My wife's experience: PI: "You put your kid in front of the TV for 2 hours a day to get stuff done? That's terrible parenting." PI: "You will be late 1 day for a meaningless group presentation to your own lab, because your child is sick and can't go to daycare? Get your priorities straight."
Raising children is a full time job. The broader problem is that the discipline is not at all treated as a profession. Instructors for those children are recognized professionals, but the guardians are not.
If you want to be good parents though, it is your imperative to put your kids above all else, which will naturally dissatisfy any members of the "all else" who don't have your well being and success as their priority.
That's very uneconomical and an inefficient allocation of limited resources. Is there a way to "force" them to come back, i.e. by offering 80% off on student loans while raising costs 5x in parallel that can't be repaid by their spouses? There should be some kind of responsibility incorporated to the system. One should not just cherry pick the good parts (status/prestige/free time).
I have yet to be told why it is important for there to be as many women in STEM as men apart from statements that I'm sexist for not knowing
Because I think it's the only way we have to measure that there are no cultural barriers for women entering STEM professions. I've often theorized that much of the widely talked about pay gap has to do with either professions that women often wish to work in - or that society steers them to - but I dont know enough to know if its personal preference, or sociocultural bias driving personal preference. In the end, pay…
The closer your field's demographics are to your society's, the lower the risk of (unconscious) bias is. Science as a whole should strive to be as unbiased as possible, as that's the closest we can get to objectivity. The same logic applies to businesses, to reduce the risk of making mistakes that come with echo chambers.
Is reducing bias the most important goal? (Definitely not for me. Life today is much better than it was 50 years ago in communist Yugoslavia, despite higher inequality and bias, due to progress in science and business.)
Imagine how much more progress we could have had in science and business if we didn't de facto force out so many possible candidates who were interested in the field after they had their first kid.
Do you think a stay home dad with equal employment gap would have an easier time rejoining a workforce ?
I have no idea. But I'm willing to guess he faces lower odds of being asked for a date by senior personnel in the better-paid department he would like to work in, thereby de facto closing doors in my face.
I am not trying to argue sexism/bias does not exist but from my experience any gaps in employment are a flag used to filter out candidates so in this particular scenario that might be the main problem to overcome.
Its kinda interesting to see the related articles on the same site: about how many of the smartest scientists are more successful doing other stuff (like finance). https://www.nature.com/news/life-outside-the-lab-the-ones-wh... Perhaps there is a common theme that Full-Time science isn't necessarily the best life path for many people and the "US Female Scientists who leave" are actually happy with the outcome rather…
It’s pretty universal it’s jusy like asking where are all the US soccer superstars when the answer is that they are they are playing in the NBA and the NFL. Elite athletes are going to be elite athletes the sport itself is secondary, smart people are going to be successful in any field and the field of choice is also nearly always secondary to their success.
I have yet to be told why it is important for there to be as many women in STEM as men apart from statements that I'm sexist for not knowing
The closer your field's demographics are to your society's, the lower the risk of (unconscious) bias is. Science as a whole should strive to be as unbiased as possible, as that's the closest we can get to objectivity. The same logic applies to businesses, to reduce the risk of making mistakes that come with echo chambers.
> The closer your field's demographics are to your society's, the lower the risk of (unconscious) bias is.
That's only true if all biases cancel each other out perfectly.
While the title focuses on female scientists, males are also affected. From the article: "...23% of men and 43% of women who had become parents had left full-time STEM employment. ... This compared to 16% of child-free men and 24% of child-free women."
I wonder how much of this is people leaving science to pursue far more lucrative opportunities like running mathematically intricate financial scams for Wall Street banks in order to assure a good financial future for their children.
I know STEM PhDs who have left their field to get a bog standard devops job on account of it pays twice as well.
I have yet to be told why it is important for there to be as many women in STEM as men apart from statements that I'm sexist for not knowing
I don't personally think it's necessarily important for there to be "as many women in STEM as men." But I do think those women who want to be there shouldn't be de facto run out by sexist practices. I was a full-time wife and mom for a lot of years. I don't self identify as a feminist. But, post divorce, I've found that sexism has been a real issue in establishing an adequate income to support myself and my sons. So…
I think you are wrong to claim current business practice as "sexist". Ideally, it would be nice for single parenting be as easy as traditional family, but in reality, nobody is entitled to easy life.
Traditionally, people can also help each other through big family, church and other local communities. The new generation does not want to be involved in any of these. Now they want the government and their employers to bear more responsibility to support their personal life.
Completely anecdotal evidence, but every female coworker I've ever worked with has left work to raise their child after the first baby. Every single one of them said that they were definitely coming back before they went on maternity leave (and I believe that they believed it). 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 th…
By the time you have two children the cost of child care is often similar to or greater than after tax income. It's just not really financially viable to work at that point.
People often make this argument, but it's an incautious one. It assumes the stay-at-home spouse's pay won't go up in the future, but this isn't the case. After four or five years, you won't need all-day childcare any more. However, the SAHP's earning potential will have gone down due to their time out of the workforce. This has compounding effects down the line. If you spreadsheet it out under reasonable assumptions, your after-tax income from the SAHP has to be substantially lower than the cost of childcare before it makes sense for them give up work over the long run. Obviously it depends on the family, but I think a lot of people take a fairly myopic view of this question and don't think about the long-term consequences.