me, to my buddies and to my male family members. As men may or may not definitely, consciously want kids and do related work, at least we need to bin resentments into two buckets (fail of promise vs. fail of expectation) and evaluate them separately.
That would be another situation where something that looks like a choice from outside is not one.
With some of the women I had in mind, I know for sure they strongly did not wanted next kid while husband suggested that, so it is not the same (in the sense that he did not wanted kid and therefore it should be all on her).
The fundamental differentiator between early and late stage in those graphs is that there are far fewer positions as time moves on, in the 'higher' cohorts.
It's not people just graduate along the path from A to Z - it's viciously competitive.
Issues of maternity et. al. I think are just one important artefact of the nature of competition which for whatever reason I think is still going to favour men. Risk taking, hubris, aggression, physical endurance, combativeness, a certain kind if confidence, social expectations, possibly even the acceptance of those things by others - these things mean a lot at those later stages.
This is a societal problem of promoting career instead of family, and delaying parenthood. In your early 20s, your time is worth so little compared to your later career, and your parents are young enough to be more involved. Having children while being an undergraduate is better than when you have an advanced career, substantial earnings, and little support from parents.
The best time to have kids is when you are getting your undergrad degree.
Daycare is not the answer. Not even "High Quality Daycare" (whatever that means?) is something to be proud of???... unless by "high quality daycare" you mean a personal nursery next to your executive office.
High quality parenting is the goal. We could provide adequate time off for anyone wanting to spend their time parenting THEIR child. Will they lose their job? No. Will they not get a raise or promotion? Yes.
> I would presume that if we made academia a more feasible place for a woman with a family to work, we could keep almost all of those 20% of leavers who leave to just stay at home...
That one word 'just' speaks volumes. People grow up. People change. Perhaps they want a different challenge than what academic achievement can provide. Raising children is challenging, daunting, and rewarding.
I'm just not sure how upset to be that there is still some difference in typical roles between men and women. It may be a norm for women to be more likely to be the primary caregiver for young children, but is that bad or wrong? It may even be a biological drive for all I know. Is 50/50 representation at all levels of all fields really the goal we want to shoot for?
How about the variance difference: men and women are equally intelligent on average. However, the variance is different so that there are more stupid men but also more intelligent men.
Could the drop-out rate simply reflect the higher share of men who are able to fulfill the functions that are required at those higher positions?
My note to the author, enjoy your career. If and when you feel ready to start a family, you will. And if it doesn't happen, you'll be okay too.
Maternal Age seems like a boogie man story to scare women.
Perhaps STEM women who are early career (24-28) would benefit from meeting mothers (both who are in STEM and not in STEM careers) who had children at age 35+.
> ...Women who stay in academia expect to marry later, and delay or completely forego having children, and if they do have children, plan to have fewer than their non-STEM counterparts (Sassler et al 2016, Owens 2012). Men in STEM have no such difference compared to their non-STEM counterparts
I would love to see the figures regarding the partners of STEM Women vs STEM Men. Is it due to the old sexist notion that women must "marry up" so a woman with a successful career have partnered with someone who also has a successful career?
Having family shifts perspective. Perhaps some of these women no longer felt a strong desire to further their career, and family matters became more interesting?
As a father, I love my job, but I gladly set aside my career to raise my kids.
My wife was a developer (EE degree). As soon as our first child was on-the-way she put down her programming books and picked up the child rearing books. She dropped her dev job the moment her water broke and never looked back.
The opportunity cost was enormous but now that the kids are grown it sure seems like it was a great plan for us. My wife did get a lot grief from her family for dropping out of the workforce ($$) until they started having their own kids.
We have two daughters. The youngest is in college for CS, she has made it very clear that she does not want to have children. The older daughter is not STEM -- she is an Army officer (Westpoint Grad) who does want kids someday.
One of my in-laws is using nannies and such even though they easily could drop to one income (MD specialist dad, pharmacist mom) -- it hurts my heart to see how much time they voluntarily spend away from their kids, including weekend shifts, holiday shifts, etc. But it is their life, and their kids seem to be thriving so what do I know.
To be honest, at the time, me leaving the workforce never crossed our minds. I was a hotshot dev in those days and I barely even paused when our first kid was born.
And, as I remember it, my wife intended to go back to dev work after a couple of months. But her return never materialized. It didn't seem like a reasonable option to us when the time came.
>Maternal Age seems like a boogie man story to scare women.
It's just a biological reality. It is certainly possible to have a healthy birth after the age of 35 but the rate of health problems and birth defects don't go up linearly with age. The rate of pregnancy loss is 35% after the age of 35 and is above 50% after the age of 45. This is just reality. If women want to have multiple children it is wise to start before age 33.
The decrease in fertility with age is a biological reality, but I also suspect it's influenced by attrition selection and stress, and looks worse because of it. Fecundability seems to be roughly linear with age, and gravid women have significantly higher fecunability ratio from 40-45 than nulligravid women do.
> In this preconception cohort study of North American pregnancy planners, increasing female age was associated with an approximately linear decline in fecundability.
A reason I suggest young women speak with women who started families mid-late career would hear actual experiences, giving perspective that it's not as bleak as the statistics show.
We had two children, both healthy, after mom was 35.
We also had a pregnancy that didn't go to term.
I surmise women might take some comfort in knowing that pregnancy complications are normal.
It's not about individual anecdotes, it's about probabilities and actuarial risks.
A woman who gets pregnant at 25 is less likely to have issues than a woman who gets pregnant at 35 and much less likely to have issues than a woman who gets pregnant at 45.
That's the reality.
The fact that some women have successful pregnancies at 45 doesn't change it. Nor does it suggest that women should simply ignore the facts and hope for the best.
Some drivers make successful journeys while drunk, without killing themselves or anyone else. That doesn't mean drunk driving is a recommended personal choice, or that the element of choice somehow makes the risks disappear, or that drunk drivers who happen to beat the odds and survive many journeys should be sharing their lifestyle choices with others.
> A woman who gets pregnant at 25 is less likely to have issues than a woman who gets pregnant at 35 and much less likely to have issues than a woman who gets pregnant at 45.
You are equating to "issues" to mean "no healthy children"
> The fact that some women have successful pregnancies at 45 doesn't change it
Is a straw man.
Plenty of women have successful pregnancies at 35. And 25 year old women debating that choice should hear from them.
Said differently:
Can you wait too long to have children? Yes.
Is 35 too long? No.
> Maternal Age seems like a boogie man story to scare women
Actually not. It's not just the genetics / pregnancy problems that are proven to significantly rise with age... but also that the time of menopause can neither be forecast nor the effects reversed (some hit it with 40, some with 60!), so there is a significant disadvantage (=no kids at all) for waiting too long.
Additionally: do you want to deal with a baby when you're 25 or when you are 40 or, worse, 50, that keeps you awake all night? It's a massive toll on your physical and especially mental health - the younger you are the better you cope. And your kids will be happier to have a dad/mom who can actually do things with you when they're 15-25 years...
I absolutely agree, maternal age is not discussed often enough, there are a number of risks that go up significantly when you wait until later to have children, for both men and women. A mother at age 20 has a 1 in 1,441 of having a baby with a Down Syndrome, whereas the odds are 1 in 84 at 40 years of age. Even at age 35 there's a 1 in 338 chance of a woman giving birth to a baby with Down Syndrome which is an order of magnitude higher than a woman at age 20 has, and that's just one defect! There are a whole host of defects including Autism that are strongly associated with the mother's age. Similarly a woman who has a baby at 40 has a 5.5% chance of dying before that child's 18th birthday, at 20 the odds of dying before your child reaches adulthood is only 0.6%.
It's that a RISK of increase, is being substituted a guarantee.
And, I should clarify, I was speaking about the authors range of starting a family around age 35.
> Additionally: do you want to deal with a baby when you're 25 or when you are 40 or, worse, 50, that keeps you awake all night?
I see that as personal choice, and each family should be able to make that choice for themselves by understanding and weighing the risks.
Not be scared into making a decision with misleading statistics.
Me personally, I had the means at age 38, that I could hire a night doula (and nearly did). Infants usually begin sleeping through the night ~6 months, coinciding with them starting solid foods (breastmilk tends to go through a baby quickly) while solids take longer to digest. As I was on the cusp of my little guy starting solids, I tried a couple different things first:
* Used a sleep sack
* Moved his pack-n-play outside my room
Both helped him sleep through the night.
So ~6 months wasn't terrible. I also have a unique situation that helps me cope with elevated levels of stress.
For our first child, we had a live-in nanny.
I got to enjoy living for myself from 25-35, that when I settled down to start a family, I was able to focus on that.
This seems like a really long argument just to end up at the main point being: "It really is sexism". The light bulb moment here is that it's not necessarily sexism on an individual level but on an institutional one.
I believe there is an obvious difference men and women which, on a general level, incites women to weigh family responsibilities over career prospects. However, industrialized nations exacerbate that difference by making it very difficult for women with children to spend the time necessary for career advancement.
The key here isn't necessarily throwing your hands up and saying there's nothing you can do about it, but more robust programs for parents to help lessen the load of parenthood.
(The "maternal wall" is sexism. If it impacted men, academia would not be shaped liked this. This is not to detract from the article, which is awesome.)
one of the aspects of being bullied, and sexism is a form of bullying, is the the bullied person is humiliated, made to doubt their own capabilities and made to fear repercussions. The result being that women leave and cite personal reasons for, their departure.
Surveys like this are not necessarily honest as the participants are not necessarily being honest.
I was discussing this not long ago and hypothesized that we have swung the pendulum so far in encouraging women into STEM that they feel pressured into the decision, ultimately leading many of them to go down a path in which they have no interest.
Exactly my confusion with this article. I have multiple female friends who have earned doctorates in STEM who have either left or are planning on leaving academia to go to industry. However, they are still all going into STEM jobs!
So maybe the problem is that industry STEM is offering an overall better benefits package than academia? We're seeing the same thing in fields like AI, where academia can't retain top talent.
Yeah it's unfortunate that the author of this article uses the term STEM over and over again and is really only talking about the S. I wounder if the issues mentioned here are as common in private industry for women in the TEM fields? It seems like at least some companies are far more generous with things like maternity leave than what you might find in academia.
I can't speak for women, and I'm just smart enough not to try.
But what I can say is that I don't hold all of the values that I did as a young man. I'm not excited about the same things, and today I find some of those ideas uncomfortably naive or even off-putting.
As I've engaged in more activities, as I've socialized with more people, I've encountered many more ideas and a lot of nuance. Nothing has simple answers and there are other solutions to problems besides code, or tools, or pills, or surgery.
And one of the consequences of this is that I'm not confident that if I show up to interview at a startup that I'm going to exhibit the degree of 'passion' they're looking for. I have plenty of passion. Too much, some will tell you. I just know beyond all doubt that your new iOS app is not going to save the world, and quite bluntly, that you have some unresolved issues that you need to work through if you so desperately need to believe how transformative your work is going to be. And I know that's not just STEM - all the 20-somethings who I've seen doing volunteer work - and bless you for showing up - feel exactly the same way. I'm gonna change the world. I have to change the world. Otherwise my life is empty and I am nothing.
It can be discomfiting to be around and I'm sure I telegraph it.
They say that young women socialize a little ahead of young men. Maybe they just get a whiff of my reality before all the rhetoric gets piled on so thick that's all they can see.
In her article, she explains her hypothesis that women leave top-flight STEM/academic careers because the demands (and, crucially, when they must be met: 20s & 30s) conflict with the demands of bearing children during a woman's most-likely-to-be-successful childbearing years. She goes on to suggest that creating more supports for mothers such as affordable childcare and possibly collaborative academic working environments might mitigate the issue.
What leads you to think primarily about "passion" & socialization? It seems almost as though we read different articles, I didn't see anything about that.
This is not a sufficient explanation. There’s more women in law and medicine, which are equally, if not more demanding. There must be something else - the nature of work (more people, less machines), the atmosphere (less bro, more professional), the pay (STEM careers plateau quickly)...
> There’s more women in law and medicine, which are equally, if not more demanding.
There exists plenty of gender disparity within these fields. Many more women in pediatrics, obgyn and family law, many more men in surgery, for instance. I'd like to see a study of these disparities to see if the subfields women choose have the benefits this author suggest is a major cause of women leaving STEM.
I've heard that number before, where is it from? Does it control for the idea that more experienced practitioners tend to be called on for more complex operations?
This article suggests that while errors increase with the age of the practitioner, mortality does not. The difference is more likely to result from differences in training. There is also a lot of variation between individuals, with some older doctors far outperforming their younger counterparts.
I don’t have any compelling evidence at hand, but professionals on STEM fields usually seem compelled to engage on career-related activities off their work hours, which is pretty much impossible during childbearing years.
It's right there in the article. You can't take a break from academia. Well, you can, but your career prospects suffer horribly. A quote: "Taking a year off during that critical 5 or 6 year period often means that the research “goes bad” ... You wind up needing to rebuild much more than just a year’s worth of effort."
Compare it with e.g. big tech - a hypothetical female PM who has just completed a big project can go off on a maternity leave and return to the memories of her success slightly faded, her contacts gone slightly cold, but otherwise she can start more or less where she left.
Law and medicine are traditionally seen as high status and may retain women longer, but certainly, suffer the same issue; women over 30 drop off dramatically in law as they leave to become parents.
Great synopsis of the article. Nothing about GP's comment relates to the article's points. In case anyone's reading these comments who hasn't read the article, it's super worth reading.
Sort of, but generally speaking, in the work world, men are rewarded for having families and women's careers are penalized on multiple levels.
Dad's are paid more, more sympathetic and even cheered on when they leave early for the talent show. Women on the other hand are considered less committed, less capable and less flexible.
Yes from her description it does seem like childcare would help a lot. But one of the other things she mentions is the moving (city/state) as well as travel. But sure looks like childcare would go a long way in helping.
I don’t think we would build “science towns” like Los Alamos in this day and age, but that would probably help as well.
I'm a little confused why work-life balance is the 'alternative' argument when it feels very much contiguous to the ones we already know and discuss, which is why I wrote what I wrote. Clearly, several people agree with you that what I said is a non-sequitur. My initial instinct was to agree, but trying to formulate a worthy reply and referring back to the article, I've decided to disagree.
She's talking post-engagement, I wrote about pre-engagement, but was thinking about both. People get it coming and going.
We have this not-at-all accurate mindset about professionalism and self-sacrifice, that 'everybody is doing it' but 'everyone' is mostly young, unattached men with something to prove. It's the Prisoner's Dilemma and young men defect. Immediately.
One of the things I value most about trying to get men to look at toxic masculinity is pointing out the self-harming aspects, showing how it's not that great a bargain. To demand better for themselves, and of themselves. I think the unattached bachelor who can work 60 hours a week 'with no consequences' is toxic, at least a little bit. We should all say 'yes' to anything that is not that. Travel, partners, relatives, children, volunteer work. Hell, throw pinball games and scifi conventions in too, not because I equate those with the first things on that list, but because I have taken the long way around to find that "there's work to do" should be a lower priority than self-care. Adjust your own oxygen mask before helping others with theirs. Advice I need to follow better myself.
I just spent a bunch of time writing down some specific examples, but it was starting to feel like a cherry-picked narrative about myself, which my partner teases me about, so block-delete. Suffice it to say that at the bottom of it I came away with this thought: I think 'treating people the same' but still volunteering yourself for things you shouldn't expect from others is not actually 'treating people the same'. If you never say, do, or look away from a single directly disrespectful thing in your whole life there are still a dozen ways you can contribute to a hostile environment.
In child development I think they call this 'bidding'. The child observes differential behavior from their guardians and tailors their interactions to maximize their returns, and things can get pretty out of control unless the parents communicate with each other, respect each other's concerns, and agree on boundaries.
Solidarity counts a lot. Maybe more than anything. And solidarity will, I believe, give you family leave, gap years, partial leave, childcare near work, hobbies... but those things without solidarity are just salves on a wound that never heals.
> And one of the consequences of this is that I'm not confident that if I show up to interview at a startup that I'm going to exhibit the degree of 'passion' they're looking for.
This is good, though. If you faked the passion, you might wind up surrounded by lunatics who actually believe their iOS app is going to save the world.
Also, this "passion", most of the time, is just a word that has been co-opted by the owner class to mean "working nights and weekends".
Yeah, I had that pattern in mind as I was choosing my phrasing.
Coworkers know that they can come to me and say, "hey dude, your code is busted and 4 people can't get work done," I'll drop everything and fix it if I can't give you a workaround (and it'll bug me until I do fix it). I like that passion in others. I get into a little trouble when that passion is about completely fixable things that are dragging down productivity and morale. I'm not particularly repentant about that either.
But when it's some tie telling me we have to work weekends because they didn't listen when we told them "shipping this functionality by April 3rd is a dangerous fiction and you need to come up with a new plan?" you're on your own pal. If you can't hear 'no' then you can't make useful contingencies. Also it probably means you don't respect the people I respect and that's gonna be a problem.
My passion rears its ugly head when my team is asked to take shortcuts and ship garbage to meet deadlines. It also comes out when we're asked to implement half-baked ideas without having the chance to meet and question the ideators and refine those ideas into something workable.
I did not mean to imply that there isn't a ton of other unwarranted bullshit they have to deal with. Reading it back to myself, that wasn't clear at all.
Is this poster for real? I am not sure how this got top upvotes since it doesn't seem to be about the article at all. The article was about women in STEM academia which doesn't seem to be at all about women whiffing a poster's reality.
The article is about women in STEM academia which is a tiny subset of women in the STEM workforce. Some STEM professions do a better job of retaining women than others.
Institutions in the country introduced gender quotas for internal committees and boards in an effort to reduce bias during hiring and other inequalities, but such measures themselves are now being labelled potential hindrances to female progression because the roles cost women career-crucial research time.
You're not wrong, but it has a different timbre when low self esteem is at the root of it, and that's what I was thinking of in particular.
You're basically attaching your identity (being okay with who you are, really) to a future event. One that you can influence but not really control. And I suspect it makes you easier to manipulate, and burnout all that much more powerful when it doesn't happen.
I think there are plenty of people who believe "if you're not part of the solution, you're part of the problem." I'm lucky enough that my job is both interesting and impactful. The people that surround me are either incredible scientists or like working for a company that strives to, and does, make an impact in the world.
I think it's perfectly fine to not care about your job to a higher degree than necessary, and I also think it's fine to seek out work based on social impact rather than salary. Most people can't have it both ways, and end up having to make a choice at some point.
I've been guilty of that myself. Question is, which problem? There are so many problems (some of them personal, some of them management won't say out loud) and everyone has their own priority queue.
Maybe the real problem isn't even technical. Maybe Jim and Tom just hate each other because something happened when they first met. We can keep arguing about haproxy vs nginx 'til the cows come home, or I could say to myself, "Hey, they both listen to Kevin, I'm gonna go ask him for a favor..." but that's kinda passing the buck.
My biggest success not falling back to other people for this was Ben, who yelled at me - in an open office plan - the first time I asked him for help. It took most of a year of me making smalltalk at the coffee machine before he was happy to see me coming, instead of avoiding eye contact. I think at some point he figured out we think alike on certain BS technical limitations, and then I started getting smiles.
If you can't tell from this that I'm fond of cats, especially shy or cantankerous ones, well...
Men are hardwired to ascend to the top of the hierachy so they can access all the women. That's why male billonaires will risk their fortune to make another billion.
Women are not rewarded biologically for being the top 2% in their industry. It's almost as if the higher women climb career wise the fewer dating options they have because women tend to want men that are even higher on the totem pole.
Outside of a score keeping system, each additional dollar is less rewarding very quickly once you pass $150k in income.
Well, it probably assumes that the 98% are eager to throw themselves in the rat race in trying to become that top 2% or at least closer to them; the fact that they won't get there doesn't mean that there isn't a drive to optimize your career to try.
Great question, and there are multiple explanations that can work, although I disagree with the previous poster:
There is more than one hierarchy of competence. For each occupation, hobby and skill there's it's own hierarchy.
So if there's ~30 hierarchies, approximately half of competitors are going to be in top 2% of at least one.
It's okay to be jaded, but to present that as coming from wisdom that others are missing is both self-congratulatory and lacking in self-awareness.
I think you misrepresent startup founders. Most I've met are generally very smart people and they've read The Remains of the Day too so it's not like they're this nerd-in-the-basement fantasy you get from the movies. The Hollywood fantasy is dead.
I'm only saying this so that young fellows browsing HN from their computers at university aren't immediately discouraged. To them: The world is very exciting here. You can find a team and work happily and passionately on something you care about. You will be fine. It is probable that you will be better for it. Good luck!
It's hard to find the right tone between "things need to change" and "everything is horrible".
Good teamwork is just about my favorite thing (I even prefer co-op games to solo). You might find it, for sure you can build it, and even when you have to work your butt off for it, I think it's still less work than killing yourself 60+ hours a week.
I’d love to be wrong, but my gut feeling is that a huge proportion of HN readers are men—probably even a larger proportion than in the tech industry in general. It makes it feel kinda weird when these articles the gist of which are “women are wrong about women’s issues” come up. That applies equally to the “all men’s problems are women’s fault” articles that seem to be just as popular around here.
Brand-new planes that crash, bridges that fall on the first day, the subordination of computing to advertising and surveillance, iatrogenics, plastics/xenoestrogens, environmental destruction, species extinction, paper-upon-paper of non-reproducible p-hacked astroturfing, and this crazy over-privileged broad is going to whine technocratically over how her gender isn't proportionally represented in this systematic destruction of nature, beauty, and civilization?
I like how she "catches readers up" on women's biology. Since she went out of her way to do that I think this would be further supported by why women want to bear children. Or thoughts and perspectives from the women that do not have children.
The article does a good job of identifying the funnel. It reiterates what we already know about society: women are aware of their biological clock and people desire to make children. But it does make an assumption that the women that stay in the funnel are childless victims, or at least portrays them that way. "Meanwhile in the Netherlands, woe!" This is hyperbole, but barely. It is okay to assume an even distribution of wants and desires as the non-STEM women, but what if there isn't? Let's get some perspectives.
Additionally, freezing eggs, surrogacy, and adoption are options followed by additional help with nannies and au pair, costly options which could be supported and subsidized by the very arguments that this article is making.
I think the case would be even stronger if we added the perspective from the child free women, along with a perspective about cultural tweaks that women could also consider. Distinct from only pointing out what organizations do not do to address the maternal wall.
If 1 Billion was spent in 2011 to support and encourage minorities and women in STEM, it really suggests that some of that money should be poured into providing childcare rather than propaganda.
Please don't make the thread even worse by posting unsubstantive comments about it.
It's a divisive topic, so fractiousness is not easy to avoid, but everyone should make sure they're up to date on the site guidelines before posting. They include: "Comments should get more thoughtful and substantive, not less, as a topic gets more divisive."
Please don't post flamebait and/or unsubstantive comments to HN—especially not on powderkeg topics. We ban accounts that do that, for what should be obvious reasons if you read https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html.
I, and many others, hold the expectation that we are quite capable of overcoming our animal instincts (in this, but importantly in many other aspects also) to make a better world. Especially if the presence of the instinct is used as a pseudo science excuse.
But it will really lead us to a better world? Theres a reason why we have instincts, its so arrogant from the enlightened westerns to think they know better than literally every other society in history.
Take it as anecdotal experience, I dont have a study right here and women are free to do whatever they want. But a childless life is much more likely to be a less happier and a unfulfilling life.
Sure, some instincts are good, like gagging at the sight of rotten food.
But also, our instincts tell us to eat sugar, be tribalistic, and (for men) to do stupid stuff to impress mates. We are designed to live in caves and chase herbivores. But for millennia we have been doing much more than what our instincts relegate us to.
And no, this is not a westerner with a superiority complex thing. See how relatively egalitarian the cultures of various settlers and natives have been throughout history.
Lastly, while I understand that for you and many others a childless life would be unfulfilling, please do not assume this to be even nearly universal. Moreover, not having or wanting your own (biological or not) children does not mean you can not help the next generation, through mentorship and teaching and community service.
Making kids is not even remotely the core reasons that many people have chosen for their existence. And this is not some egoistical selfish decision: there are many more ways in which you can take care of the next generation and make their lives better, without having to give birth. These are noble pursuits independent of gender.
The author seems to ignore the fact that plenty of women do work while pregnant and have children and go back to work after a little as 3months hiring childcare.
1. Pregnancy is very hard on women's bodies. It is not uncommon for health effects like high blood pressure, joint inflammation, and gestational diabetes to become temporarily disabling for expectant mothers.
2. Infant childcare is incredibly expensive. Even at professional levels of compensation, the expense is likely to outweigh the added income from continuing to work. Costs drop significantly once children are potty trained, but remain quite high.
3. Three months of paid maternal leave is very rare. Even with saved time off, taking large amounts of unpaid leave is hard on a family.
4. Breast feeding a child while working full days requires a huge amount of work, above and beyond the exhausting labor involved in having a new baby. If a nursing room is not provided, women often resort to spending a large amount of time pumping milk in the restroom. Which is uncomfortable, unsanitary, and disheartening.
Just because some women have the resources or the stark need to return to work so early does not mean it is possible or desirable for everyone.
We need to have better maternal leave and accommodations. Fathers need to step up and do more of the work.
We need to have better paternal leave and accomodations.
We need to support affordable child care options.
We need to make the above 4 items available to everyone.
That is clearly not the only reason, and likely isn't even a major factor in and of itself. Yes, we might expect to see slightly more men in general in math heavy fields, but that women tend to drop out as they approach not heavier math, but more time consuming/worse work/life balance situations (management) suggests the issue isn't just "men are more mathematically inclined".
Like any complex phenomenon applying to a multitude of people there are several effects happening in different proportion at the same time.
I find this a bit pointless- Scott Aaronson has his views that are not the
views of a sizeable majority of women in STEM, who find that their career
progression is hindered by institutionalised sexism. At some point Aaronson
finds or receives a dissenting opinion from a woman in STEM. He publishes it,
with a preface suggesting that _this_ is the _real_ view of a majority of
women in STEM (the opinion "dovetails with what I’ve heard from many other
women in STEM fields, including my wife Dana").
Fair enough- but how often has Aaronson published, or publicised, an opinion
from a woman who disagrees with his view? Er. Not often. Probably because he
disagrees with them and so will tend to find that they do not marshal "data,
logic, and [their] own experience in support of an insight that strikes me as true
and important and underappreciated".
So what have we learned from the fact that Scott Aaronson has published this
opinion on his blog? Absolutely nothing. We knew his opinion, he still has the
same opinion. We know there are other people, including women in STEM, that
have the same opinion as Scott Aaronson. Here is one of them and her opinion.
We have learned nothing new.
Your judgement of the article was nearly entirely informed by who wrote it rather than its contents. That's a good way to continue a culture war, not a good way to discover the truth.
I implore you to consider the well-founded facts on both sides, not to claim this piece has absolutely nothing worth saying.
The piece by the young scientist has a lot to say, but the preface by Scott Aaronson only has to say "See, I told you so!". And that's what I'm commenting on, of course.
The original essay linked combats the institutional sexism claim with data that suggests the number of women who claim to have experiences sexism is on par with non-STEM career choices, but the exit from STEM vastly exceeds that of other fields.
I agree, to the point where I wish that we'd just talk about the original article instead of this repost, instead. Maybe the URL could be changed to [0]?
Woke twitter after reading this article: Having children is a tool of the patriarchy! Another way that men keep women down! Why don't they have the biological maternal desires to have children?
Technocratic twitter after reading this article: We must solve the “maternal tax” gap!
Normal people after reading this article: "yes, this is what we have been saying for years. Promote the family."
The fact that women shoulder the primary economic burden of raising children is structural sexism. Sexism is not merely about personal conduct but also how we structure society. For millenia across many cultures women have had their participation in broader society curtailed to the sphere of reproductive and domestic labor. That is injustice. As Morenz notes, we don't have to accept that. We can structure our work so that women are not disadvantaged for having kids and men aren't penalized for taking a greater role in raising them.
This seems like violent agreement. I think Scott was trying to dismiss the people who criticize them by inviting Morenz to make a guest post. Perhaps his dismissiveness is the reason why this is so acrimonious.
> The fact that women shoulder the primary economic burden of raising children is structural sexism.
You seem to be making a fairly subtle point here that I think others might be missing. Which is not that women choosing to take on the burden of childcare represents sexism (which is an argument some people make), but rather that the fact that their making this choice impinges upon their personal economic future is sexist. That is maybe a more interesting point than the former, but I don't think it really holds up to scrutiny. Choosing to take on the burden of childcare is choosing to spend less time working. In any other context, if a person chooses to work less, that negatively impacts their earning, and we consider that perfectly reasonable and fair. If I choose to play video games for 8 hours a day and work part time, basically everyone accepts it's reasonable that I make less money.
Now, if women are being pressured or forced into accepting this childcare responsibility at their own economic expense, then yes. That is 100% structural sexism. Also, if society would have treated men making this choice differently than women, then that too would represent structural sexism. But there are men making this choice, and their careers are generally just as negatively impacted as the women who make it.
to compare it to playing video games all day is (unwittingly?) falling prey to the very systemic sexism you're trying to fathom--that "women's work" such as childcare is not "work"--that it's economically unproductive and should be "free".
No, that was not the point of my analogy. Whether it is work or not is irrelevant. When I clean my home, that is work, but nobody pays me to do it. I do the work because I receive the benefit of that work. People care for their children for the same reason. And many (most?) couples consider the income of the breadwinner to be shared between the two of them for precisely this reason: Because the couple values the childcare that the childcare-r provides.
I'm not arguing that childcare isn't valuable. I am arguing that it isn't valuable to any employer of the person doing the childcare, and as such, they shouldn't pay for it.
No, the employer is not beside the point. The employer pays your salary. If you do less work, you get less salary. That isn't saying their work isn't valuable, it is saying it isn't valuable to the employer. The person who values work pays for it. In this case, it is the woman herself who values the work. She is literally choosing to pay herself, in the form of a well cared for child. In the same way that when I clean my home, I am choosing to compensate myself for the effort required to do so by having a clean home.
You could have compared it to caring about elderly dad, doing volunteer work or anything else boring, unpaid but useful. Instead, you compared it to playing games which rubs people wrong.
Who cares what the evocation is? Are we not adults capable of following chains of reasoning without descending into literary analogy and euphemism? We're not analyzing Shakespeare here.
and that's the systemic sexism--the systemic choices about what should, and what doesn't need, to be paid for.
why don't we instead have a society where all childcare is paid labor and we just "pay ourselves" for other self-benefitting labor (growing food, for example)?
(collective) assumptions like these are the systemic sexism. note that this is different from calling a specific person a sexist.
> and that's the systemic sexism--the systemic choices about what should, and what doesn't need, to be paid for.
Who is it you think ought to be paying for childcare? It's clear who pays for wage labor. The employer pays for it, because they value it.
> why don't we instead have a society where all childcare is paid labor and we just "pay ourselves" for other self-benefitting labor (growing food, for example)?
The answer to this question is "the entire history of economics and every lesson ever learned about how to structure effective civilizations for the entire history of humanity". I'm not really sure how else to respond to that.
> that "women's work" such as childcare is not "work"--that it's economically unproductive and should be "free".
Obviously contractual childcare is work.
Seems to me more similar to voluneer open-source development. It may be productive and useful for others, but that does not entitle anyone for compensation.
> But there are men making this choice, and their careers are generally just as negatively impacted as the women who make it.
I don't think this claim holds up to scrutiny. Yes, there are men out there whose careers are negatively impacted by starting a family, but by and large the expectation is a man continues working while a woman drops everything. That's part of the reason why family leave for men is less common.
Which boils down to structural sexism being an issue for both men and women. Men are not allowed to spend time with their family and women are expected to drop everything to take care of the children. In a more equally balanced situation, men would have the opportunity to be the full caregivers while women could continue their career in their field of choice. But right now a lot of options for families depend on your gender.
> I don't think this claim holds up to scrutiny. Yes, there are men out there whose careers are negatively impacted by starting a family, but by and large the expectation is a man continues working while a woman drops everything. That's part of the reason why family leave for men is less common.
That isn't what I said though. Obviously men who start a family but don't do the childcare won't be negatively impacted. I'm not talking about them. I'm talking about the ones who do curtail their careers to do the childcare. This is a less common arrangement to be sure, but I know more than one heterosexual couple who has done this (usually because the woman has a better paying career).
You said that they were equally negatively impacted though and I brought up an example of where that is clearly not the case. Which is parental leave, done in a way as to discourage men from taking time off to take care of a newborn while also pressuring women to be the primary caregivers.
That's my entire point. They're not equally impacted because there are larger societal pressures designed to punish women who want to continue their career and men who want to spend time with their children.
> You said that they were equally negatively impacted though and I brought up an example of where that is clearly not the case. Which is parental leave, done in a way as to discourage men from taking time off to take care of a newborn while also pressuring women to be the primary caregivers.
Read what I said more carefully. I didn't say all men are equally negatively impacted. I said the men who choose to take on the burden of childcare are equally negatively impacted.
> Read what I said more carefully. I didn't say all men are equally negatively impacted. I said the men who choose to take on the burden of childcare are equally negatively impacted.
And I think you need to reread my argument, which is specifically talking about those men who do take on the burden of childcare against the societal pressure to do otherwise. I think it would do you well to reread my argument from the top because it's starting to seem like you're arguing against something entirely different than what I'm saying.
Yes, you are making a separate line of argument that is completely unrelated to the piece of my argument you quoted. I am not responding to that because I agree with it - social pressure that pushes women into childcare is sexism. The impact of choosing childcare over career on economic is not sexism.
Have you considered that the primary enforcer of this curtailment is not adults but infants? I mean, I took long paternity leave, I am with my daughter at night, and am with her whenever I am home. She still wants to nurse on her mothers breast when she's sick or in pain. This makes sense as not only is it comforting to her (and a childs emotional need is very real) but it is also physiologically beneficial (nursing reduces stress hormones and helps her heal from disease faster). She enforces this dichotomy of roles by screaming if i try to comfort her and shes already decided what she wants by screaming mama. She'll take comfort from me only if shes decided that its something that doesnt require something no man can give. And her cry is meant to change both of our emotional states to fulfill her every desire.
Is this injustice? Perhaps you could characterize it this way, but since the perpetrator is beyond reason and lacks expression, I'm not sure how youre going to fix this.
This is an obvious truth to anyone with children. Women have to carry, birth, and recover from having a baby plus raise/feed them in the first 1-2 years. There are so many biological factors here that objectively make women better primary caretakers for children, putting careers on hold because raising a child is harder than most careers, that anyone arguing it's sexism is flat out ignorant of the reality of raising a child. I hate that progressives/feminists try to paint child rearing as an inferior choice to a "proper" career when it is something women excel at, and should be embraced and encouraged.
Men and women can both program, sure, but only women can make people. Society simply reflects this.
Structural sexism is not perpetuated by infants. I mean come on. Children wanting to nurse is not the big issue; children grow up, and do not need nursing when they become toddlers. So why are women still expected to be caretakers of toddlers, middle-schoolers, and tweens? Surely, there isn’t a physiological reason. There is clearly something larger going on.
In reality, men and women’s roles are arbitrary, and the sexist structures present today are not the result of children asking for it. You are overestimating the intrinsic qualities of human social and family interactions, which are not as set in stone as you claim. Even the concept of the nuclear family - with one possible nurse and mother figure - isn’t a universal construct of human societies.
While its not a universal construct - it is challenging to look at the history of many cultures who arrived at a similar distribution of labor and the behavior of other mammals and not wonder if men and women aren't inherently different in some generalized way that isn't readily alterable.
For those of us on the other side of the debate, there is always this vague sense of some people are underestimating the impact of these intrinsic differences.
Lots of things were/are found in many unrelated human societies, such as slavery, which was found all over the world for thousands of years and still exists in many places/forms today. Something being common isn’t an indication of whether or not it is intrinsic or “the only way”. We only make progress by challenging social structures and trying to improve them. Perhaps these kinds of commonalities exist all over because they are effective at controlling/enforcing oppression and power.
My point isn’t that men and women aren’t at all different, it’s that institutions use the “it’s human nature and it can’t be changed” argument to hide oppressive/coercive practices that are avoidable and able to be removed.
> For those of us on the other side of the debate, there is always this vague sense of some people are underestimating the impact of these intrinsic differences.
I suspect that this distribution of labor is not due to intrinsic differences, but came with the invention of agriculture, and what we are dealing with now is just that we are used to these structures. Hunter gatherers did something else, and now that we are not all subsistence farmers we can do something else again.
> So why are women still expected to be caretakers of toddlers, middle-schoolers, and tweens? Surely, there isn’t a physiological reason.
Enhanced emotional bonding due to emissions of oxytocin during breasfeeding? Make men sit with children several times a day while getting oxytocin shots and perhaps they would have much stronger bonds with their children.
From Wikipedia: Maternal behavior: Female rats given oxytocin antagonists after giving birth do not exhibit typical maternal behavior. By contrast, virgin female sheep show maternal behavior toward foreign lambs upon cerebrospinal fluid infusion of oxytocin, which they would not do otherwise.
Of course not. But the average woman wants three kids. WHO says babies should breastfeed for two years. My daughter has nursed for 13 months. A mother taking off three chunks of 13 month leaves while married to a man probably earning as much or more than she does (since women disproportionately marry similar or higher earning men) is going to -- at some point -- realize that it's easier to stay at home. That is exactly what my wife did.
> Even the concept of the nuclear family - with one possible nurse and mother figure - isn’t a universal construct of human societies.
Yes it is. The only people who claim this are people who've never lived in an extendend family situation. You still know who your mom and dad are. They are still the primary care givers, and babies still have a primary attachment to their moms when born that self-reinforces itself unless there is some major disruption.
How many people do you think are involved in raising the average child? Two? I had a veritable village of people raising me. I can assure you that only one of them nursed me. For some reason, though, most of them were women.
It was even more obvious before the establishment of the nuclear family that a whole bunch of people should work together to raise children because not only does it improve the outcome, it's more efficient.
I mean I was raised by my grandmother and grandfather while my parents worked. Did you think I didn't need to emphasize the importance of extended family? My father and mother also take care of my daughter, as do my wife's. However, she still wants her mom at night, no matter who is around. This makes it harder for my wife to work. It is unfair to even ask her to, given her work when dealing with the baby at night.
I suppose we could bottle feed. But my wife doesn't want to, and it is linked to worse outcomes for kids so asking moms to do this for the sake of their career is like asking them to cut their nose to spite their face.
> It was even more obvious before the establishment of the nuclear family that a whole bunch of people should work together to raise children because not only does it improve the outcome, it's more efficient.
Of course, but there's only one mom still. My parents were raised in a ' non-nuclear family' where aunts and uncles lived next door. Hell, I was raised by my mom's family and my parents often living together. Do you think the mom wasn't preferred out of all these people? You have to be joking. The only people who ascribe 'the nuclear family' as a bogeyman are people who idolize extended families. Believe it or not, even in an extended family situation, with grandma, grandpa, aunts and uncles... babies still prefer their mothers.
Sure, many more women may choose to take the more active role, but it’s important to consider that these conscious choices are affected by implicit social pressures and expectations that are placed on men and women from childhood onwards, such as men being expected to be breadwinners and women being expected to be caregivers. These are pretty arbitrary social constructs that are not universal or intrinsic to nature or even human societies. So it follows that what men and women would say they desire is not the full picture, since they may be unaware of the implicit forces acting on them.
It's true that these social pressures exist, and they are certainly sexist. But I think it's important to distinguish that the pressure is what's sexist, not the impact of the choice.
Then let’s make an effort to expose and reform these sexist structures! That is the goal of people trying to reform the mindset of STEM institutions. These structures are not fixed, and so can be changed.
I'd love to spend more time with my kids and my wife would prefer to spend more time at work. I make 3 times her salary, though, so it's not really economically feasible for us to switch roles. She could afford to not work or work part time for 2 years. We couldn't afford it if I did it.
Although I love my kids I would go clinically insane if I had to do the stay-at-home raising of them full time. My wife OTOH loves it and would rather do nothing else. I know that this is swapped for many couples, but I still argue that reality is more skewed this way than the other. Maybe that will change over time.
IMO dads don't achieve the same level of bonding as women do to their babies and therefore we are able to tolerate less of the crap babies get into during the day.
Its not sexism, its just biology.
If I had a project I worked on for 9 months I would have more desire to continue working on it into the future. My investor is an interested party, but ultimately its entirely my drive which moves the project forward
I was responding to the main premise of your comment, that "the fact that women shoulder the primary economic burden of raising children is structural sexism." This implies discrimination due to external forces that make men and women behave differently.
What do you mean by external forces? These are all interactions between human beings. We behave that we do in large part based on our interactions with others. Would you say that it is "external forces" that cause us two to communicate in English?
What is the alternative position you're suggesting?
"Structural sexism" implies nonintrinsic forces causing discrimination, hence why I called it an external force, as it's a force not generated internally.
I think the effects of evolutionary biology need to be considered when looking at behavioral differences. Evolutionarily speaking, women invest much more energy into growing, giving birth to, and caring for children than men. This leads to innate differences in behavior separate from social forces you are describing.
Then how come some women don't want children and even dislike children?
The reason why women are more involved in childcare after giving birth/nursery years is purely societal factors. It's expected of them to behave in that way in more conservative places and it's strongly implied in other places.
Biology isn't sexist. Men can't get pregnant so therefore only women can deal with pregnancy. Men can't breastfeed or pump, either.
People want reality to reflect their world view but biology is biology. It's not an indictment on society that only women perform certain biological functions.
>Sexism is not merely about personal conduct but also how we structure society.
Great.
But my personal experience is that this notion seems to vanish as soon as we look at things like rates of workplace deaths, life expectancy, hours worked, imprisonment, or numerous other areas. And even if they don't vanish, the level of attention devoted seems to be remarkably different. Would the way we structure society in regards to structuring our attention for social ills also possibly include sexism?
And I guess such notions can be dismissed as being off topic. As they aren't relevant to the actual issue under discussion. But when we start viewing larger more structural things as sexism, then wouldn't even such dismissal potentially qualify as sexism?
This might surprise you but a lot of feminists are also strongly in favor of workers' rights and prison abolition. For example, bell hooks and Angela Davis.
I have never met people more passionately invested in the wellbeing of men than the feminists I read and live with. It is a shame to me that decades of propaganda have buried those voices and raised the voices of those who insist that feminism is a zero sum game.
As in, no criminals go to prison? I wonder what these feminist feel should be as the punishment for rape.
>I have never met people more passionately invested in the wellbeing of men than the feminists I read and live with.
Many of those who want to ban abortion are very passionate about protecting the women seeking such, as they believe it is far better for those women to be denied such an opportunity (such as saving them from doing something they will regret, at least per the belief of the people supporting anti-choice legislation). Intentions and passion shouldn't be ignored, but neither do they provide a complete picture.
> Sexism is not merely about personal conduct but also how we structure society.
What does raising children have to do with society? Decision of having and raising a child is a fundamentally personal, not societal decision. Each pair should decide how they want to split responsibilities of raising a child before its conception, based on their preferences, and society should not force them to any model.
Also, it seems to me that society already prioritize child-raising too much compared to other non-work activities. If people would leave STEM/some other field due to work-life balance for some other personal goals than child-raising (say part-time working in a non-profit), would anyone care?
> What does raising children have to do with society? Decision of having and raising a child is a fundamentally personal, not societal decision.
Of course it isn't. Every society needs an up and coming younger generation as the older generation stops working. That is absolutely a problem on a societal level.
While i agree it may be a concern of a society to be stable, it does not automatically translate to necessary concern for society as a whole. Many things necessary for a society work even if society does not intervene in them. People would have children for emotional reasons even if society does not intervene.
Also, if a societal stability is a goal, then having more than replacement number of children is as problematic as having less.
>People would have children for emotional reasons even if society does not intervene.
What if that isn't true though?
Fertility is universally falling in rich countries.
Could you give me a number of births-per-woman that would motivate your concern? I think 1 birth per woman is a reasonable number for national concern. South Korea is already at 1.0.
Without a future generation long term concerns evaporate from concern. Maybe this has already happened in some peoples minds with regard to national debt, and the long-term sustainability of social security.
It is true that developed countries have often get to this point where it may be reasonable for society so support child-rearing for stability reasons. But they often still have much more people than say hundred years ago.
But note that this situation is relatively new, while natality was praised even during times where population was expanding. My point in this thread is that natality is not intristically good (or bad) value and it is for country to decide on which level want to motivate individuals to change their behavior, but having a child is still fundamentally individual decision.
I think framing child-rearing as an individual choice is a dangerous framing.
That's what I was getting at with the comparison to the movie Bird Box.
It's important to think of ourselves as biological systems first and thinkers-as-choosers second.
I suspect that an increase in the virtualization of our lives will lead to an equal increase in the will-full termination of our lives. Suicide. As our lives become less biological we will end them with greater intensity and frequency.
You may not be convinced, but ask yourself what would that road look like? Would you recognize the indicators? Could you and the people you care about hop off the ride in time? Why did so many Westerners join the ranks of ISIS?
> People would have children for emotional reasons even if society does not intervene.
Yes, but the success of those children is still a societal concern. You want some of those children to be a new generation of doctors, teachers, etc. etc... without supporting them at a young age (i.e. providing education, a welfare safety net) there's no guarantee that would ever happen, and they might end up being more of a drain on society than a productive member.
I agree that it is reasonable for a society to support parents with child-raising to a degree (by say offering free public education and healtcare). But it is a fundamental responsibility of parents, society is here in supporting role.
>We can structure our work so that women are not disadvantaged for having kids
Can we, though? It seems that there is some amount of time that women are unable to work due to the physical rigors of pregnacy, child-birth, and (in many cases) infant care.
Taking time away from work, no matter what the reason, necessarily affects the trajectory of your career. We can try to minimize that in various ways (as the original article discussed) but it seems impossible to reduce it to zero barring sci-fi tech like artificial wombs.
It might be reasonable to say that we can structure out work so that women are disadvantaged _as little as reasonably possible_ for having kids.
The article is about women in STEM in Academia, not just STEM.
And I don't understand why people absolutely need to have biological children. I think more people should just adopt if they want to raise children.
I also think sexism in the US is the biggest factor for women leaving Academia or not entering STEM. In other countries more than 50% of the researchers are women and 40% of the students studying computer science are women.
> I think more people should just adopt if they want to raise children.
As someone who has adopted 3 children, I assure you that the biological route is way easier and cheaper. It's not like rescuing a dog from the pound...
Except for birth and family planning related complications that are minimized in exactly the time frame where career effects tend to compound (or so the article seems to claim)
>And I don't understand why people absolutely need to have biological children.
Consider these possibilities:
1. A best case scenario is that what you have expressed is a personal opinion that takes your genes out of the future in a Marty McFly fading away fashion as this opinion hardens.
Fine. Your choice. More pie for the rest of us.
2. A worst case scenario where this opinion accumulates in the market place of ideas and inevitably leads to human extinction.
Impossible right? Well, know that disgust with sex is climbing in rich nations (like Germany and Japan) and the number of births per woman is falling. Is this a function of wealth, or technology?
South Korea has fewer than 1.1 births per woman. That can only translate into a poorer, older, and smaller country for the future. [1]
(I tell people that this was the thickly veiled premise of the movie Bird Box.)
If that is true, then can it be called a choice? Are people actually choosing to have fewer sexual partners than their parents generation? Are people really choosing to feel disgust at the thought of intimate contact?
Maybe repulsion-to-sex is a bigger threat to continued human existence as nuclear weapons.
The average human's genes are not that great as to deserve preserving. I certainly see the benefit from preserving the genes of the woman who lived 122 years old, though.
I don't think it's bad to find sex repulsing. I mean, sex is inherently disgusting. It involves naked bodies and bodily fluids. You can'g describe sex in a way that doesn't sound repulsing.
Besides, people can have children without having sex through IVF. But if a woman is repulsed by sex, I can totally see why she would also be repulsed by pregnancy.
I remember seeing a similar headline for German women but cannot find a source now. (I think people expect weird think from Japan so it's good practice to compare to other countries)
Maybe social media and instant communication has replaced (or dulled) some of, what used to be, our sexual appetites.
Half the world is sub-replacement-rate: "As of 2010, about 48% (3.3 billion people) of the world population lives in nations with sub-replacement fertility"
The RT article doesn't say anything about disgust, so why bother linking to it?
The Politifact article does involve aversion, but only aggregated with disinterest:
"The percentage of women who responded they were not interested in sex at all or felt an aversion to it was 60.3 percent for ages 16-19 and 31.6 percent for ages 20-24. Combine the age groups, and the average response was about 46 percent negative — the figure that drove attention-grabbing stories in Western media."
To interpret the numbers differently, a net 30% of Japanese girls aged 16-19 become interested in sex within 5 years.
I tried looking for the original report to disaggregate lack of interest and aversion, but I only found it on Amazon and don't feel like buying it. https://www.amazon.co.jp/dp/4930807085
The RT article said that "Nearly half the couples had not had sex in a month". That happens because they prefer to do something else instead.
Will you grant that this means that interest in sex has fallen?
The Politifact article says "In 2013 a whopping 45 percent of women aged 16 to 24 ‘were not interested in or despised sexual contact,’ and more than a quarter of men felt the same way."
Which matches my claim:
> Nearly half of young women in Japan are "uninterested in sex" or "averse to sex"
- More than 40% of Japanese 18- to 34-year-old singles claim they are virgins.
- the fraction of people getting it on at least once a week fell from 45% in 2000 to 36% in 2016.
- more than twice as many millennials were sexually inactive in their early 20s than the prior generation was.
- In 2016, 4% fewer condoms were sold than the year before, and they fell a further 3% in 2017.
- Teen sex is flat and has been on a downward trend since 1985
- The median age for first marriage in America is now 29 for men and 27 for women, up from 27 and 25 in 1999.
- the highest drop in sexual frequency has been among married people with higher levels of education
- those with offspring in the 6 to 17 age range were doing less of what made them parents
What do you make of these data points? I think they successfully demonstrate that interest in sex is falling.
> What do you make of these data points? I think they successfully demonstrate that interest in sex is falling.
You're equivocating between disgust and lack of interest, but these are very different things. I wouldn't have bothered asking for a source if you had blamed falling interest rather than rising disgust.
I don't think I am "equivocating between disgust and lack of interest".
My motivating concern is universally dropping fertility and whether the reasons are disgust and disinterest, they both cash out the same way. No babies.
So, yes, they exist as two distinct categories, both inside a larger category. I'm talking about that larger category.
Let's imagine that people want to have sex, but they can't find the time in their busy lives. I would lump that in with disinterest. Now, whether you would or not is a discussion about your language preferences. You are entitled to language preferences, but I'm more interested in the slow suicide of everyone around me.
I find this slow suicide fascinating.
Maybe everyone is too busy arguing on the internet about what words mean to have children. That's weird and bad. That's a future we should avoid.
There are few infants to adopt due to the success of americas adoption programs and the willingness of americans to adopt. The ones that are 'easy' to adopt almost universally have special needs that most people (especially working parents) simply cannot meet.
> And I don't understand why people absolutely need to have biological children.
Especially smart women in STEM should have children because cognitive abilities like intelligence and conscientiousness are largely inherited traits (e.g. IQ is between 50% and 80% inherited according to twin studies).
Those are very high status, high demand 'job', you need a lot so sacrifices to achieve tenure professor, and I think they are not compatible with family raising for most people. Why, because you are competing with the best people that are willing to sacrifice life balance, family, leisure time, etc.
But the thing is, it's a choice, no one is forced to go into super high status occupations. Those that choose so must be very bright and completely dedicated to one thing. I think most women know or realise later on that this level of competition is insane, and that's why they quit and find something that is not as high status, but is more enjoyable.
A very small percentage of men are willing to ditch everything else to be at the top, some get there, most don't, most women find out that it's not worth it.
Oh, and I think it's crucial for children to bond with their mother and skipping this and putting them in daycare early is not in their best interest. I also think that motherhood is more valuable than most engineering job or paper publishing.
>> I’ve got a big scholarship, and a lot of people supporting me to give me the
best shot at an academic career — a career I dearly want. But, I also want a
family — maybe two or three kids
Oh.
Up to this point I was keeping notes with my criticism of this article, but
this caused me to stop and reconsider.
If I may advise the author, I understand how difficult it is to balance
life decisions that seem to be at odds, but trying to deny the very reason why
those life decisions are hard to combine will not make the choice any easier.
It is stupid and sexist that you have to think of pursuing a PhD and having
two or three kids as an either/or option, when the (probably) man you'll want
to start a family with will not have to do that, even if they are also a PhD
in STEM.
This is part and parcel of the sexism that people complain about. It's not
just inappropriate behaviour by senior male academics. There is no reason why
a woman must put her career on hold to start a family when a man in the same
career does not need to. There is no reason why women are expected to be the
ones most concerned with the business of having and raising children when men
are expected to be the most concerned with advancing their careers. How is
that not sexist? How is that not the sexism that's keeping women from
advancing their careers in STEM academia?
>How is that not sexist? How is that not the sexism that's keeping women from advancing their careers in STEM academia?
Why should the academy structure itself so that women who choose to put their attention into their families do not have a career impact? If academic positions are necessarily zero-sum, it seems impossible to correct for this without seriously unfair negative externalities?
How is it that the biases inherent in collective decisions of individuals within society are the responsibility of the academy to correct for (that men tend to choose to focus on career and women on family)?
I don't see how my point served to excluded a member of the academy weighing in. Note that my question was specific in the context of a zero-sum industry. I'm happy to see reasoned arguments that address this point.
Nature and sexual selection have nothing to do with it. A complete lack of societal support for women who want to have children and maintain a career in STEM academia (or similar) is all there is to it.
>> Many fathers would very much prefer to spend time with their families, but can't because they're expected to first and foremost provide for them.
Why do the fathers "have to provide"? Why is it so difficult for a man to stay at home and take care of the kids, after they're born (which he can obviously not really do)? Is that nature, again?
Society is supporting women who raise children and men who provide. This worked quite fine for the history of human civilization, but it's painful for women that want to build careers and men who want to be with their families.
First of all, there are very many people that are content with that situation. There is no easy solution for those that aren't, because nature does play a huge part and those 9 months and at least the first year are very important for the baby and mother. There is no way the father can provide the same emotional and physical support, so he might as well ensure that his family is otherwise taken care of.
The father can't provide emotional and physical support in the first year of life of a child? Why? What is it that a father can't do during the first year of a child's life, other than breastfeed it, that the mother can?
I thought the pre-industrial role of women included crafts and gathering. I would put those under the "providing" umbrella.
If we imagine that fathers taught their children to hunt and fight we would expect children to be raised those abilities too.
I wonder if role specialization is more prevalent now than it used to be. Perhaps some pre-industrial societies were more egalitarian than we pretend to be today.
It's worth taking a look at three other professions with long, high-intensity pathways from apprentice to master --all of which have been wrestling with the same challenges. They are management consulting, law and medicine. I've written about them elsewhere.
In medicine, there's been a surge of female participation (and leadership) in specialties such as dermatology, psychiatry and radiology, where it's relatively easier to rearrange hours and training regimens to be family compatible. There's been less progress in surgery, where hellish hours are considered part of the journey.
In law, some firms have been experimenting with a blurring of the boundaries between associate and partner, so that there's a middle level at which women can enter into motherhood without tanking their career chances. (In the traditional model, close to 40% of entry-level associates are female, but few of them stick around to make partner.)
I'm wondering if either of those models is transferable to STEM academia. Are there particular sub-disciplines where professional success and sane hours might be more compatible? Similarly, are there tenure-track or quasi-tenure track job titles that split the difference in tolerable ways?
I haven't researched these well enough to have clear answers. But it's worth discussing.