[Womeninmedicine] Life in academic research

Tue Jan 27 09:32:48 EST 2009

 From the chronicle for higher education

http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/01/2009012701c.htm

BALANCING ACT

A Bad Reputation

Why are more and more graduate students turning 
away from careers at research universities?

<mailto:careers at chronicle.com>By MARY ANN MASON

"I don't want to live your life." Faculty members 
who train graduate students hear that remark a 
lot these days. In a 
<http://chronicle.com/cgi2-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/01//free/2009/01/9652n.htm>major 
new study of doctoral students' career goals, our 
research team received candid responses from more 
than 8,000 Ph.D. students in all disciplines at 
the University of California system. The news was not good.

We may be losing some of the most talented 
potential academics before they even arrive for a 
job interview. In the eyes of many doctoral 
students, the research university has a bad 
reputation  one of unrelenting work hours that 
allow little room for a satisfying family life.

This is a new generation caught in an old 
culture. The pool of graduate students is no 
longer dominated by young men with stay-at-home 
wives. Nearly half of our graduate students are 
women, and this generation wants a different kind 
of life  not one where the men work round the 
clock and the women take care of the home and 
children. Instead, these students envision 
dual-career families with both parents sharing in child raising.

Family balance weighs heavily on the minds of 
students in considering their career choices: 84 
percent of women and 74 percent of men registered 
the family friendliness of their future workplace 
as a serious concern. But they do not see their 
own universities meeting that goal. More than 70 
percent of women in the survey, and more than 
half of the men, did not consider research universities to be family friendly.

The number of young women who want to pursue 
careers in academic research declines by 30 
percent over the course of their doctoral study, 
and the number of men by 20 percent. In 
explaining their decision, men are more likely to 
report that they do not like unrelenting work 
hours. One male student in the survey complained 
that he was "fed up with the narrow-mindedness of 
supposedly intelligent people who are largely 
workaholic and expect others to be so as well." 
But most women give up on academic-research 
careers for family concerns. As one woman in the 
survey said, "I could not have come to graduate 
school more motivated to be a research-oriented 
professor. Now I feel that can only be a career 
possibility if I am willing to sacrifice having children."

Women also change career paths to accommodate 
their partners. Among academic couples in which 
both partners are seeking tenure-track jobs  the 
much-debated "two body" problem  women are more 
likely to defer their career plans for the 
benefit of the relationship. As one female 
doctoral student explained, "To pursue a 
tenure-track job in English you need to be 
willing to move anywhere in the country to take 
the job. The salaries for these positions are not 
enough to justify a spouse giving up his job, and 
many of these positions are not in places where a 
spouse could easily find another job, especially if he is an academic."

Role models also make a difference. When we asked 
women in the survey whether they viewed research 
universities as family friendly, their opinions 
differed significantly depending on whether or 
not it was common in their departments for female 
professors to have children. Where it was common, 
46 percent of female respondents agreed that 
research universities were family friendly. Where 
it was uncommon, only 12 percent of women agreed.

Not many babies are born in graduate school, even 
though more than two-thirds of the female 
respondents claimed that the optimal time to have 
a first child would be between the ages of 28 and 
34  the very years in which they are struggling 
to obtain their Ph.D.'s. The average age at which 
women receive a Ph.D. is 33, meaning that those 
lucky enough to find tenure-track jobs right out 
of graduate school cannot expect to earn tenure 
until they are 39. They can see their biological 
clocks running out before they achieve the golden 
ring of tenure, but they feel helpless.

Money is a major consideration for why women 
don't have children in graduate school. Few 
members of the Association of American 
Universities (the 62 top-ranked research 
universities) offer paid maternity leave to 
graduate students who are employees or supported 
on fellowships, and only a handful provide them 
with dependent health care for a child.

Women in our survey said they didn't have time in 
graduate school to have children, and they also 
feared that doing so would mean they would no 
longer be considered serious scholars by their 
professors. One student said of her department's 
attitude toward pregnant doctoral students: 
"There is a pervasive attitude that the female 
graduate student in question must now prove to 
the faculty that she is capable of completing her 
degree, even when prior to the pregnancy there 
were absolutely no doubts about her capabilities 
and ambition." The majority of women in the 
survey, as opposed to only 16 percent of the men, 
were somewhat or very concerned that pregnancy 
would be similarly perceived by future employers.

Academic science offers even more challenges for 
graduate-student parents, particularly mothers. 
The competitive race to achieve scientific 
breakthroughs and prove oneself offers little 
respite for childbirth or child rearing. The 
effect of parenthood on the career choices of 
female doctoral students supported by federal 
grants (the source of support for most students 
in the sciences) is undeniable. Forty-six percent 
of female respondents began their graduate 
studies working toward a faculty position in a 
research university. Babies changed that; only 11 
percent of new mothers indicate they now want to 
continue on that path. Fatherhood for men 
similarly situated appears to have less impact  
59 percent began their doctoral programs planning 
to pursue a research-intensive academic career 
and 45 percent still plan to do so.

Where do all the graduate students go when they 
reject careers at research institutions?

The biggest winners are business and government. 
Four-year teaching colleges are also a popular 
choice, since they are perceived as being the 
most family friendly of all career choices in 
higher education. That may surprise faculty 
members at four-year colleges who often complain 
of heavy teaching loads and lack of 
accommodations for pregnancy and child rearing.

Unless the old academic culture  which 
discourages family formation at all levels but is 
particularly unfriendly to graduate-student 
parenthood  radically changes, we are in danger 
of losing many of our best and brightest minds to 
other professions. There has been some movement 
to accommodate new faculty parents, but by then 
it is already too late to capture many 
disaffected graduate students who have already found careers elsewhere.

For starters, some of the policies now offered to 
many faculty members could be extended to 
doctoral students who are employees or supported 
on fellowships. Those include: paid maternity and 
paternity leave, paid dependent health insurance, 
subsidized child care, relief from teaching and 
work obligations for several weeks following 
childbirth and adoption, and stopping the Ph.D. 
career clock after childbirth for both mothers and fathers.

At present, too many graduate students agree with 
this woman's appraisal in our survey: "Don't get 
a Ph.D.! Just don't do it: There are so many 
other things in life that you could do for a 
living that are as intellectually challenging, 
pay more, and where women having children is not 
a big deal. Academia is stuck in the 1970s at best on this issue."

Mary Ann Mason is a professor and co-director of 
the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic & 
Family Security and the author (with her 
daughter, Eve Mason Ekman) of Mothers on the Fast 
Track. She writes regularly on work and family 
issues for our Balancing Act column, and invites 
readers to send in questions or personal concerns 
about those issues. She will answer your 
questions in a future column. E-mail your 
comments to 
<mailto:careers at chronicle.com>careers at chronicle.com 
or 
to<mailto:mamason at law.berkeley.edu>mamason<mailto:mamason at law.berkeley.edu>@law.berkeley.edu. 
To read previous Balancing Act columns, see 
<http://chronicle.com/cgi2-bin/printable.cgi?article=http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/2009/01//jobs/news/archives/columns/balancing_act>http://chronicle.com/jobs/news/archives/columns/balancing_act

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