Women doing PhDs

[andrewducker]

There's a fascinating piece here on women who do science PhDs and then give up on academia - a higher proportion of women  than men do so.

A study for the Royal Society of Chemistry has found that although 72% of the women surveyed intended to pursue a university career in the first year of their PhDs, by their third year this had slumped to 37%.

This wasn't the case for their male peers. The study found 61% of them wished to pursue a university research career in their first year; this fell by only two percentage points, to 59%, by their third year.

About 450 molecular bioscientists (all female) and 610 chemists (male and female) took part. All were either studying for PhDs or had just finished them. They were quizzed on what encouraged them to pursue a research career, or what put them off. Several women said they had been warned they would encounter problems if they chose to continue on an academic path, because of their gender.

More women than men had come to view academic careers as too solitary and the fight for permanent posts after a PhD too competitive. One in 10 of the men felt "powerless to resolve significant issues" with their PhD supervisers, while this was the case for 17% of the women.

More women than men felt isolated or excluded from, and sometimes even bullied by, their research group. When their experiments went wrong, the women were more likely to "internalise failure", the studies found. And more women than men were discouraged by the "all-consuming nature of science", which the authors interpreted as its incompatibility with motherhood and family.

Women were also more likely to find their research repetitive and frustrating - 57% did, compared with 43% of the men. This finding, in particular, baffles Dr Shara Cohen, a former senior scientist who quit nine years ago to run her own business.

"I don't think the male chauvinism is conscious any more, or as overt as in the old days," says Rohn, "but it's still there. When it comes to recruiting a position or selecting speakers for high-profile lectures, men naturally think of their mates first. You still see seminar series with hardly any females speaking, and shortlisted positions with no, or few, female candidates."

Rohn says when she was studying, women were told: "Don't worry, when the old guys retire, women will finally get the professorships." But, she says, "the reality seems to have been that the old guys are just replaced with younger guys".

But why see this all so negatively, asks Rohn. "I don't see women leaving academia as a defect or as cowardice. I see it as wisdom. With a science PhD, it's possible to do a whole host of other rewarding and important jobs. Women now feel they can give up gracefully without losing face and go on to do something more fun."

Comments

[despotliz.livejournal.com]

This is quite interesting, although I am a bit wary of the numbers as maybe it's an effect of being a molecular bioscientist, and that is more likiely to put people off than being a chemist. Actually I am not surprised by how many women decide they don't want to pursue a university career by third year, I am surprised by how small the drop is among the men.

Most of the seminar series I attend are male-dominated - I would guess maybe ten percent of the speakers are male? At the last conference I went to, they had nine keynote speakers and all of them were male, and of the senior scientists leading the sessions only one was female.