Nearly Half of US Female Scientists Leave Full-Time Science After First Child

The main issue in every case was that as the new mothers got to the end of their maternity leave, they started to think about day care. In the end, they felt that they could not trust the day care centres with their child. Similarly the mothers did not trust their own husbands to look after the child because the husband had not spent much time with the child at that point. Because all of the families I knew were relatively well off with dual incomes, they eventually decided that the woman would quit work to look after the child.

In my anecdotal data, in no cases was there a salary gap between the man and the woman. Both were making roughly the same amount. Neither was it a case of not being able to afford child care -- although, once they crunched the numbers the cost of child care was a good percentage of one of the salaries, so it made it easier to take the financial hit to move to a single income. As far as I could tell, in all cases it just came down to trust.

For this reason, I think there should be some sort of encouraged paternal leave. For example, the government/company in partnership could pay for 80% of the salary for 6 months for the father to look after the child. This would occur immediately after the mother's maternity leave.

What this does is provide a financial incentive for the father to learn to look after the child. When the paternity leave is finished, then the choices look very different. I think it's still likely that one parent (in well to do dual family incomes) will choose to look after their child and quit their job (and I see nothing wrong with that). However, now the woman has spent the last 6 months working and it will be a harder decision to quit. The man now has had a chance to show that he can look after the child and the woman will be able to trust him with that responsibility.

I honestly believe without that kind of system, there will always be a disparity between men and women when it comes to one parent choosing to quit their job and raise children. I should point out that, personally, I think raising children is a wonderful job, even if it doesn't pay so well ;-) Sometimes I think modern society looks down on that role and I think it's rather unfair. However, I do understand that we aren't quite modern enough to make that job reasonably risk free (you're dependent upon your spouse which is not always going to work out). We've got a long way to go...

The other 4 men and 4 women are pretty good, but not nearly as good as the top developers.

If a company needs to hire 10 people, and they hire men, they will not be able to fill their entire hiring need.

Obviously a silly policy, and it leaves a lot of good talent on the table.

So instead, the company hires the best it can.

4 amazing women

4 amazing men

1 average woman

1 average man

That is an optimal team given the local talent!

But now let's have the company put in some sexist work place policies. Half the woman leave. Now the company is down to

2 amazing women

4 amazing men

1 average woman

1 average man

to make up for lost numbers, the company is going to have to hire talent that is not as good as the talent that left!

The tl;dr is that discriminatory policies artificially limit the labor pool, reducing the overall efficiency of a company (and the economy of a nation as a whole if looked at broadly enough).

For us, it was because her field (immunology) was simply less lucrative than mine (computer science). Given the differences in gender distributions between both fields, and the pay gap between fields, I think simplifying this as STEM collectively isn't sufficiently granular. I wonder what the rates are for "left CS after child" vs "left biology after child", and how they compare.

With that being said, it's likely that there are also systemic/structural differences as well; research (and academia in particular) is notorious for poor work-life balance (prior to tenure). Social undercurrents of expectation towards primary caregivers would certainly have some influence as well.

I know it shifts the narrative slightly, but I would also be interested to see the effects of PhDs on birthrates, broken down by field, gender, and country of birth. It seems to me that it would be negatively correlated, but I don't have the data to back up that observation.