academia is a damn ugly place, especially for women
Basics – In ‘Geek Chic’ and Obama, New Hope for Lifting Women in Science – NYTimes.com
From a purely Darwinian point of view, expecting a young woman to sacrifice her reproductive fitness for the sake of career advancement is simply too much, and yet the structure of academic research, in which one must spend one’s 20s and early 30s as a poorly compensated and minimally empowered graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, and the remainder of one’s 30s and into the low 40s working madly to earn tenure, can demand exactly that.
That’s damn straight. Science is geared towards a particular sort of maleness. This, however, is a good sign:
Dr. Mason and her colleagues found that while two-thirds of the respondents either had or planned to have children, 84 percent of the women and 74 percent of the men expressed worry about the family-unfriendliness of their intended profession, and many had changed their plans accordingly.
I’m heartened that so many males are getting a clue and understanding that family is important.
(On the other hand, as far as I know, all academic positions are some measure of the publish or perish, hunt for tenure, etc. Why is science in a worse position?).
