Incorrect?

Thank you for explaining that as long as I swear to be single and childless, I will be fine in a science career. I am so pleased.

Things could very well change over the next decade or two as increasing numbers of men take "parental leave". The economists' explanation that time off work for child-rearing reduces an employee's productivity will be testable as more men take more time off work to participate in child-rearing activities.

How many many years ago was it that the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in chemistry explained that to be a university chemist she had to swear she would be single and childless? I forget the name for a moment. My sense has long been is that Tyler Cowen delights in explaining to women why they cannot succeed professionally. Thank you, Tyler, sweetie.

This is very interesting; thanks for posting. There are so many things that screw women over once they have kids. I remember reading in the Daily Labor Report about a study showing that when union employees are disciplined for missing work due to family issues (ie, sick kid) and they grieve the reprimand through to arbitration, women are significantly more likely to win than men. This kind of thing just encourages women to continue bearing the burden of dealing with children as they know they will be excused but their partners could get in trouble.

This paper looks at people who have _already received their PhD_. It doesn't tell you anything about why there is already a huge gap between the numbers of men and women in math, engineering, and (some) fields of science before that level, back to undergrad and high school. And if you want to understand that - well, you'll have to be open to truck theories.

You also have to be open to "Why aren't there any women professors in this department? Fuck this, I'm entering a field that I can succeed in even if I have kids" theories.

The whole thing for me is made even more bizarre by the fact that the typical university campus is the perfect place to have a child-friendly work environment: pleasant environment, infinite pools of high-quality, low-cost labor (with flexible schedules!) for day care centers (and even K-5 schools), generally flexible working environment, etc. But most academics fight it harder than just about anything except the allocation of parking places.

Cranky

As a very good commenter at Marginal Revolution pointed out, Matt's just ignoring the evidence against discrimination by positing an even bigger conspiracy. Now, the whole social schema is the problem! According to Matt, the lack of evidence for discrimination just proves a bigger web of discrimination. Matt's being very faith-based, here.

I mean, isn't it pretty likely that the child-care arragements we have just might, kinda something to do with the fact that women physically carry the babies and physically carry the means with which to nurture the babies after birth? I mean, doesn't that drive the division of labor at least a tad? Really, I'm just trying to inject some reality-based observations into your faith-based discussion, people.

Finally, Matt takes a cheap shot at Summers, but ignores the fact that the natural intelligence argument was only one of four possible reasons that Summers posed, and was considered by Summers to be the least likely. Summers also posited that the differential burdens of child care might drive gender differences in science professorships. And it looks like Summers was right about that. Matt either knew that, in which case Matt is lying, or Matt didn't know it, in which case Matt is ignorant. His choice.

I'm glad EdectEcon is an optimist about things changing over the next 20 years as more men take paternity leave. My husband asked for paternity leave from a large law firm; the reply was that no one had done that, that he could, but it would not be good for his career. He didn't take the leave. We were hopeful that things would eventually change. The person whose birth caused my husband's request celebrates his 29th birthday next week.

Mrs. Joe is months away from her PhD in the humanities--a field with a disproportionately high share of women. She was expressly told that if she wanted to have children, she needs to either have them at least a year before she starts a TT job, or after she has gotten tenure. According to her advisor, taking maternity leave after starting a TT job would be the death knell of any hope of ever getting tenure. As in, "I'm not sure if I've ever heard of any woman who has taken maternity leave before getting tenure who has then gotten tenure" death knell.

So, we procreated in a manner such that our youngest daughter will be exactly 12 months old when Mrs. Joe starts a TT job.

You're thinking of Barbara McClintock, Jennifer. (I may have misspelt her last name.)

"The whole thing for me is made even more bizarre by the fact that the typical university campus is the perfect place to have a child-friendly work environment: pleasant environment, infinite pools of high-quality, low-cost labor (with flexible schedules!) for day care centers (and even K-5 schools), generally flexible working environment, etc."

One word of caution: The whole "flexible schedule" bit is often code for "you are going to have to do a ton of work during abnormal hours" (i.e., social functions in the evening, writing books/articles late at night, etc.). If you have a working spouse (and if you have a kid and live in anything remotely resembling a higher cost of living environment, you will need a working spouse), it's kind of unfair to make them get home from their job (and in case of women in academia, their spouse's other job is usually at a law firm, or hospital, or investment bank--very smart women in lower-paying prestigious jobs seem unusually attracted to very smart men in higher-paying prestigious jobs) after 9 or 11 or 13 hours (with the latter two being far more common in my experience) at work and then watch the kids so mommy or daddy can write his/her articles or go to the cocktail reception. And good luck finding a babysitter for those times on anything resembling a regular basis.

Finally, Matt takes a cheap shot at Summers, but ignores the fact that the natural intelligence argument was only one of four possible reasons that Summers posed, and was considered by Summers to be the least likely.

You know this is a flat-out and easily confirmed lie, right? He ranked "intrinsic aptitude" as the second of three factors, ranking behind "high-powered career" (the 80-hours-in-a-lab factor) but in more important than more direct discrimination.

Keith, let's try to inject a little reality into the debate by looking at what Summer's really said, shall we?

"There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very substantial disparities that this conference's papers document and have been documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I'll explain each of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end, and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described."

So actually, summers proposed three possibilities, and thought that disparities in natural ability was the second most important, and less important than discrimination. Not only that, his #1 reason is effectively what Matt is saying, that women are forced to choose (Summers would say just choose) children over a science career. I don't really think this changes the debate one bit, I just wanted to make clear that you actually have no idea what you're talking about, and should probably learn to use a simple google search, or else sound a little less self-satisfied.

Sam, thanks for the link. You have a point that my recollection of Summer's talk was not fully accurate, but still more far accurate than Matt's. Which means, since you claim that I "had no idea what I was talking about," that you believe that Matt was deliberately obfuscating. Wow, you're really taking Matt to the woodshed over this. I thought I was hard on Matt, but you're much tougher.

Things could very well change over the next decade or two as increasing numbers of men take "parental leave".

I have pretty strong doubts of that being true in general. But in academia, forget it. The competition for tenure track jobs is too stiff to permit people to take a six month block of time essentially off. Hell, just working a normal work week of 40-50 hours is pretty iffy, unless you're extremely productive.

Normally, you're working all the time. When you're home, you're reading literature in the field.

No, sorry kids. Summers certainly did point to this as a possible factor. And instead of saying "here's a factor in why we don't have more women working at high levels in the science, now I'm going to roll up my sleeves and do something about it," he followed up with a lengthy disquisition on how women lacked the intrinsic aptitude for work in the sciences. The upshot was that Summers -- a university president at the time -- was disinclined to try and actually do anything that would help remedy the circumstances that lead to their being so few women with tenure in the sciences.

"The terms, however, were set up long ago -- by men"

If you totally deny agency to women of long ago and of today, then it's just as you seem to say: women assume the role of primary caretaker because men oblige them to do so, and they passively acquiesce.

But it's possible, as deMarneffe has argued is indeed the case, that women have something effective to say about their assumption of this role.

Snarkout, that's close but not exactly right. Summers's #1 explanation for the gender disparity was a combination of another factor with "the 80-hours-in-a-lab factor," and even that is far too chary a description. What Summers said was the biggest factor is the combined effect of two societal assumptions: first, that prestigious jobs should go to people who spend 80 hours a week working (and, he said, we should question whether that is fair) and second, that women with children should do the greater share of homemaking than their children's fathers (and, he said, we should question whether that is fair). Just as a matter of counting the hours in a week, you can see how those two assumptions are going to have the effect of pushing women out of academia.

I disagree with the remainder of Summers's rankings and I'm loath to relitigate the entire matter, but it's worth pointing out that what Summers thought was the single greatest reason women have a harder time in the academic sciences is pretty much what Matt is saying here. Which makes Matt's parting line a little unwarranted.

The competition for tenure track jobs is too stiff to permit people to take a six month block of time essentially off

after which the child dies? having children and taking care of them is a life-long distraction from career-building. the 'social discrimination' here is the assumption that somehow its advantageous to society for their to be people spending 80hours a week on their careers but somehow raising children is a low value-added proposition left to the economic underclasses... or your wife (or both nowadays).

not to say that there isn't a fair dose of 'direct discrimination' in between.

it seems clear that the only fair solution is to go back to the old British model: no marriage for professors.

As a Harvard graduate, I would like to add (since this has turned into a debate about Summers) that the real reason Summers resigned as President of Harvard was because the investigation of Harvard's role in the looting of Russia's assets in 1999 has just turned up Summers' involvement. He kept playing up the fact that people found his remarks "un-PC" in order to avoid public discussion of the Russian investigation and to give the impression he didn't step down as President of Harvard because of the Russian scandal.

As Matt says, Summers made it clear that as President of Harvard he had no problems with the absence of women in tenured positions and he was not going to do anything to help reform the system.

But Summers was also an outright crook, and I think he may well have made that remark deliberately in order to create a PC-tempest smokescreen. I'm guessing he figured women-in-the-sciences were an easier and safer target than, say, minority tenure in any field, otherwise he probably would have insulted black people.

I know several women in academia, not all of them in the sciences, and I have heard several horror stories along these lines.

One woman was told after she announced her pregnancy that having a baby would ruin her academic career. She was in linguistics.

So, frankly, I suspect it's an academia problem, not a science problem. Unless linguistics has magically become one of those fields than men are "naturally" better at?

Please. If you take a year or two off in science without keeping up with the literature, you can be toast.

At several schools, there is a policy that the tenure clock stops for one year when you have a baby - in other words, you get an extra year to get everything together for tenure. I know two people who have made use of this, one who just received tenure. The other, we will see. She is in the sciences, and apparently she was the first woman in her department to EVER have a baby. She took no maternity leave, but like I said, did do the tenure clock thing. But she is worried that some people might think she was "unserious" about her career for doing that. She ended up adopting her second kid.

Now that my non-tenured professor husband and I are starting to think about kids, we are wondering if he, who wants to do his share of the parenting, can do the tenure clock stopping thing, as I think no MAN has ever done that in his department. Just goes to show that anti-family, sexist mind sets hurt everyone, men and women.

"...the 'social discrimination' here is the assumption that somehow its advantageous to society for their to be people spending 80hours a week on their careers but somehow raising children is a low value-added proposition left to the economic underclasses... or your wife (or both nowadays)."

Exactly. The problem is that scientific institutions relentlessly haze their pledges. You work non-stop for virtually no pay until you achieve tenure, which occurs these days at roughly the age when fertility rates begin to plummet. Then you have the option of raking in the bucks and offloading all the actual work onto the new pledges. Take a couple of years off to have a child, and your career is generally shot.

The dirty open secret is that the hazing model not only drives out married women, but it's also starting to drive out most people who aren't holding an F-1 Visa, because the lifestyle is generally horrific.

It's in the nature of scientific research to be time-consuming and intensive. But a more collaborative institutional model, which makes it easier for people to work part-time for several years before resuming their career path, would hardly be impossible to create. The major obstacle is standard old-fogey resistance to institutional reform. I'd add that a "libertarian" with a cushy taxpayer-subsidized gig at a public university is probably not someone whose opinion should be taken seriously on the subject of institutional reform.

All that said, I would be remiss if I did not mention that the best Professor I ever had was a married woman with children who beat the system and is currently a department head at a Big 10 University.

Diana, do you have a link to backup that assertion? I haven't heard anything about this and Google doesn't seem to be helping. Thanks.

But in any case -- it is clear Summers did not resign because of the women-in-science issue, and the far more proximate cause was widespread faculty (of arts and sciences, specifically) dissatisfaction with his management style, particularly with regard to the Curricular Review.

Anyone here read Becker? Say women have a greater preference towards nurturing, and a higher efficiency at doing so (eg, built-in lactation devices). One would think that evolutionary forces would tend to favor this, and I think only a Harvard graduate would be mostly likely to think this is a total screw-job by men (other than sea horses and a few other oddities, females invest more in care of the kids than males). Given the large costs of leaving the labor market (see Art Shell), the male specializes in work, the female in 'home-work'--on average. Problem solved? For many, yes, as in case my wife is content as a housewife involved in the very important task of raising 3 kids, and I make much more money than she could (especially as her marketplace skills have diminished over time). But for many, especially overeducated 20-somethings and others with little appreciation of the nuclear family (eg, Yglesias, female professors who get more attention for being victims than scientists such as the fragile-as-a-flower Nancy Hopkins), the omnipresent equilibrium is proof of male malice and power.

In the annals of human thought, this anthropological conspiracy will go down with 'aether' and 'N-rays'.

You say the gap is explained by "fertility decisions" I say it's explained by "structural sexism."

Well Matthew, I say this is a case of the theory ladeness of observation. Is there a possible resolution to this that doesn't involve rhetoric and politics? Is there an objective fact of the matter?

Structural Sexism seems like a cop-out to me. To assume this data supports that is to assume that child rearing isn't just as important as occupational advancement.

I love how kids are just things that get in the way of careers. This whole topic is utter nonsense. Does every field have to be equally represented by men and women? How about the discrimination against men in K-12 teaching? Or...maybe...fertility decisions also affects who goes into teaching.

Why should women who want children get special treatment anyway? What about women who choose not to have children, and focus on their career? The same thing goes for men. Do you know how many men quit high powered jobs to spend more time with their family? It's not a small number. This debate is started by people who want life to be easy, to have no consequences for their actions, for a free lunch, whatever metaphor you want. Life has choices. If you choose to have a family, your're going to see your career suffer, unless you ignore your kids. Make your choice and live with the consequences.

I also have to say that in certain fields it's become even more competitive. When I grew up, in the 1960s, it was considered "acceptable" for (male) grad students to be married, not spend all the time in the lab, etc.

When I got around to getting my doctorate in the 1980s, there was active discouragement of grad students to get married. One of my co-workers (who was older than the rest of us) was considered "not serious" because he was married and had a child.

"The terms, however, were set up long ago -- by men"

If you totally deny agency to women of long ago and of today, then it's just as you seem to say: women assume the role of primary caretaker because men oblige them to do so, and they passively acquiesce.

Given that women were not allowed into monasteries or universities until sometime in the 19th century--by which point the higher education system we have today was well established--the terms of academic jobs most certainly were set up by men.

Structural Sexism seems like a cop-out to me. To assume this data supports that is to assume that child rearing isn't just as important as occupational advancement.

If it's just as important, why don't more men do it?

As to the arguments about how women "naturally" bear more responsibility because we have breasts, I hear they have these nifty modern devices called bottles, breastpumps and formula nowadays.

Please. If you take a year or two off in science without keeping up with the literature, you can be toast.

What, now women with children can't read?

If you choose to have a family, your're going to see your career suffer, unless you ignore your kids. Make your choice and live with the consequences.

Should read: "If women choose to have a family, they're going to see their career suffer, unless they ignore their kids."

Interestingly, this statement doesn't apply to men.

So what, scientist are supposed to enjoy playing with trucks? :-)

Also being discussed over at Bitch PhD:

"In other words, I don't think you can game the system. More to the point, I don't think you should try: the reality is that academia hires adults, and that adults often come with families. And that adults who don't have families may very well form them, or may have other committments (elderly parents, ailing pets, time-consuming hobbies) that are or aren't visible to hiring committees. Not all people who are married wear rings; not all people who are coupled are married; not all people who have children can *get* married. So, on general principles, I think those of us who are married and wear rings shouldn't try to hide our spouses; nor should committees assume that people without rings are unattached. Every hiring committee should make sure that every candidate is told about the department and university's climate and policies w/r/t families, parental leave, domestic partner benefits, gay-friendliness, family-friendliness, help finding jobs for spouses, and what structures are in place to provide support for women, ethnic minorities, folks with health problems (including mental illness), and so on."

http://bitchphd.blogspot.com/2006/11/ask-bitchy-feminist_15.html

/

Eric--I am not defined by my body. I wonder how many men touting the "male-breadwinner, female-housewife" model would be so quick to claim it if THEY were the ones having to take the low-status, ill-paid job?

And what would a "housewife-wife" do if the husband decides at some reason to kick her out and trade her in for a trophy-wife model? Do you think that she doesn't realize it? And how that might affect her interaction with her husband?

Face it--the "housewife-wife" model requires a great deal of trust on the wife's part that she isn't going to be taken advantage of. A relationship where one side has all the economic and financial power isn't very equal.

I have followed up my brief comment [comment #2] with a longer posting about parental leave here.

Based on my personal experience, there are still huge problems with implicit sexism in science and academia. I am a male tenured faculty member with 4 kids, 2 born while I was in a post-doctoral position. My decision to start a family while a post-doc was quite surprising to my mentor and very atypical for successful scientists in my field. There are many easily identifiable examples of men who succeed (e.g., obtain tenure) and then start a family (typically with a younger wife). I notice this because my kids are the same age as many of my colleagues who are 10+ years older than me.

There is no doubt in my mind that there is huge implicit pressure on women attempting to compete successfully in academia to avoid or delay having children. This both incurs a much larger cost for them and pushes some women out of the field entirely. Now that I am in a position of participating in graduate training, faculty hiring and promotion decisions, I am finally in a position to battle this implicit sexism directly. Having seen people evaluate scientists by simple metrics like total number of publications/grants or pubs per year, metrics that heavily penalize anybody who invests significant effort in parenting, there is no question in my mind it exists.

Two things on a more positive note:
1. The decision by my wife and I to start our family when we did was done with full awareness of the typical academic career trajectory (and also that my wife and I are the same age). I'm highly invested in my kids and I have no doubt that it impairs my productivity relative to my childless peers. However, having made this choice, I hope that I can act as role model and give advice to both women and men who want to make a similar choice.

2. I suspect I'm not the only one who also sees an opportunity in the misevaluation of female scientists by those who do not adjust for time off for children. These women will be undervalued by some and therefore those of us making better evaluations will be at an advantage during hiring/promotion decisions (so our departments will be beter). I suspect this is starting to happen already and provides at least some initial counter-pressure.

Christ on a crutch, is someone seriously holding up Becker as a model for the understanding of gender-related work-life conflict? This is a man whose models "prove" that womankind derives more utility from polygamy, for god's sake. As someone once sneeringly observed of Becker, "Economic theory as applied to the family should increase our understanding of the phenomena we are studying." Becker's, to be sure, does not.

I don't know everything about what is 'politically correct' or not given that it's a bit of a moving target, but the whole paper he cites, contrary to what tzs says above, is that while biology isn't the whole of destiny, it does play a part.

Per my non comprehensive understanding of 'political correctness' is that all social practices, like 'structural sexism' that Mr. Yglesias cites, come from some sort of 'power structure', that is so powerful as it were, that it doesn't have to take things like biology into account, and arguements about what a societal practice should be or why existing social outcomes are what they are that take biology into account are facades which the evil white male power structure hides behind.

An arguement that cites biology is thus politically incorrect then. That doesn't seem too baffling to me.

I have been in academic science for most of my 30+ year career and am married to a highly successful scientist who is also a tenured full professor and administrator. In our experience women with families are not denied tenure because of their sex, the timing of their pregnancies, or the number of their children. Tenure at research oriented academic institutions is based on productivity, that is how many papers get published and (most important)how many grant dollars are obtained. It's the number of NIH grants that will gain a research tenure, not the presence or absence of children. Academis institutions do not care if you have no children or 10 children as long as the grant dollars keep rolling in. The reality is that the time it takes to bare and raise children is time taken away from the lab and that translates into less scientific success. Most successful female scientists have no children, one child, or (rarely) a spouse who will do the majority of child rearing. If a woman can find a way to have children without it taking too much time away from the lab she will be able to compete with the men, if she can't, it's off the tenure track for her. It's a cultural issue more than one of discrimination. Until women can find partners who will shoulder the greater amount of the home and heart burden they will continue to be at a disadvantage compared to men who can.

"For many, yes, as in case my wife is content as a housewife involved in the very important task of raising 3 kids, and I make much more money than she could (especially as her marketplace skills have diminished over time). But for many, especially overeducated 20-somethings and others with little appreciation of the nuclear family (eg, Yglesias, female professors who get more attention for being victims than scientists such as the fragile-as-a-flower Nancy Hopkins), the omnipresent equilibrium is proof of male malice and"
'

Come on now. Rules set up to ask someone to work 60-80 hour weeks are antiquated. There is always a backlash to change. 'We have always done it this way and I don't really see the problem' is the excuse the male with a wifey at home uses. He cannot see because he has blinders on. If a women wants nothing more than to be a wifey, fine. But for some of us, men as well as women, we would like to contribute to the world differently. Why is it, when men seek to cure cancer we hold hold them up on a pedistal for all in society to admire? But when a women seeks the same, she is selfish and seen as going against "nature"?

Humans, like birds, need two parents to raise a child. I'm tired of men excusing themselves from this role, because somehow it is NOT natural. A child does not simply need to eat. That is not the only form of nuturing. And I suggest that you probably can contribute part of this nuturing, EVEN IF YOU ARE MALE. Perhaps YOU do not understand the importance of the nuclear family -- the nuclear family does not mean a 50s style, LEAVE it to BEAVER family.

Oregon girl I think is a bit fascinating in a way she does not intend.

If we define 'success' in science as to who is the best scientist is who adds the most to the sum total of human scientific knowledge, the scientist who works the most hours will always, ceter paribus, be a better scientist than the someone who works less at it. This isn't society's fault, it's Nature's fault, it's Physics fault, Chemistry's fault and Biology's fault (not the biology of the researcher but the Biology the researcher studies). It's 'done that way' because Nature is that way, though she seems to think that it's the result of some set of rules people can change at a whim.

Add to that "If a women wants nothing more than to be a wifey, fine" stuff that denigrates motherhood as some sort of low status pursuit. In the past, Motherhood was considered the most noble thing a woman could do. Artists painted Madonna and Child paintings over and over again because they thought they were depicting something holy. Social attitudes toward the nobility or servility of motherhood actually are purely social contructs.

It seems that she insists that what is purely a social construct is natural and not to be questioned and what is natural is a social construct that can and should be questioned.

> If we define 'success' in science as to who
> is the best scientist is who adds the most to
> the sum total of human scientific knowledge,
> the scientist who works the most hours will
> always, ceter paribus, be a better scientist
> than the someone who works less at it.

I realize that things are going to be a bit different on the intense experimental side, but Enrico Fermi was noted for working from 9:30 AM to 1:00 PM, taking a 1:00:00 lunch, working again from 2:00 PM to 5:30 PM, and then going home to his family. I seem to recall he got quite a bit more accomplished than Lawrence with his 24x7-until-you-die approach at Berkley. Churning out more papers and getting more grants does not equal doing better, or even more, science.

Cranky

I'm not denigrating anyone's choice to insist their spouse share 50/50 in childcare--I'm sure there are lots of guys up for it. But inherent abilities and preferences not unique to our species will create the general result that women tend to more childcare, and as a result, make less money. This latter point, the trade-off, is unavoidable, because it's rooted in productivity, not bias. Kids are anathema to the sustained concentration needed to solve Fermat's last theorem or the double helix, so the more you are around them, the less you will accomplish as a scientist. That's a cost of rearing children, there are, of course, many benefits.

Like so many things, one must optimize, specialize, and note that as Kate Hepburn said, 'you can do anything you want, but you can't do everything.' The fact that men and women are wired differently, which affects averages but not necessarily individuals, is unfortunate to many, but we shouldn't confuse 'ought' with 'is'.

Matt writes:

"The terms, however, were set up long ago -- by men -- before that was the case, operating under the implicit assumption that the competitors would be men who, if they had children, would have wives at home to take care of the children. So things work out nicely if you're a man, or if you're a single woman, but not so well if you're a woman who -- like most women -- has children at some point."

But Matt, how would you set things up to fix the problem?

The way I see it, many women abandon the tenure track (and all sorts of other career paths) in favor of another opportunity, one that Providence has not seen fit to offer to men. Do you object to opportunity costs generally?

Now, the paper's second finding--that children have a different effect on men's careers vs. women's careers--might be due to structural sexism. (Or not. If we wipe out the costs of childbearing itself, e.g. by considering only people who adopted children, does the disparity go away? The abstract doesn't say.) But that women's "fertility decisions" should affect their careers is not per se unfair, except inasmuch as men are not afforded those decisions at all.

Someone wrote:

"I realize that things are going to be a bit different on the intense experimental side, but Enrico Fermi was noted for working from 9:30 AM to 1:00 PM, taking a 1:00:00 lunch, working again from 2:00 PM to 5:30 PM, and then going home to his family. I seem to recall he got quite a bit more accomplished than Lawrence with his 24x7-until-you-die approach at Berkley."

Bad scientist! No biscuit!

This is the most ludicrous kind of anecdotal evidence. Controlling for absurd levels of genius, most of us would be more productive if we worked more. Disagree?

>Kids are anathema to the sustained concentration needed to solve Fermat's last theorem ... , so the more you are around them, the less you will accomplish as a scientist.

[Andrew Wiles] is married to Nada Canaan and has three children Clare, Kate and Olivia.

> Controlling for absurd levels of genius,
> most of us would be more productive if we
> worked more. Disagree?

Yes I would, actually. I see enormous amounts of busywork in all walks of American life (corporate, academic, government, non-profit) designed specifically to create the impression of sound and fury while accomplishing nothing. Productivity drops rapidly after 6-7 hours of concentrated work in 99.83% of all human beings I have observed. And I really question the value to society of the 2843rd paper published in the 93rd-ranked journal of Obscure Science. This "work" is done exactly to fulfill the hazing process described above and I doubt it is ever read, much less cited, ever again.

Cranky

in favor of another opportunity, one that Providence has not seen fit to offer to men.

Providence doesn't see fit to offer me the opportunity to take care of my kids? Curse you, Providence!

That is to say, and it applies to many of the posters here, the fact that women wind up doing more of the childcare than men is not unconnnected to sexism. Saying "It's not sexism, it's raising children!" is ignorant.

By the way, speaking as a person who has quite probably benefitted from one structral bias in society, I have to say that the idea that there is no structural sexism in US society (and particuarly the technical world) is ridiculous. I am not saying that ericf's 2:56 comment is wrong; there is something to be analyzed there. I AM saying that men in US society know exactly what they have, they do admit it to themselves in the locker room/deer hunting fire/exclusive club, and they do exert at least a little effort to keep it going. Wink wink.

Cranky

It needs emphasizing that the hypothesis under consideration concerns averages. One's personal preferences, or any particular anecdotes, are irrelevant. It is tendencies manifested in averages or rates, that we are talking about, in regards to productivity or childcare choices or whatever. The fact that Spud Web was only 5'4" tall is not relevant to the assertion that tall people are better at basketball, while the fact that the average height in the NBA is 6'7" is relevant.

I wonder what proportion of women who take extended time off work for child-bearing/raising had planned for such? I know at least a handful of women who fully expected the birth of their children to cause no more than a 6 - 8 week hiatus from work, and then decided, upon meeting and falling in love with their children, that they really wanted to take more time off to stay with them. My guess (and it's just that) is that such changes of heart are fairly common among academic-types. After all, if one is truly a curious person, as scientists tend to be, then watching a small human (made by you!) develop before your eyes can be quite intriguing.

I downloaded the paper and will read it as soon as I have time. But I was interested in the way some of the comments went and blogged on it here.

I want to address something closer to the original point of Matt's post. I'm not sure what is "politically correct" (loaded term, that), but it certainly is often claimed in the course of discussions of women in science that women are subjected to a hostile environment by their peers and to unreasonable standards by the (purportedly personally biased) people responsible for evaluating their work, and that this causes them a disadvantage that goes beyond the structural issues relating to how the tenure clock conflicts with childcare responsibilities and the like. Ben Barres' recent commentary in Nature, for example, which received (by academia's standards) a very large amount of attention from the press, talked a lot more about scientists' personal biases than about work/life balance issues.

I can't recall reading anything by anybody who seriously tried to deny that the academic life cycle is difficult on people in their mid-30s or younger who want to have children and be involved in their lives, and that women are much more likely to be affected by this issue than men (there surely is disagreement on what realistically can or should be done about this, but there's no dispute that the issue exists). As has been pointed out by others, even Larry Summers--everybody's favorite example of a reactionary on women in science--identified this issue as the most significant one holding women back in the field.

So the findings of the paper in question here appear to give evidence that this factor that everybody seems to agree is significant is in fact the overriding one, and that the claim that scientists persistently treat their female colleagues poorly and leave female achievement unrewarded--again, this is a claim that is very often repeated; look at the women in science discussions at cosmicvariance.com for example--is, if true, not an explanation of overall outcomes. So if one chooses to define "politically incorrect" as "contrary to the opinions of a vocal subset of generally left-identified advocates," then that description does seem to apply to the paper.

> The fact that Spud Web was only 5'4" tall is
> not relevant to the assertion that tall people
> are better at basketball, while the fact that
> the average height in the NBA is 6'7" is relevant.

The fact that black men were not allowed to play in the NBA until 1950 by _unwritten rule_ is also relevant, but an army of scientists with meter sticks would never be able to measure it.

Cranky

> So the findings of the paper in question here
> appear to give evidence that this factor that
> everybody seems to agree is significant is in
> fact the overriding one, and that the claim
> that scientists persistently treat their female
> colleagues poorly and leave female achievement
> unrewarded--again, this is a claim that is very
> often repeated; look at the women in science
> discussions at cosmicvariance.com for example--is,
> if true, not an explanation of overall outcomes.

I am a not sure how it would even be possible to remove potential bias from that analysis. [Warning: anecdote ahead!] I have a friend with an MS in Applied Math who left a Fortune 50 company at age 25. She had been told openly that she was on the Fast Track(tm) and could expect Great Things by 45, but she could see quite clearly that in that culture she was actually on the fast track to Vice-President of Nothing Very Important, to be trotted out for visiting sociology professors and sent to speak at SWE conventions. She founded a very successful technical consulting firm but she still has to hire ex-football players (from Division III engineering schools of course) as salesreps because there is a limit to the level she can sell as a woman in that industry.

Again, I just don't see how you factor out bias that pervasive from any study.

Cranky

If we define 'success' in science as to who is the best scientist is who adds the most to the sum total of human scientific knowledge, the scientist who works the most hours will always, ceter paribus, be a better scientist than the someone who works less at it.

But ceter is rarely paribus. The fallacy of this definition is inherent in its presumption that scientists are individuals toiling alone and making personal contributions to human knowledge in proportion to effort expended. Successful scientific research is generally collaborative, and ten faculty members pooling their talent and resources together almost invariably produce more than ten working independently like Randian ubermenschen in ten different labs and needlessly increasing the overhead for grant agencies. Yet the American university research paradigm typically assumes that each tenure-track faculty member will manage an independent laboratory, and only elite institutions tend to have a certain number of large, independently funded collaborative research labs. This is, I think, a mistake.

Even if one accepts your definition, I fail to understand why the laws of nature should dictate that it must hurt someone's career to work part-time for several years and spend time with their young children, prior to moving into a high-stakes job and working long hours at an older age... instead of slaving away until age 40 and then hitting the golf course.

The structural assumptions there are entirely non-biological. It's all about the hazing and seniority privileges. These are cultural models predicated on a man having someone at home to take care of him and his offspring during his prime child-bearing years, and then earning a position of privilege and luxury to enjoy in his later years. This model is hardly essential to the proper practice of either capitalism or academic research.

None of this is news. Just see the studies by MIT or the policies endorsed by the American Association of University Professors http://www.aaup.org/AAUP/issuesed/WF/ on work-family issues.

The solution is to have policies that enable women to have children and do research -- in other words, to do what male researchers can do.

Mr. LaFollette Progressive:

I guess that a team of 10 scientists all of whom work 80 hours a week won't add more to the sum total of human scientific knowledge than a team of 10 scientists who work 35 hours a week? Really? You must live on a very interesting planet.

The 'structural assumption' embedded here (on the planet Earth), is that 'career success' should be and is proportional to one's contribution to the success of the enterprise. I'm not sure us Earthlings really want to get rid of that.

The French work fewer hours than we do and yet have a higher rate of productivity (not that I'm saying we should appoint Chirac Treasury Secretary). Sometimes, actually often, a system made to burn you out will run into diminishing returns.

Cranky: I think the Jim Crow prohibition on black athletes is a good template. Note that during that time no one professed publicly their great desire to hire more blacks while they discriminated against them, in contrast to today's environment for female scientists, where 'diversity', generally meaning proportional representation of women and blacks, is pretty well universally declared as a laudable means to a better department, if not a good in of itself. Also, when the ban was lifted, the gains to those clubs not engaging in discrimination was large and immediate. I don't see any parallel here, some rogue biology department courageous enough to hire female professors that generates more citations and jumps up the academic ladder. As Becker argued, if discrimination is truly bias, those practicing it should pay. So is there data showing that departments with more females are better than those with fewer? This also occurred with Jews, as the quota on Jews hurt schools like Harvard and Northwestern that practiced it, and allowed places like MIT and Purdue to make great strides.

I think Pinker had the best empirical argument in his debate with Spelke last year. If an 'old boys club' is responsible for constraining female advancement in academics, why is it that female representation is generally increasing the more subjective the science, where presumably bias would be easier to apply? That is, male/female faculty ratios are higher in math than physics than biology than psychology etc. Further within these subjects the proportionality runs the same way: more labor economists than macro theorists.

I'd like to see how many male scientists would be that "productive" if they had to take care of a small infant. Not very much, it seems to me.

Looks like if we're female, we're considered damned if we do, and damned if we don't. This uterus thingy we have is considered to be so all-over-powering that we're supposed to automatically a) want to have kids b) want to stay home and raise kids c) not mind that we don't get paid any money for doing so, d) not mind we're not using our brains for anything.

And if taking care of small humans is all so blasted fascinating, why don't more male scientists do it?

Heaven sakes, guys, go take care of your own kids, don't shove it off on to your wife and pretend she loves doing all this low-level scut work while you stay in the lab playing Great Scientist. And don't pretend that all that "productivity" is all your own. You're only able to "be a father" because someone else is doing all the work.

j mct - Fancy trick there, moving the goalposts.

My point, asshole, is that we earthlings live on a planet where the current model of academic research is demonstrably inefficient, and moving toward a more collaborative model can offers opportunities for people to contribute at different levels of input depending on their family situation, AND also increase the total output. A lab with ten faculty members does not need ten people writing grant proposals, ten people balancing the books, and ten people to handle the bureaucratic paperwork. It can offer a higher salary and fancier job title to those who take on a greater workload and still have ample jobs for people who are highly productive and make strong contributions while working family-friendly hours.

A research lab is not a fucking burger joint. It is not composed of interchangeable unskilled laborers whose value is determined entirely by how many hours they are willing to spend standing over a goddamned grill. In any collaborative enterprise you need people who are willing to work very hard, people who have good ideas, and people who are highly productive per hour worked. These are overlapping sets, but they are not a single, inclusive set of people.

If you mandate 80-hour weeks, you devalue the other variables. You drive talented people away from the profession, and lower your standards for the quality of work performed. You get shitloads of pointless articles published in obscure journals, and I might add that you get an awful lot of undergraduate courses taught by non-English speakers. Therefore, it is not at all clear that the 10 people you hire who are willing to work 80-hour weeks will contribute more to human knowledge than 10 people who are given the option of either working 80 hour weeks in an effort to advance their career rapidly, or working fewer hours and accepting that they might advance more slowly.

It really doesn't take a rocket scientist to understand the principles at work here. Corporate America seems to be slowly starting to figure this out, and the economy has shockingly not collapsed as a result.

Let's restructure scientific research so women can have kids, raise them, and make great scientific breakthroughs that require long periods of intense thought about abstractions. And let's make physics and math more interesting to women. It's just too boringly impersonal right now. And, while we're at it, let's make sure everybody gets a pony!

So I'm pretty far downthread and don't know who will read this, but here goes.

I just got voted on for tenure, and I've had kids since I started my tenure track position in the sciences. I'm a guy. I had a HUGE "support staff" (as my mother jokingly refers to it), but also did a HUGE amount of parenting. I miss work in equal amounts as my wife, now that the early maternity period in which my unproductive boobs made me useless has passed. I leave work early to go to gymnastics, doctor's appointments, and the little special outings that are cool.

But I work at night. Unscheduled work means you spend more f%&^ing time than you can imagine on your job, and nobody ever notices. (Then you get the tenure letter and it counts your achievements and you think "I did all that? Really? Oh.")

The serious issue is that schools could adjust. Ours is going to a 1 year pause in tenure clock, REGARDLESS OF GENDER OF PARENT. This is huge. It's that kind of policy choice that makes parenting different. I would have loved it. I didn't have it, though. And that is the point of the original quote by Matt, isn't it? You need to make policies that allow choices equally. No, men can't nurse, but soon enough they can bottle feed a nursed baby, and then equality of choice comes in.

And women getting punished for this choice is just plain bullshit. Fuck that, it's wrong.

Hey, Christina, upthread here ... you're totally right. I see it in academics over and over. We have to be ripped away from time with our kids. My GOD it's fascinating. This 3 week old creature is flailing about and whacks herself in the head... then looks around frantically: who hit me? And only 3 weeks later, she does it again and immediately stares at her hand. She's wired up two different sense of touch and realized that they coincide. How cool is THAT?!

There are a zillion moments like that when parenting. It makes up for the insane boredom that also accompanies parenting. Whatever, the spectrum is broader (and faster paced) than any academic work.

My sense, from reading the comments here, is that some (like LaFollette Progressive and a few others) don't get lab work, don't get what it means to run experiments, and don't understand the choices you make when your experiment has to run at 2.30 am because that's when the building shakes the least (or the cells finally stop growing or the laser is free for use or whatever). My grad student who just had a baby a while back is complaining that she can't get her old "6 hour blocks of concentration" anymore. It's true. Kids are on shorter schedules than that, and you lose the ability to focus. It matters.

Matt: thank you. Very reassuring to see that some guys other than my husband get it. Too many at my law school thought like--well, like a lot of the sexist *&$*@*&$ punks in your comments.

In a large majority of fields, there is no reason at all that the key "work till you drop for a later payoff" years have to occur EXACTLY when are biologically ready to have a kid. There is no intrinsic reason that you should have to step off the tenure track for life instead of stepping partly off for a year or two and making up the time later. But that option is not available. Why?

A research lab is not a fucking burger joint. It is not composed of interchangeable unskilled laborers whose value is determined entirely by how many hours they are willing to spend standing over a goddamned grill.

actually it is. the intellectual labor is effectively commodified (to put on the Marxist hat): you can import grad students from china if none are availlable locally (look at the rosters of lower ranking research universities for a better picture...)

i think that the essential issue here is identical to say software development: you have highly skilled workers who don't recognize that 80 hr weeks are fundamentally exploitative. they may not recognize that they are getting exploited and they certainly aren't compelled to think about the people who support them 'laboring.' they don't exist in a vacuum and if you added in the 'man'-hours of the support labor by wives, girlfriends, parents, and so on they suddenly look a whole lot less productive.

In reply to someone who asked here about Summers and Harvard's settlement of the Russian lawsuit, I read about it in the Harvard magazine which is distributed to the alumni. This is official: "Beyond Harvard’s $26.5-million share of the legal settlement (plus expenses) and the closing of HIID in the wake of the investigations, the experience has lingered in Cambridge because Shleifer and President Lawrence H. Summers have long been close friends: as student and teacher, during Summers’s service in Washington, D.C., and now in his Harvard presidency. In light of that relationship, Summers recused himself from the legal proceedings. The University has declined comment on the matter since the settlement." The rest is gossip, but think about it: how likely is it that University presidents go around making that kind of remarks? Is there any comparable comment on this issue from any other academic bigwig? I agree with the gossip: Summers knew what he was doing.

I love how so many of these commentators are treating what-if toy models and just-so stories as Scientific Truth, while refusing to realize that there's been a massive body of real research on this stuff for years, decades even, in sociology, organization econ, and yes, gender studies. Just because you can develop a rational agent model that generates the observed outcome from purely natural differences doesn't mean that is, in fact, the mechanism at play in the real world. This is not a difficult concept.

Oh, and regarding the Pinker comment--there are two obvious reasons why female representation would be higher in the 'soft' sciences: the first is the structure of labor varies; hard sciences tend to have just the sort of hierarchical lab-centered labor model we've been discussing here, which is precisely the one that's going to hit women hardest, given current social norms about child-rearing. The second is that sexist expectations about what a female academic should study are self-reinforcing--again, there is a vast body of *real research* on this.

Many of these comments are of the form: I don't want a husband who doesn't share childcare, some people manage wonderfully with kids, etc. This is all irrelevant except as illustrating a general point, not a point in itself. As per those women who don't want children: who cares? We are arguing about whether certain averages imply discrimination. An individual's preferences in such a state are pretty irrelevant, unless you have the (very unscientific) idea that exceptions 'prove the rule'.

Further, I don't see how the fact that most (not all) women prefer nurturing roles negatively affects any particular woman who likes science more than childrearing. It seems that many feel that averages for their group affect their status, and thus instead of trying to increase their status directly, lament their group's average. Hey, I'm from a crappy suburb of Cleveland. If I defined myself as such it would be depressing, so I don't, and no one else cares. In fact, bringing up one's disadvantageous background is often a lame attempt to garner pity, which is pathetic, a sure way to generate ill-will, as no one likes self-righteous victims other than lawyers and journalists.

Lastly, those who think the research is overwhelming that X occurs should list their sources and let the audience decide. Argument by authority doesn't carry any weight with those who disagree with you.

In reply to someone who asked here about Summers and Harvard's settlement of the Russian lawsuit, I read about it in the Harvard magazine which is distributed to the alumni. This is official: "Beyond Harvard’s $26.5-million share of the legal settlement (plus expenses) and the closing of HIID in the wake of the investigations, the experience has lingered in Cambridge because Shleifer and President Lawrence H. Summers have long been close friends: as student and teacher, during Summers’s service in Washington, D.C., and now in his Harvard presidency. In light of that relationship, Summers recused himself from the legal proceedings. The University has declined comment on the matter since the settlement." The rest is gossip, but think about it: how likely is it that University presidents go around making that kind of remarks? Is there any comparable comment on this issue from any other academic bigwig? I agree with the gossip: Summers knew what he was doing.

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Further, I don't see how the fact that most (not all) women prefer nurturing roles negatively affects any particular woman who likes science more than childrearing. It seems that many feel that averages for their group affect their status, and thus instead of trying to increase their status directly, lament their group's average. Hey, I'm from a crappy suburb of Cleveland. If I defined myself as such it would be depressing, so I don't, and no one else cares. In fact, bringing up one's disadvantageous background is often a lame attempt to garner pity, which is pathetic, a sure way to generate ill-will, as no one likes self-righteous victims other than lawyers and journalists

Lastly, those who think the research is overwhelming that X occurs should list their sources and let the audience decide. Argument by authority doesn't carry any weight with those who disagree with you

In a large majority of fields, there is no reason at all that the key "work till you drop for a later payoff" years have to occur EXACTLY when are biologically ready to have a kid. There is no intrinsic reason that you should have to step off the tenure track for life instead of stepping partly off for a year or two and making up the time later. But that option is not available. Why?

Oh, and regarding the Pinker comment--there are two obvious reasons why female representation would be higher in the 'soft' sciences: the first is the structure of labor varies; hard sciences tend to have just the sort of hierarchical lab-centered labor model we've been discussing here, which is precisely the one that's going to hit women hardest, given current social norms about child-rearing. The second is that sexist expectations about what a female academic should study are self-reinforcing--again, there is a vast body of *real research* on this.

There are a zillion moments like that when parenting. It makes up for the insane boredom that also accompanies parenting. Whatever, the spectrum is broader (and faster paced) than any academic work.

If you mandate 80-hour weeks, you devalue the other variables. You drive talented people away from the profession, and lower your standards for the quality of work performed. You get shitloads of pointless articles published in obscure journals, and I might add that you get an awful lot of undergraduate courses taught by non-English speakers. Therefore, it is not at all clear that the 10 people you hire who are willing to work 80-hour weeks will contribute more to human knowledge than 10 people who are given the option of either working 80 hour weeks in an effort to advance their career rapidly, or working fewer hours and accepting that they might advance more slowly.

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For many, yes, as in case my wife is content as a housewife involved in the very important task of raising 3 kids, and I make much more money than she could (especially as her marketplace skills have diminished over time). But for many, especially overeducated 20-somethings and others with little appreciation of the nuclear family (eg, Yglesias, female professors who get more attention for being victims than scientists such as the fragile-as-a-flower Nancy Hopkins), the omnipresent equilibrium is proof of male malice and

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