Title IX & why women prefer non-science careers
Heather Buschman
Tuesday, 22 July 2008 03:05 UTC
An interesting article titled A New Frontier for Title IX: Science caught my eye in the New York Times last week. It describes an initiative by the U.S.’s National Science Foundation, Dept. of Energy, and NASA to conduct reviews of lab space and research funding going to men vs. women at several top institutions, including Columbia University and M.I.T.
Title IX is better known in the U.S for preventing discrimination in education, particularly when it comes to mandating equal funding for men’s and women’s school sports teams. If federal funding for research depended on a similar assessment, wouldn’t it do more harm than good to punish departments or universities if they don’t recruit enough women to science?
The NYT article also delves into some interesting studies of why women tend to prefer non-science careers in the first place. Many things have been written about the need for more childcare support or the need to encourage more young girls to pursue scientific careers. Yet as this article points out, there are still significantly fewer women in science in parts of Europe where healthcare, daycare, and maternity leave for women are quite generous (certainly far better than in the U.S.). The article also brings up the point that, rather than being discouraged from pursuing science careers, many successful female scientists have switched careers partway up the ladder after realizing that they were pushed into science without actually enjoying it. Perhaps, like sports, there are simply fewer women interested in science.
I was left pondering a couple of questions that I’d like to put out there…
1) Is the tendency for women to prefer people-oriented careers over science inherent or shaped by society? (Of course most things are a bit of both, but it’s my opinion that there must be a good deal of biology making social work or teaching more attractive to women. After all, isn’t it generally accepted that we are naturally better communicators and nurturers? Why wouldn’t women be more interested in careers that celebrate their innate abilities?)
2) Does anyone think “Title Nining” science is a good idea? Is it fair to punish research institutions if women just aren’t as interested in science as men are? Are there better ways of discouraging sexual discrimination, without discriminating against other successful scientists, both male and female?
Updated 22 July 2008 03:13 UTC
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Anonymous
An other point to make is that women have a higher service load than the men. I’m an assistant professor, and I see women at all level being asked to participate in hiring committees, service committees etc for the sake of equal participation. But there’s no extra recognition of these efforts, and it ends up being a huge time commitment. Minorities of course have the same problem.
White males tend to sail through avoiding these things, unless it’s an important committee and then of course they want to be in. -
I echo anonymous user’s point (immediately above). Our experience at Nature is that when we ask women to peer-review manuscripts or to write various review or commentary-style articles, they tend to refuse more often than men, quite possibly for these reasons (disproportionate number of such requests by organisations wanting to be all-inclusive).
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Hey Maxine, we (I work for a small science publisher) actually get the same thing – women more frequently declining to review a paper because they don’t have time and many other commitments. However, when female scientists accept to do a review, they (generally) do a more thorough, thoughtful job than many men. So our impression is that women take the requests for review more seriously.
Is this the same with everything? Do women load themselves down (on top of the service load imposed from the ‘job’ mentioned before)? I would venture to say that this goes with family life as well, not ‘just’ the science career – we like to do a first-class job all around, don’t we?
How many women change their mind – intentionally or forced by circumstances – AFTER starting a family?.. From my own perspective: I never actually ‘changed my mind’ – I would still very much love to pursue a scientific career. However, I have an almost five year old son who was born less than a year after I finished my PhD (I also moved to a different country at the time, so that didn’t help). I was lucky to get a full-time, well-paid job right away.. outside of academia. So then how do you justify going back to a low-paid post doc position (not that I didn’t try anyway…)?
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Another good podcast – thank you Matthew. Interesting to read Steffi’s comment (are women too conscientious and helpful?) and Paul’s link to the Royal Society piece on Hertha Ayrton (and other pioneers).
The Labour Force Survey 2007 indicates that (in the UK) “women were18.7% of all science/engineering/technology (SET) workers and men 81.3%” http://www.ukrc4setwomen.org/html/research-and-statistics/statistics/ .
There is some room for optimism: in terms of proportional growth, overall the number of SET women workers increased by 12.3% between 2002 and 2007 (a 62,000 growth from 504,364 in 2002), which is proportionately almost a double of that of their male counterparts (a 6.5% or 150.000 growth from 2,317,837 in 2002). However, this data does not reveal the patterns of loss, or the concentration of women in particular sectors or lower income levels.
As Paul says, many excellent organisations are active in this area. This includes the growing network of support groups run by women scientists, engineers and technicians – new network has been formed for these groups, and will have its own space on the UKRC website soon. (UKRC works with SET policy makers, employers, professional bodies, women’s groups and individual women. We use many of the strategies already mentioned and look out for new opportunities and approaches.)
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