From an article in the Guardian.
Young women scientists leave academia in far greater numbers than men for three reasons. During their time as PhD candidates, large numbers of women conclude that (i) the characteristics of academic careers are unappealing, (ii) the impediments they will encounter are disproportionate, and (iii) the sacrifices they will have to make are great…
Women more than men see great sacrifice as a prerequisite for success in academia. This comes in part from their perception of women who have succeeded, from the nature of the available role models. Successful female professors are perceived by female PhD candidates as displaying masculine characteristics, such as aggression and competitiveness, and they were often childless.
As if all this were not enough, women PhD candidates had one experience that men never have. They were told that they would encounter problems along the way simply because they are women. They are told, in other words, that their gender will work against them.
So, outright sexism and a hostile work environment are pushing women out of academia. Nice.
Apt. 11d 
Is it really true that there is gender discrimination against women in hiring? It seems to me there is a lot of “affirmative action” work in encouraging women to apply and ensuring that they are given full consideration. Even here in Ghana we go out of our way to make sure there is no discrimination against female candidates and we are in a country much more patriarchal than the US. Judging from blogs I would say that if anything women seem to dominate US academia rather than being excluded from it. The only woman exile we have in my department is British not American.
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We’re having a major baby boom among the female graduate students in my husband’s department. Many of the male graduate students have growing families (there are at least a couple with three kids and in our low-cost area), but up to now, there haven’t been any female grad students with kids. Off the top of my head, I think two female grad students have had babies this year and a third is expecting twins in a couple of months. There’s been a lot of juggling of TA assignments to make this work (they’re entitled to a teaching reduction if they want it).
While it is harder for a mother than a father to get through the program (there are a number of SAHM grad wives here, believe it or not), the other side of this is that at least in philosophy, it is much easier to get a female philosopher a job.
There was a funny episode recently when a certain male philosopher at a different institution was decrying the fact that in philosophy, women are generally confined to the kitchen (i.e. ethics), whereas women are relatively uncommon in metaphysics and epistemology (don’t ask me what epistemology is!). The funny thing about this statement was the covert sexism of the assumption that ethics must not be important, because there are so many female philosophers doing ethics.
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” women conclude that (i) the characteristics of academic careers are unappealing, ….(ii) ….. and (iii) the sacrifices they will have to make are great…”
Two out of three look like areas where women have better insight into the future.
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I absolutely don’t believe that it is easier to get a female philosopher a job. See the Women in Philosophy project website:
http://web.mit.edu/wphtf/Welcome.html
with linked article by Sally Haslanger, a woman philosophy at MIT, on her observations and experiences. MIT has done quite a lot of institutional research on treatment of women there with respect to biases in things like size of assigned offices and so on (and to its credit, done a lot to address inequities).
As to whether there is gender discrimination in hiring in academia and elsewhere, come on! This is well documented in Virginia Valian’s book Why So Slow which reviews the many many studies which show how changing the gender on an application gets fewer offers, lower salaries, and so on.
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“I absolutely don’t believe that it is easier to get a female philosopher a job.”
The people we know who work on job placement believe it. Maybe they’re wrong, but that’s the operating assumption at admission time.
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My husband is a scientist, with a big research/tenure track job at a prestigeous university. Having observed him along the way, my impression is that doing a science PhD with kids is not easy but possible. But these first few years of the real academic life have been insane, particularly with the international travel which (so he says, anyway) is a prerequisite for tenure advancement. There’s no way that I would travel away from my kids (as their mother) as much as he does. I knew about the long hours in lab, and he does routinely spend 12+ hour days. But the many weeks of travel each year took me by surprise.
Bottom line: academic science is not conducive to being a daily-level involved parent.
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*prestigious* (ack!)
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The issue is, which women? Childless superstars may find it easier to get offers from top departments due to affirmative action or tokenism, but if the issues are family friendliness in academia or general sorts of more subtle biases, being able to point to a woman in a department isn’t really solving the problem of sexism in academia. Amy’s story is great illustrator of the more subtle biases women face: that a field dominated by women must be “softer” or “less analytical/rigorous,” that issues women choose to look at are more trivial, that women are less theoretically minded, or a valorization of certain forms of performing which women are less attracted too, and thus an assumption that women aren’t able to ‘cut it’ or aren’t interested, even though these types of performance have little to do with academic ability.
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These stories make me think of my college friends who both went to grad school in biology after they got married. After a year, she decided to give up and get a job to support him. At Genentech. In 1989. He never did get a tenure-track position in academia, but thanks to her “sacrifice,” they are doing quite well.
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Let me revise myself:
“Many of the male graduate students have growing families (there are at least a couple with three kids and in our low-cost area), but up to now, there haven’t been any female grad students with kids.”
Actually, come to think of it, there was a grad couple a few years back that had two kids while they were here. He finished and got a very modestly paid but tenure track job and she didn’t finish. They have at least three kids now.
The current baby boom among female grad students is a new thing, though.
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Having gone through and managed the PhD process myself, I feel that female mentors for female doctoral candidates are key and can make or break a female student’s vision for her future and ability to navigate politics in the field/academia.
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Given the realities of PhD placement today, it may be worthwhile to divide statistics into “Top 10 PhD Program” in the discipline, compared to all of the rest.
Do they look the same, gender-wise, and placement wise? It is entirely possible that a woman from a top program would be at an advantage, but a woman from a mediocre program would be subject to gender discrimination. Or vice versa. Or maybe one sort graduates a larger percentage of woman who enroll, but other place a larger percentage of graduates in jobs.
I don’t have an intuitive sense of how it might be different for the different groups. But when such a small percentage of PhD graduates actually get a placement in tenure track jobs, it is not necessarily obvious that Harvard’s program and Mediocre State’s program should be lumped together.
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On the front page of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 14th: “Women challenge male philosophers to make room in unfriendly field.”
http://chronicle.com/article/Female-Philosophers-Shake-Up/136629/
A few months previously (Oct 2012), they ran another article titled “Men dominate in philosophy and history.”
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There’s data out there that says that bias plays out most significantly for ambiguous cases. It’s true in the visual system, for example, when one is more likely to have seen a gun when one was expecting one, but only in images that are difficult to discern. That is, you don’t manufacture a gun in a picture of a rubber ducky when the rubber ducky is clear, but when the image is degraded, your prior expectations influence what you see. It’s a perceptual example of confirmation bias (once you’ve decided there might be a gun, you look for confirming evidence of its presence, manufacturing it if necessary).
The same effect has been shown to play out in cases of gender/race bias. That is, the highly qualified women who stand out do not necessarily experience bias in hiring. But, the people in the middle, who are difficult to differentiate, see the effects of bias (The effect can be clearly observed in experiments where identical resumes are sent with male and female names).
So, Ragtime’s hypothesis that there might differences among PhD programs seems plausible and worth testing.
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“On the front page of the Chronicle of Higher Education, Jan. 14th: “Women challenge male philosophers to make room in unfriendly field.””
I was thinking of mentioning that article, but I didn’t as I wasn’t able to read it myself (I just heard about it). A theory I heard mentioned was that philosophy is very argumentative (if two people agree, one of them is not a philosopher), and so that for a philosopher, the way you show a person respect is by arguing with them. If you don’t argue, it’s a sign of disrespect. I’d add that in contrast, female culture tends to prize conformity and unanimity, so there may be a culture clash going on.
The good old days were much wilder in academic life, I suspect. I remember hearing a story of a female job candidate who found herself being waved over to sit on an unmade hotel bed for a job interview with male interviewers (that was probably the 1970s or early 80s). Muy uncomfortable and inappropriate! Also, I believe there was a lot more heavy faculty drinking in the 1970s. Things have gotten a lot tamer.
My feeling is that 1) admissions and hiring committees do very much want women 2) doing a doctoral program or getting tenure is much more of an ordeal for a woman who wants kids (all sorts of clocks are running–biological clocks, graduate funding clocks, tenure clocks, etc.) than it is for a man. I’d compare the relationship between the universities and women to kids and puppies. Your kid may really, really want a puppy (like the admissions and hiring committees desperately want female candidates), while being unaware of all that that involves. The kid wants the puppy, but doesn’t want to walk the puppy or feed it. (I shouldn’t take this metaphor too far.)
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But AmyP, surely you know about the research showing that behavior which is accepted encouraged from men (assertiveness, argumentativeness) is stigmatized in women (called aggressiveness, hysteria). So I’d be very, very hesitant to rely on the culture clash explanation.
Also, the resume name-changing studies that bj and I have both mentioned show that people may say they want to hire women, and even sincerely believe that they want to hire women, while their subconscious biases still steer them in the opposite direction in reality.
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