Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

medium.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

601–610 of 748 posts

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#601

Post by asdff »

healsjnr1 wrote: post #512
barry-cotter wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> As men in the field we should advocate for those things Karen recommends, namely flexible hours, obscenely convenient high quality childcare, and other supports to make a career not the death of family. Flexible hours impose large costs in terms of increased difficulty of coordination and communication and if you’re really serious about them you need to completely upend the organizational structure, like changing a…

This point of view keeps coming up and it completely misses the point that _this already happens to every single women who has given up their career to look after children_. This flexibility and cost you are talking about is borne entirely by them as they rearrange their lives and attempt to make things work while men continue with barely any disruption. I'm my opinion this is deep, unintentional, structural sexism.…

If you or I were to take off a year to be a stay at home dad, would we suffer the same career consequences as women? If the answer is yes, then the issue is that we don't let anyone have children without harming their career, and that sounds counterintuitive and should be fixed.

If the answer is no, then bigotry is at play. It's impossible to know this answer, so we should just make it painless to take time off. I know of plenty of academics who go on sabbatical, fall off the face of the earth, and ignore every department email for a year or however long. This process actually improves their career, not hinder it. Taking time off is harmless.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#602

Post by tensionhead »

This 'scissor diagrams' are a gross misrepresentation of what is really going on in academia. It conveys the the misleading message that 'the pipeline' is only leaking for female STEM aspirants. In fact, if you start with 100 woman and 100 men, so 200 STEM students in total, only around 1-5 people will make it to the end of these scissor diagrams (professorship and alike). Let's assume a very strong imbalance, say we have 4 man and 1 woman making it (80/20). That means the drop out rate (or 'leakiness') is 96% for men and 99% for woman! So yes, in this case it is 4 times as likely for a man to become professor compared to a woman. However, it's still very unlikely (4%) for an individual man to succeed and hence the majority of men also drop out of STEM academia.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#603

Post by asdff »

thereisnospork wrote: post #260
fizwhiz wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

to your last point, top companies hire before PhDs even defend all the time. In fact it's nice when that happens because then you can go to your committee with the job offer and they will pass you without too much fuss or revisions, sometimes a year early. Post docs are pretty optional in the industry these days, and the prerequisites on job applications for phd science positions are going to be a bit fast and loose.

The trick is to angle your skillset to the industry skill set, network network network, even collaborations with the company directly can happen when you are a grad student. When you show up to the interview and are recommended by the people you networked with and understand their technology since you've been all over it in grad school and have some papers published to prove it, suddenly you are the top candidate in the pile. It's not impossible to do this if you angle your grad career from the start, and go to a school in an area with a lot of these companies and other good research schools nearby.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#604

Post by asdff »

Fomite wrote: post #314
thereisnospork wrote: post #260

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

There's also less room to move. It's much harder for someone whose been doing PCR for the past 6 years to go "You know what, screw this..." than there is for someone whose been working on the analysis of large datasets in say, physics. And, perceptional-wise, leaving for industry is often seen as a failure.

People doing PCR for 6 years are probably generating a pretty big dataset for analysis...

Bioinformatics is an entire field. The lines between molecular biology, genetics, physics, chemistry, statistics, and computer science are getting very blurry these days. Plenty of bio phds get hired for data scientist roles in industry.

No one is going to knock you for leaving for industry these days. Anyone who is a big deal enough in academia to have that kind of ego is already going to have started a company or three themselves on the side.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#605

Post by codingmess »

nl wrote: post #544
username90 wrote: post #471

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Being able to stay at home is a privilege. My brother, my dad and some of my friends took a few years off to stay at home when the mother worked, I don't see how being able to do that is not a privilege, all of them did it because they wanted to and liked it. However all of them experienced a lot of sexism from being a stay at home dad. So an alternative explanation to the skew between men and women at work could be…

I don't think the person you are replying to is either agreeing or disagreeing it is a privilege. They are just pointing out the increadibly bad argument they are replying to. A brand new account posting self-contradictory nonsense like For dads to step up, as feminists demand, mothers would have to give up that privilege. sounds like a troll to me. I think the comment "no, you see, I can't possibly help you with thi…

No - what is going on is that feminists point to statistics of dads not staying home, then claim it is because dads "don't step up to help in the home". That's a feminist lie - several, actually. First lie: it is a burden to take care of your kids. Second lie: dads are lazy slobs oppressing the mothers to do all the awful work, while they chill in their comfy careers.

It's not even a question of "I can't help you with that because of your privilege", it is that the question is not even the question.

Of course there are dads who wouldn't like to stay at home, or who don't even consider it because of societal traditions. Likewise mothers who don't want to stay home (less often). Overall, it is a question of money (privilege), and a private matter between the parents.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#606

Post by GrayTextIsTruth »

filleduchaos wrote: post #552
pnako wrote: post #539

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Saying that women give up a career to look after their children is like lamenting the fact that people are giving up drinking to look after their liver.

Do you consider a career to be a literally body-destroying poison for men as well or only for women?

Yes. I would be in better health gardening all day and building things with my hands. Probably have better mental health too.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#607

Post by asdff »

virtuous_signal wrote: post #514
HammockWarrior wrote: post #397

Seems like much of the problem could be solved by just having the working world chill the f' out for women and for men. For example, a 32 hour workweek along with generous paid parental leaves. Everyone should have time for a life outside of work, not just women of childbearing age. Also, The whole idea of having young people work like dogs in order to have a shot at making partner, or gaining tenure, or gaining a me…

32 hour workweeks might work but there will always be the issue of defection . If a company allows employees to take unlimited leave, then worker A who avails him/herself of it, will be at a disadvantage to worker B who keeps working like a dog, when it comes time for promotions. If company A mandates 32 hour workweeks, then they will eventually lose out to their competitor company B who mandates 40 hours (or more in…

That assumes that working like a dog is more efficient than having a 3 day weekend and free time to interact with your family and coming back in on monday fresh and alert.

It also assumes that workers A and B both working 40 hours (or more informally) are both working like dogs, trying to earn a promotion before the other. This is definitely true in some fields like finance, but not all.

The last assumption is that there is no economic benefit to added free time. Where would we be if the world was solely workers who didn't have the free time to engage with their own thoughts? We certainly wouldn't be on this website, or a computer for that matter.

We aren't computers with a job queue that can be maximized. We are animals that get exhausted easily, distrust our own warning signs, and have been known to do foolish things like jump from buildings if an artificial number dips below some arbitrary level. I think we can all afford to slow down just a little.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#608

Post by Fomite »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #372
Fomite wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the health sector and honestly, it comes down to a couple things: 1) They have more data. It's not clear that it's better. 2) That difference is, to the eyes of many of us, showing up, making things worse, and then "pivoting". 3) I get to decide what I want to do. I want to add a project on X? I go work on it.

I would seriously quibble with the anarchic independence you describe in #3 because (depending on the field certainly) you need to fund that work with grants and postdocs etc... Do you might feel like you can but it's generally largely dependent on convincing other groups to fund that work. I'll Grant that The above doesn't really apply to pure math or philosophy

I'll admit that I managed to find a position with an abnormal degree of freedom in a fairly applied field (epidemiology) but I don't think that's any more atypical than people with particularly nice jobs in the private sector.

But right now, I'm working on projects in emerging infectious diseases, healthcare associated infections, some philosophy of science stuff, some algorithmic work in network science, and something that can best be described as "digital humanities".

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#609

Post by Fomite »

oefrha wrote: post #528
Fomite wrote: post #321

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I work in the health sector and honestly, it comes down to a couple things: 1) They have more data. It's not clear that it's better. 2) That difference is, to the eyes of many of us, showing up, making things worse, and then "pivoting". 3) I get to decide what I want to do. I want to add a project on X? I go work on it.

I have a friend who’s a physicist-turned machine learning researcher working on health issues. I asked him about why he decided to say an academic researcher instead of going to the industry where (to me) there’s clearly more data. I was told that academic institutions tend to land better partnerships that companies don’t tend to get maybe due to privacy concerns.

I think your friend's impression is pretty accurate.

Industry in healthcare, especially the tech industry, has a long road of trust building ahead of it.

I think we're also a little jaded. We've been talking about how big, real-time data streams like pharmacy sales data, social media, etc. are going to change the game for disease forecasting since I was an undergrad. We're still not even close.

Re: An alternative argument for why women leave STEM

#610

Post by asdff »

oefrha wrote: post #51

> We spend billions of dollars training women in STEM. By not making full use of their skills, if we look at only the american economy, we are wasting about $1.5 billion USD per year in economic benefits they would have produced if they stayed in STEM. So here’s a business proposal: ... With all due respect, I don’t understand this call to action. Faculty position is basically a zero sum game. If more women end up as…

faculty positions are not the only path in stem
Post reply on HN