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An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

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Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#251

Post by fiftyfifty »

tus88 wrote: post #147

> women leave the field at a rate 3 to 4 times greater than men, and in particular, if they do not obtain a faculty position quickly Wait what....you mean by STEM you just meant academia?

Yeah it's unfortunate that the author of this article uses the term STEM over and over again and is really only talking about the S. I wounder if the issues mentioned here are as common in private industry for women in the TEM fields? It seems like at least some companies are far more generous with things like maternity leave than what you might find in academia.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#252

Post by Apocryphon »

tomp wrote: post #247
sequoia wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In her article, she explains her hypothesis that women leave top-flight STEM/academic careers because the demands (and, crucially, when they must be met: 20s & 30s) conflict with the demands of bearing children during a woman's most-likely-to-be-successful childbearing years. She goes on to suggest that creating more supports for mothers such as affordable childcare and possibly collaborative academic working environ…

This is not a sufficient explanation. There’s more women in law and medicine, which are equally, if not more demanding. There must be something else - the nature of work (more people, less machines), the atmosphere (less bro, more professional), the pay (STEM careers plateau quickly)...

Also women in business.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#253

Post by amanaplanacanal »

eej71 wrote: post #123
csb6 wrote: post #96

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Structural sexism is not perpetuated by infants. I mean come on. Children wanting to nurse is not the big issue; children grow up, and do not need nursing when they become toddlers. So why are women still expected to be caretakers of toddlers, middle-schoolers, and tweens? Surely, there isn’t a physiological reason. There is clearly something larger going on. In reality, men and women’s roles are arbitrary, and the s…

While its not a universal construct - it is challenging to look at the history of many cultures who arrived at a similar distribution of labor and the behavior of other mammals and not wonder if men and women aren't inherently different in some generalized way that isn't readily alterable. For those of us on the other side of the debate, there is always this vague sense of some people are underestimating the impact o…

I suspect that this distribution of labor is not due to intrinsic differences, but came with the invention of agriculture, and what we are dealing with now is just that we are used to these structures. Hunter gatherers did something else, and now that we are not all subsistence farmers we can do something else again.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#254

Post by proc0 »

e12e wrote: post #117

Maybe I'm missing something, but this seems to be typical sexism: there's work at work which is paid, and work at home which is not. Men do little enough of the latter, that doing the paid work isn't a problem. Women do such a large part of the former, that they feel the need to chose between which part get done. Sure, the positive way to change this, is to reduce the unpaid work (child care professionals are paid, c…

Running a home is boring and not as valuable as learning a STEM degree and helping out society move forward. We can easily imagine a distopia where everyone works and no one has a proper home, but we surely cannot do the opposite which is imagine a world where everybody has a nice home but no one knows how to build anything and there is no electricity or water pipes. STEM is hard and requires sacrifice to get to a point where you are taking on the responsibilities of civilization, and for women that equivalent is simply having a child.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#255

Post by balls187 »

TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #243
balls187 wrote: post #209

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The statistics do not tell the whole story. A reason I suggest young women speak with women who started families mid-late career would hear actual experiences, giving perspective that it's not as bleak as the statistics show. We had two children, both healthy, after mom was 35. We also had a pregnancy that didn't go to term. I surmise women might take some comfort in knowing that pregnancy complications are normal.

It's not about individual anecdotes, it's about probabilities and actuarial risks. A woman who gets pregnant at 25 is less likely to have issues than a woman who gets pregnant at 35 and much less likely to have issues than a woman who gets pregnant at 45. That's the reality. The fact that some women have successful pregnancies at 45 doesn't change it. Nor does it suggest that women should simply ignore the facts and…

> A woman who gets pregnant at 25 is less likely to have issues than a woman who gets pregnant at 35 and much less likely to have issues than a woman who gets pregnant at 45.

You are equating to "issues" to mean "no healthy children"

> The fact that some women have successful pregnancies at 45 doesn't change it

Is a straw man.

Plenty of women have successful pregnancies at 35. And 25 year old women debating that choice should hear from them.

Said differently:

Can you wait too long to have children? Yes. Is 35 too long? No.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#256

Post by seanmcdirmid »

fizwhiz wrote: post #226
thereisnospork wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By 27 they've probably just wrapped up their PhD and were making a paltry stipend to work in a professor's research lab followed by 2-4 years at a postdoc, asked for in every job application for a 'biologist II' which has an average salary of ~77k (per indeed). This is for industry, not academia. So how am I am misrepresenting the fact that being a biologist takes over 7+ years of being grossly underpaid relative t…

Forgive me for I live in a bubble so I don't know a great deal about why someone would spend that many years in school to land a 77k job. I also don't know much about compensation structure (ex: is comp == salary or are there other components?) I do know a couple of friends that work at Genentech who comfortably pull in > 200k so there's that.

Biology is one of the lower paid STEM disciplines, and the toughest to break into professorships. Most biology majors are just premed anyways.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#258

Post by amanaplanacanal »

hurricanetc wrote: post #151
danharaj wrote: post #4

The fact that women shoulder the primary economic burden of raising children is structural sexism. Sexism is not merely about personal conduct but also how we structure society. For millenia across many cultures women have had their participation in broader society curtailed to the sphere of reproductive and domestic labor. That is injustice. As Morenz notes, we don't have to accept that. We can structure our work so…

Biology isn't sexist. Men can't get pregnant so therefore only women can deal with pregnancy. Men can't breastfeed or pump, either. People want reality to reflect their world view but biology is biology. It's not an indictment on society that only women perform certain biological functions.

The century is young. Who knows what the future might bring?

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#259

Post by gnaritas »

tomp wrote: post #247
sequoia wrote: post #213

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In her article, she explains her hypothesis that women leave top-flight STEM/academic careers because the demands (and, crucially, when they must be met: 20s & 30s) conflict with the demands of bearing children during a woman's most-likely-to-be-successful childbearing years. She goes on to suggest that creating more supports for mothers such as affordable childcare and possibly collaborative academic working environ…

This is not a sufficient explanation. There’s more women in law and medicine, which are equally, if not more demanding. There must be something else - the nature of work (more people, less machines), the atmosphere (less bro, more professional), the pay (STEM careers plateau quickly)...

Law and medicine are traditionally seen as high status and may retain women longer, but certainly, suffer the same issue; women over 30 drop off dramatically in law as they leave to become parents.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#260

Post by thereisnospork »

fizwhiz wrote: post #226
thereisnospork wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> By 27 they've probably just wrapped up their PhD and were making a paltry stipend to work in a professor's research lab followed by 2-4 years at a postdoc, asked for in every job application for a 'biologist II' which has an average salary of ~77k (per indeed). This is for industry, not academia. So how am I am misrepresenting the fact that being a biologist takes over 7+ years of being grossly underpaid relative t…

Forgive me for I live in a bubble so I don't know a great deal about why someone would spend that many years in school to land a 77k job. I also don't know much about compensation structure (ex: is comp == salary or are there other components?) I do know a couple of friends that work at Genentech who comfortably pull in > 200k so there's that.

> Forgive me for I live in a bubble so I don't know a great about why someone would spend that many years in school to land a 77k job. I also don't know much about compensation structure (ex: is comp == salary or are there other components?)

comp pretty much == salary (plus benefits, like insurance, 4% 401k match, maybe small bonuses). My take is that the low salaries is primarily due to the appeal of the work - kids grow up wanting to be biologists, (chemists, physicists) so there is a labor oversupply. A strong secondary contributor is overhead - a scientist can easily cost 2x salary in overhead for equipment and reagents (very field dependent).

To your point it is possible make decent money in big pharma, but they are essentially the FAANG of the bio/chemistry world and still come with 7y postgrad prereqs.

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