When I started my life as a graduate student in the biological sciences, I was met by opposition from both sides of the family, but for very different reasons. My mom's side of the family lives with a very strong religious belief. What is important is strengthening and developing your religious practice and being a good Muslim woman. This meant believing in a God and marrying well - this meant a good Muslim boy. I had three choices of a career: medical doctor, medical doctor, or medical doctor. Going to graduate school and studying evolution was an affront to their belief system.
On my dad's side, money is a very powerful and motivating force. His belief (echoed by his siblings) is that stuff will liberate you. This meant having a big home, expensive cars, expensive adult toys, and lots of expensive clothes. Stuff. Stuff will buffer you from the harsh realities of the world (here they meant racism). Or at least you can buy your way out of the discomforts of the real world . From their perspective, I had three choices of a career: medical doctor, lawyer, or get an MBA and go into business. Going to graduate school was a waste of time not to mention condemned you to a life of poverty (if only they could read this blog, how they would laugh and say I told you so).
Needless to say, my life to date has essentially been a big "fuck you" sign to both sides of the family.
Given the pressure I felt to become a medical doctor, it didn't seem surprising to me that I was one of the few minority biology graduate students in the biological sciences. I had thought that most children of immigrant families tend to become doctors, lawyers, engineers etc.
I was quite interested then in the NSF data that documents the participation of Women, Minorities, and Persons with Disabilities in Science and Engineering. I have summarized the report in a series of graphs because some interesting facts emerge.
When we look at the proportion of graduate students in the biological sciences we still see that minorities make up less than 10% of student population. Asian Americans make up the largest percentage of the minority graduate student population at approximately 8%, followed by African and Hispanic Americans at 5%. A second noticeable trend in Figure 1 is that over the last 7 years these numbers have not really changed. What do these statistics mean? Well, let's explore this.
In 2000 and 2007, demographic data showed that 12% of Americans were Black or African American, 15% were Hispanic or Latino, <1% were Native American, and only 4% were of Asian origin. This means that the per capita representation of Asians is actually double what you would expect given their representation in the population base. The issue of under representation of minorities in STEM lies specifically with African and Hispanic graduate students. If there was equal opportunity available to all, we would expect that African and Hispanic Americans should, at the very least, make up 12% and 15% of graduate students in biology. But they don't.
And yet it seems like when minorities do get through graduate school they do quite well. In 2006, 15% of all science and engineering faculty were Asian, 4% were African American, 4% were Hispanic and 1% are Native American.
(I didn't have numbers specific to biological sciences faculty.)
The picture looks even better in non-academic settings. In 2006, 23% of those employed as life scientists with doctorates were Asian, 3% were Black or African American, and 3% were Hispanic. Of the 2000 forestry and conservation scientists in the year 2006, none were Asian, Black, Hispanic or Native American.
Although the representation is still something to be concerned about, there doesn't seem to be the attrition levels that are associated with women.
Under the same per capita logic, in the year 2000 and 2007, women made up 51% of the American population. The number of women that graduated with doctorates in that same year was 43%, by 2006, this number increased to 47%.
In that same year, 2000, women made up 38% of the postdocs in the biological sciences and by 2006, were at 41%. And if you look at these numbers by discipline within the biological sciences, other than biometry and epidemiology, women are generally hanging tight at ~40% across the six year dataset.
At the risk of sounding repetitive, the report by the AAUW, "Why So Few" is still important because there are areas where women graduate students are few and far between, like computer sciences oddly. But focusing solely on the early stages simply sets us up for continued failure and disappointment.
We really need to explore why there is such an attrition rate in women at the postdoctoral level. What good is it if we can achieve 50% representation at the doctorate level in all STEM sciences, if women never end up in tenured or tenure-track jobs?
We have an opportunity right now because women in the biological sciences are almost representative of their population base at the doctoral and postdoctoral level. It is that crucial transition from postdoctoral scientist to faculty where things fall off a scientific precipice.
A study that examines the employment routes of women with doctorates would be incredibly useful. Do they go into industry, publishing, consulting, etc? What proportion are women in these different scientific workplaces? Is it because they have actively chosen to pursue other routes or that they have tried, but unsuccessfully to obtain a tenure-track job? And if they actively made a decision to pursue another career route, what factors played into their decision?
At present my chance of getting a tenure track job is the pr(t-t job as a woman)x pr(tt as a minority)= 0.22x0.15=3%.
It would be nice, if just this once, the older generation wasn't right.
6 comments:
Having been on search committees for tenure track jobs, the applicant pool for tenure-track jobs appears to be rather heavily male skewed.
A very quick calculation suggests that at the rate we're going, we won't hit parity in tenured / tenure-track faculty in my department until I'm about 80.
Wow, my family sounds a lot like yours.
This is a great summary of the data and where we are now: stuck. Women have been getting almost equal numbers of PhDs for a lot of years now, and yet there's this huge blind spot about where the problem is.
And I get in trouble all the time for pointing out that the problem is at the level of postdoc. And that nobody is doing anything about it.
Anyway the questions you ask in your last paragraph - some are answered, actually. There's quite a lot of data on where women end up.
What's mostly lacking is honest discussion about why women postdocs leave and what to do about it. I think that the why part is obvious. I think it's the same reason girls didn't want to major in science for a lot of years: they didn't feel welcome, they thought they weren't good enough.
Which turned out to be incorrect perceptions among girls. That was caused by sexism, mostly of the overt kind, built into educational practices. Once that went away, the problem went away almost completely.
But that was in public schools. What to do about private higher education and hiring is a much bigger, more complicated cultural problem that extends beyond science. Turns out women our age are all coming to the same conclusion: sexism never went away, it just went underground.
I've seen a lot of women leave because they felt unwelcome, and thought they weren't good enough.
@MsPhD
This means if what you're suggesting is correct that the AAUW report is even more valuable because it does get at cognitive attitudes. Presumably if girls can gain confidence in their abilities in science and math at an early age, this would translate to the transition between postdoc and t-t.
Hi GirlPostdoc,
I have come across your blog just recently and it's comforting, but also very worrying, that many of us have similar concerns across different countries. The situation with few women reaching the top levels of academia/science is the same in Australia, despite many disciplines having similar proportions of male and females at the PhD level. This information was released in a report last year (http://www.fasts.org).
Luckily I have yet to come across obvious gender discrimination, but what I do see from my older peers is women dropping out of academia because it's too hard to balance the demands of the career with having a family. Interestingly, it's a similar story for some of my male colleagues who also want to spend more time with their family - so from my limited observations it seems a major issue is work-life balance (for everyone). The top professors here seem to be work-a-holics, how can anyone who wants to have a life outside university compete against those who spends all their time working?
Finally, I agree that mentoring could help. Having a more experienced female scientist to talk to about these issues would be really nice, but all I see above me is ultra hard-working men who don't appear to spend much time with their families.
Cheers
Lynds
It is such a difficult topic: talking about why minorities are in some areas of work more than others. It doesn’t matter if you are a woman, or if you are African-American, Asian, Hispanic, it will always be tougher even though racism is not as hard as it was before but can take new forms.
Even if the minorities manage to be in fields they weren't fifty years ago, it's still an important challenge especially in Science for minorities to be able to fight discrimination.
Hope to read you soon. Love your blog.
T.
I went to grad school in the US, and on my program Americans citizens were a minority. I was the only non-Asian in my lab.
The biggest obstacle see to the tenure-track issue is the two-body problem. Finding one tenure-track position is hard enough, but finding AND acquiring two suitable positions in the same geographical location is almost impossible. This results in a compromise. Whoever is less advanced in their career invariably ends up as the "trailing partner".
I cannot imagine an easy answer to this (certainly not giving "charity" professorships to trailing spouses). However, I would love to see data on women scientists with science partners versus those without. I suspect more women with a non-academic partner are likely to hold faculty positions.
I notice I am frowned by my peers for hitching up with a non-"career competitive" man who does the cooking and is supportive of my career. The "traditional" roles of the 1950's are so entrenched that women feel the pressure to not only be successful career-wise, but to also do all the cooking and house-keeping. I am not a super-women, and I like to be looked after and cooked for. If we have kids I shall not be the primary caregiver. Why should I get stick for this attitude just because I am a woman?
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