So I was reading an interesting post on The Moderate Voice called Why So Few Female Science Professors? that makes a number of points regarding gender inequities in professorships. The most interesting revolve around how pursuit of faculty positions is challenging and not extrinsically rewarding (i.e. money, timeline of career development) in general, for both women and men. As the post says, quoting another blog, “Why would anyone think science is a good job?”

Just to be clear, I want to state again that this discussion is predominately about the extrinsic rewards of pursuing an academic science career, which obviously does not include many of the pertinent reasons why people choose science and many of their career options after doing so. However, it does raise an interesting question for me, based on some conversations I’ve had with young scientists lately.

I’ve talked to a lot of young people in Ph.d programs, and as anyone familiar with the demographics knows, more than half of whom are women. In my anecdotal experience, the current cohort of Ph.d students are pretty frank about the lack of realistic options for University teaching positions. Obviously, there are still more than enough people who want to be professors. However, are gender inequities in higher education going to be artificially maintained because the cohort with the largest representation from women is also a cohort that, for many reasons, is seeking out other jobs than professorships? To clarify, my conversations have suggested that young scientists aren’t looking at Non-University options as a back-up, but that they’re not really interested in pursuing professorships because the career path, frankly, sucks so much.

Actually, giving it a little more thought, this concern may be more relevant for the lack of representation of non-caucasians in science professorships. There are more men and women of color in the ranks of young scientists. But again, out of necessity young scientists are looking at other options than university positions. Will this lead to a situation where, for a while at least, non-University positions more accurately reflect the developing egalitarianism (note I said developing and not developed) of the scientific community?