I am not sure what the solution is, but ideal professor or ideal postdoc, or student is a single-minded lab slave who thinks about science 24/7. This is part of the problem.

Continuing your theme of the “business case,” this ideal is in fact valuable. In my limited experience, the most productive scientists I’ve seen live and breathe their work. Even the ones who don’t, are willing to make themselves miserable in order to fit this mold, and their productivity and dedication are rewarded.

I wonder if tenure is the problem. It provides a horizon for working yourself to the bone to get to the “promise land” of financial security, intellectual independence and presitge; and, the institution has to protect itself from people who just want a cushy semi-retirement at age 40. So the more hardcore you appear, the less of a perceived risk you are. This attitude trickles down to post-docs and even graduate students, and the hard-charging faculty (tenured or otherwise) reinforce it.

At a surface level this enhances productivity, but how many talented people are driven away, who would want a more relaxed lifestyle? These people might have made big contributions. The essential question is: are current hardcore types the most probable future big contributors?

The environment is a bit different at non-university institutions. There’s no tenure, so the horizon is actual retirement. People work closer to 9-to-5. And, AFAICT, they don’t work any harder than tenured academics.

I am not sure what the solution is, but ideal professor or ideal postdoc, or student is a single-minded lab slave who thinks about science 24/7. This is part of the problem.

Is this really true?

Swedish study is a really interesting and quite convincing one. One thing I’d like to see is who got the positions – did it correlate well with their “total impact” score? I compared the numbers for a couple of people and the value of “total impact” or “total first-author impact” correlates real well with my own partial perception of quality of scientists. However, it doesn’t really correlate with who gets jobs and who doesn’t. In fact plenty candidates with a lot of high-impact publications get passed over for people with the impact factors half that of others. So there must be some other secret ingredient – quality of presentation, proposal ideas, “sexiness” of science (or presenter?), and of course connections.

I also wonder how much the difference in assigning scores to men/women was deliberate and how much of it was subconscious. Hiring a woman in her 30ies is a lot riskier than a man in his 30ies, everything else being equal – not just in sciences but any other career. A man is far more reliable – a woman is likely to take time off to have kids. From purely business point of view, even without any prejudice towards the abilities, and everything else absolutely equal, hiring a man is far more “cost-effective” – with women it’s a little like rolling a dice.

Some anecdotal examples – in biology lab where 80% of personnel are women, 4 out of 11 women are currently pregnant. Head of the group is not too happy about such “coincidence”, as it disrupts his work output quite significantly, but what can he do? Will he think twice before hiring another woman in the future?
Essentially, he is penalized for having hired them in the first place. A solution to this problem would be to provide people with paid maternity leaves that don’t come out of grant, but general university or laboratory/company funds. In fact you might want to “force” people to take time off – a lot of them continue working, because they can’t afford to take time off, but cannot legally peform most of their usual work with cancerogenic chemicals, radiation, etc.

Otherwise lab leaders would need to think twice whether to hire “just married” 35-year old, or go for a man instead.

I am not trying to justify this type of practice by any means – but it’s naive to assume that a boss can be completely impartial in these matters, even if he or she has no prejudices about ability of different sexes.

Another examples – just yesterday I realized that a postdoc (female) who just started working a few months ago, is quitting to follow her husband who got a job in another part of the country. Turns out she took the job knowing this was very likely to happen at the end of the summer and so she wasn’t working very hard, by her own admission, since there was no way to accomplish anything in such a short time. Since the reverse situation (a man following a woman to be a stay-at-home husband for at least a while) happens much more rarely, are we to assume that even the most fair bosses will not develop some sort of prejudice, especially after they are “dumped” a few times in a row?

Similar, but obviously far less strong bias may be expressed against men who have children or who have other outside interests that might distract them from working all through the weekend. During one of the interviews a friend just happened to mention to his potential boss that he is an avid outdoor enthusiast, who goes for one-week sailing trips a few times a year and spends most of his weekends in the mountains – hiking, skiing, kayaking. The boss got visibly upset and started questioning my friend’s attitude and motivation to do top science while going on weekend-long trips.

I am not sure what the solution is, but ideal professor or ideal postdoc, or student is a single-minded lab slave who thinks about science 24/7. This is part of the problem.

Leaving aside the question of subjective gender bias (even unintentional; see Swedish study from other thread), what is to be done about the hypercompetitive culture that some departments have?

My impression is that it arose from the male-dominated post-WWII era, when physics was the “place to be;” with the GI bill and gov’t grants paying salaries academics could draw from all economic classes. Men didn’t have many family responsibilities since they could afford to support their families on just their own salaries (even in places like Boston and Bay Area), and women were generally expected to stay home and do childcare and homemaking. The men could then spend day and night at the lab, and a quasi-meritocracy arose based solely on scholarly productivity.

Things are different now. I think men who want to “breed” can still afford to be gung-ho — they just delay marriage until they get tenure. Women, unfortunately, have a biological clock and need time off for birth. I see a few options (again, assuming there is not subjective gender bias):

* Devise some calculus for judging the absolute productivity of a post-doc/asst. prof. (which is ideally what is supposed to be done now), and consider family-life a personal choice, at a career cost

* Recognize childrearing as a necessity of life, and judge women (and men who want to take time off) by their time while actually working, rather than total productivity while being a post-doc/asst. prof.

* Recognize family life as a merit good, and not only judge by productivity while actually at work, but stop the tenure clock and even provide childcare

Re: childcare, for example… there’s plenty of easy ground that can be covered there. Most universities DO NOT provide access to adequate childcare facilities, and most tenure-track programs heavily penalize persons who need to take time off for family reasons. Even if those penalties are more cultural than intrinsically institutional… they need to be diagnosed and dealt with.

I won’t comment on emotional/sexual immaturity. But I will speak from my own experience and comment that in my environment alpha-male competitiveness is not subtle — it’s the rule of the land. Anyone who is cowed by that attitude is eventually taken aside to have it suggested that “perhaps they’re not really the right personality for science?” And I know plenty of senior faculty women who are more alpha-male than even the local alpha-males… rumor has it, the two women on this year’s graduate admissions committee put an a spectacular display of unprofessionalism by getting into a shouting match in the middle of a meeting, with each one trying to talk over the other. This kind of posture actually hurts them in the long run; at their level it’s usually more important to be perceived as “getting along well with others” than as “tougher than the boys.”

And David, I know you probably meant this anyway, but… there needs to be room in academia for both choices. Because even in this modern era, the expectation is that a PhD woman has to CHOOSE — she can either have children now and abandon her career… or go with her career, and maybe not have children at all. And while I know a few crazy mo-fos (can you call a woman a mo-fo?) who have pulled off both, those are very much the 1-in-20 alpha-male women. The same women who take other women aside to suggest that maybe they’re not cut out for academia after all? I know a heck of a lot more women who have dropped out of academia because they don’t feel there’s room in the tenure-track system for them to take care of their families… and one or two of my early female role-models have actually been caught in recent years referring to parents in academia as “Breeders.”

There needs to be room for both. Otherwise we end up with tokenism — one or two women for every 20 men — and alpha-male-female mentors with giant chips on their shoulders, hurting both themselves and the junior students who can’t look to them as role models.

Until it is generally accepted that men are willing to stay home and raise the kids, women in science who wish to have a family life will be at a disadvantage.

Yeah, and until it’s generally accepted that not all women want to do that, women in science who don’t wish to have a family life will still be at a disadvantage.

(And until it’s generally accepted that having any sort of life outside your discipline whatsoever is not a sign of insufficient commitment, well-rounded people of all genders will be at a disadvantage…)

Part of the problem is physics culture. While I don’t see it in my graduate school peers, I’ve noticed hints of alpha-male-wannabe competitiveness and sexual/emotional immaturity in older faculty. Even though many more men are willing to be “house-husbands,” or at least compromise more on their own careers, older male faculty in positions of power may scoff at the notion and persist in their skepticism of women.

I am neither a faculty member nor a woman, so perhaps others in one or both groups would offer their comments on these points.