Women in science: from high school expectations to academic career

Deref said :

switch said :

There are a lot of clever women out there. I occasionally had the privilege of working with some of them. But I’d say the vast majority are clever enough to work out early on that science in Australia is a crap career choice. Do a lot of study of very hard subjects, perhaps get a PhD and still find the pay is lousy, you end up several years behind your peers in the pay scales having “wasted” all that time at uni/postdoc etc and anyway you have to move on after three years because the grant money’s dried up. Getting good students of either gender to study science is only going to get harder: developing countries need scientists and engineers, developed countries get accountants and lawyers.

That.

Both my kids either have or are getting science degrees. My pride in their achievements is matched by my distress at knowing that they’ll never make as much as they would if they’d become lawyers or economists.

They could have been poets or musicians though…Look on the bright side!

chilli & Deref have both articulated some very real challenges for those who pursue a career in science, and the reality of the situation is that any potential scientist should consider in making their choices.

That being said, if you can eke out a comfortable existence from work that is personally rewarding, that’s what I call success.

It’s important that we learn to choose our comparison points well, and what inspires the neighbours may not make you feel much better at all!

Deref said :

Both my kids either have or are getting science degrees. My pride in their achievements is matched by my distress at knowing that they’ll never make as much as they would if they’d become lawyers or economists.

Yeah, but lawyers are more important.

switch said :

There are a lot of clever women out there. I occasionally had the privilege of working with some of them. But I’d say the vast majority are clever enough to work out early on that science in Australia is a crap career choice. Do a lot of study of very hard subjects, perhaps get a PhD and still find the pay is lousy, you end up several years behind your peers in the pay scales having “wasted” all that time at uni/postdoc etc and anyway you have to move on after three years because the grant money’s dried up. Getting good students of either gender to study science is only going to get harder: developing countries need scientists and engineers, developed countries get accountants and lawyers.

That.

Both my kids either have or are getting science degrees. My pride in their achievements is matched by my distress at knowing that they’ll never make as much as they would if they’d become lawyers or economists.

gooterz said :

I wonder if it has anything to do with the affirmative action?

Get people into science that dont really care for it and aren’t suited. Most will end up as science teachers.

If you have a system that dependant on grades and you end up with mostly guys, if likely to be a gender difference. There are also roles that women do most and no one is trying to get guys to even the numbers.

Umm, there’s no affirmative action for women in science. They get where they to where they get to on merit, just like the guys. And, just like the guys, the women who do science are passionate about it. They need to be to get through the years of study, often to find (just like they guys) that grant-funded contract work is pretty hard to come by. Tenured positions are rarer than gold.

Most women (and men) don’t leave science because “they don’t really care for it and aren’t suited”. They leave because the jobs aren’t there. And by the time you’re in your mid-thirties, possibly with a family and a mortgage, you need something a bit more stable. And you realise that your contemporaries at Uni who scooted straight into the PS afterwards and have been EL2s for a few years now are earning $30-$40k more than you, despite all your papers and degrees.

And for mid-thirties women, they actually need the chance to have babies before it’s all too late because there was no scope for maternity leave during their doctorate or their post-doctorate contracts which together have taken up the previous 10 or 12 years of their lives (not to mention the 4-5 years BSc + Honours/Masters that preceded it). And no scope for part time work during a contract either. Even if they are lucky enough to get one after two post-docs. It is these factors that account more than any other explanation for the gender imbalance among the research scientists in the labs in the over-40s age brackets.

So, wonder no more about the place of affirmative action in science, gooterz. It doesn’t exist.

I wonder if it has anything to do with the affirmative action?

Get people into science that dont really care for it and aren’t suited. Most will end up as science teachers.

If you have a system that dependant on grades and you end up with mostly guys, if likely to be a gender difference. There are also roles that women do most and no one is trying to get guys to even the numbers.

There are a lot of clever women out there. I occasionally had the privilege of working with some of them. But I’d say the vast majority are clever enough to work out early on that science in Australia is a crap career choice. Do a lot of study of very hard subjects, perhaps get a PhD and still find the pay is lousy, you end up several years behind your peers in the pay scales having “wasted” all that time at uni/postdoc etc and anyway you have to move on after three years because the grant money’s dried up. Getting good students of either gender to study science is only going to get harder: developing countries need scientists and engineers, developed countries get accountants and lawyers.