[FoRK] women in science, by phil greenspun

[Eugen Leitl]

(oldie, but goodie)

http://philip.greenspun.com/careers//women-in-science

Women in Science

by Philip Greenspun in February 2006

Larry Summers was fired from his job as president of Harvard University
partly for saying the following:

    "There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very
substantial disparities that this conference's papers document [percentage of
women among tenured professors of science] 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." 

This fired up an international debate about whether or not there were enough
women with the towering intellects required to make it as top scientists and
mathematicians, the sorts who would be likely to receive tenure at elite
universities.

Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons. He claimed
to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't more women
reaching the top jobs in the sciences. Yet Summers, an economist, left one
out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and working hours, jobs in science
are the lowest paid in the United States.

This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of
women in science: They found better jobs.

Why does anyone think science is a good job?

The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:

   1. age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college

   2. age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a
stipend of $1800 per month

   3. age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year

   4. age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for $65,000
per year

   5. age 44: with young children at home (if lucky), fired by the university
("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that universities
discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily
wish to hire folks in their early 30s 

This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in
college. He got into Stanford for graduate school. He got a postdoc at MIT.
His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to land a job at
University of California, Irvine. But at the end of the day, his research
wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to
commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his life. He is now 44 years
old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a "second rate has-been"
label on his forehead.

Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career that
people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it? Sample bias.

Suppose that you go to the airport trying to figure out how crowded the
airplanes are. You stand by the baggage claim and ask people "How full was
your flight?" You write up your conclusions: Most flights are nearly full.
The sample bias here comes from the fact that full flights contain more
people than empty flights. At an airport, you are much more likely to
encounter someone who just stepped off a packed flight than someone who was
on a plane that was only one-third full.

College undergraduates do the same thing in choosing careers. One of my
students, we'll call him Bill, in an introductory computer science class said
that he wanted to be a biologist when he grew up. What biologists had Bill
met? They were all professors at MIT and about half of them had won the Nobel
Prize. This is hardly an average sample of people who went to Biology
graduate school! Fortunately, Bill was a tall good-looking fellow. He managed
to score himself a lovely girlfriend during the semester, we'll call her
Theresa. Theresa was a biology postdoc, with a PhD from an elite institution
and a plum job at MIT. Bill got to see how Theresa was treated in the lab,
count her working hours, see the pay stubs she received as a young woman in
her 30s with a PhD, wave goodbye as she got fired after her experiment did
not work out, and write email to Theresa at her new postdoc at Stanford. By
the end of the semester, Bill said, "I think I want to be an architect."

[Four years later, I attended the MIT graduation ceremony and was pleasantly
surprised to hear Bill's name called out for the degree of Master's in
Architecture.]

In short, some young people think that science is a good career for the same
reason that they think being a musician or actor is a good career: "I can't
decide if I want to be a scientist like James Watson, a musician like Britney
Spears, or an actor like Harrison Ford."

There are some old people who think a career in science makes sense,
including the people who attended the conference where Larry Summers was
hoist by his own petard. Basically these functionaries in university
bureaucracies are saying "If young women were really smart, they'd be just
like me." Indeed, that might have been true in the 1970s when these folks
chose their undergraduate major. What has escaped their notice, however, are
the enormous returns to high IQ and ability that have arisen in many
occupations since the presidency of Ronald Reagan.

In medieval times, having a high IQ didn't change your life. If you were born
noble, the peasants had to get out of your way whether your IQ was 75 or 150.
If you were a peasant with an IQ of 150, you might have very interesting
reflections as you dug for roots or harvested grain, but it wouldn't turn you
into a nobleman or woman. In the middle class society that America was in the
1950s through 1970s, the best paying jobs were lavish, but not spectacular
compared to being an assembly line worker or college professor. Today, you
can't spit in the street without hitting a millionaire and oftentimes it is
simple wages that got him or her to that point. Salaries for professionals,
Wall Street money shufflers, artists, athletes, executive recruiters, et al.,
are all up, but the data are not readily available. By contrast, compensation
for executives at public companies is reported every year. Forbes magazine
reports that in 2005, the CEOs of the Fortune 500 helped themselves to a 54
percent pay raise, resulting in an average per-executive salary of $10
million for the year.

University salaries are not that much lower than they were in the 1970s, but
all the other smart people in the U.S. have gotten so rich that faculty and
postdoc salaries seem lower. Any resource that is scarce, such as real
estate, is snapped up by society's economic winners. A science researcher at
Harvard now earns an annual salary that is only 1/50th the price of a
family-sized house in Cambridge, a fact that may not be lost on an
intelligent female Harvard undergraduate choosing a career.  Science versus
the professions and business Science can be fun, but considered as a career,
science suffers by comparison to the professions and the business world.

Consider someone taking the kind of high IQ and drive that would be required
to obtain a tenure-track position at U.C. Berkeley and going into medicine.
This person would very likely be a top specialist of some sort, earning at
least $300,000 per year. Instead of being fired at age 44, our medical
specialist would be near the height of her value to her patients and
employer. Her experience and reputation would continue to add to her salary
and prestige until she was perhaps 60 years old. [A woman who wanted to spend
more time with her children can choose from a variety of medical careers,
such as emergency medicine, that involve shift work and where a high salary
can be earned with just two or three shifts per week. She could also work
from home as a radiologist reading data transmitted via Internet.]

Consider taking the same high IQ and work ethic, going into business, and
being put on the fast track at a company such as General Electric. Rather
than being fired at age 44, this is about the time that she will be handed
ever-larger divisions to operate, with ever-larger bonuses and stock options.

A top lawyer at age 44 is probably a $500,000 per year partner in a big firm,
a judge, or a professor at a law school supplementing her $200,000 per year
salary with some private work.

Even a public schoolteacher actually does better than a scientist. Consider
the person of unusual ability who takes that bachelor's in science and
decides to become a schoolteacher instead of going to graduate school. At age
22, the schoolteacher is earning a living wage and can begin making plans to
get married and have children. By age 30, when the scientist is forced to
start moving around to those $35,000 per year postdocs, the schoolteacher is
earning $50,000 per year. By age 44, when the scientist is desperately trying
to switch careers, the schoolteacher is making more than $90,000 per year for
working nine months (only the better school systems pay $90,000 per year, but
remember that we posited a person with a high IQ and motivation sufficient to
get through graduate school in science). Being a public employee and a member
of a union, the schoolteacher cannot be fired but may at this point in his or
her life begin thinking about a comfortable early retirement and some sort of
second career.

A good career is one that pays well, in which you have a broad choice of
full-time and part-time jobs, in which there is some sort of barrier to entry
so that you won't have to compete with a lot of other applicants, in which
there are good jobs in every part of the country and internationally, and in
which you can enjoy job security in middle age and not be driven out by young
people willing to work 100 hours per week.

How closely does academic science match these criteria? I took a 17-year-old
Argentine girl on a tour of the M.I.T. campus. She had no idea what she
wanted to do with her life, so maybe this was a good time to show her the
possibilitieess job security than a drummer in a boy band, and works longer
hours than a Bolivian silver miner. Roger W. Bowen, general secretary of the
American Association of University Professors, in a March 2, 2006 discussion
run by the Chronicle of Higher Education summarized the situation of the
tenure lottery winners:

    "The average full professor, someone who has been teaching for, say,
fifteen years or longer, is making five times less than the average president
at most institutions; works 60 - 70 hour weeks, uses holidays to do research,
and tries desperately to find time to be a good spouse, father, mother, or
partner. The life of the mind may seem cushy, but it is not." 

Does this make sense as a career for anyone? Absolutely! Just get out your
atlas.

Imagine that you are a smart, but impoverished, young person in China. Your
high IQ and hard work got you into one of the best undergraduate programs in
China. The $1800 per month graduate stipend at University of Nebraska or
University of Wisconsin will afford you a much higher standard of living than
any job you could hope for in China. The desperate need for graduate student
labor and lack of Americans who are interested in PhD programs in science and
engineering means that you'll have no trouble getting a visa. When you finish
your degree, a small amount of paperwork will suffice to ensure your
continued place in the legal American work force. Science may be one of the
lowest paid fields for high IQ people in the U.S., but it pays a lot better
than most jobs in China or India.

Once in the U.S., of course, you don't have to remain a drone in the lab. A
friend of mine was a physics professor, let's call him "Professor Jones", at
MIT looking for a new graduate student. A student from China, let's call him
"Yuan", approached him and said "I want to work in your lab. I will do
anything you tell me to do and work harder than any of your other graduate
students. However, I'm not interested in physics and I won't finish my Ph.D.,
so you can't count on me being here more than three years." Profetioned the
American-born students at MIT intently, asking them where they shopped for
clothing, how often they took a shower, what books they read. Yuan spent his
second year in the lab learning how to present himself to an employer. He
signed up at the placement office for several interviews per week, simply for
practice. Like Bill Murray methodically determining what particular women
wanted to hear in the movie Groundhog Day, Yuan wrote down what worked and
did not work until he had figured out exactly what to say. Yuan spent his
third year actually trying to get a job. Reading the Wall Street Journal one
day, he learned about a new boutique investment bank that had spun out of a
larger firm. Yuan had heard that one should always Fedex one's resume rather
than mail it, to make it seem more important. Being a graduate student, he
chose the Fedex economy afternoon delivery service. His resume arrived at the
office of the new boutique firm on a Friday afternoon, when the founding
partner had already left for his beach house in the Hamptons. The secretary,
assuming that it must be important, re-Fedexed the package to the partner for
Saturday morning delivery. Thus did Yuan's resume arrive as one of the only
business documents that this guy had available to read while out at the beach
house. Yuan ended up being hired just about the time that his advisor,
Professor Jones, was denied tenure ("fired") by MIT and had to shut down his
lab.

[When a population of workers is primarily made up of immigrants, you're
going to get a lot more men than women. Every migration of people for work
starts with young men.] What about the excitement and fun of science?  Is
life all about money and job security? What about excitement and fun? Isn't
that a good reason to choose a job? Sure! I love every minute of my $8 per
hour job as a helicopter instructor, but on the other hand I don't say that
it is a great career and I can't understand why there aren't more women
helicopter instructors.

Some scientists are like kids who never grow up. They love what they do, are
ive of their job) or support a family, I don't feel sorry for them.

Unfortunately, this kind of child-like joy is not typical. The tenured Nobel
Prize winners are pretty happy, but they are a small proportion of the total.
The average scientist that I encounter expresses bitterness about (a) low
pay, (b) not getting enough credit or references to his or her work, (c) not
knowing where the next job is coming from, (d) not having enough money or job
security to get married and/or have children. If these folks were
experiencing day-to-day joy at their bench, I wouldn't expect them to hold
onto so much bitterness and envy.

How did so many smart people make such bad mistakes in planning a career for
themselves? Part of the answer may be that young people fail to appreciate
the risk that they will become more like old people when they are old. The
young person sees the old tenured academic, ignored by his younger colleagues
in a culture that values hot new ideas, sign up to be on committees. The
youngster never asks "This oldster has tenure. He draws the same salary
regardless of whether he sits through those interminable boring committee
meetings. Why would he agree to do it? Why wouldn't he rather be playing
squash, riding a horse, flying an aircraft, walking his dog, etc.?" The
distressing possibility that the oldster agreed to be on the committee so
that he would have a venue in which people would listen to him does not occur
to the youngster.

In the personal domain, young people are very different from old people. If
you interview old people and ask "What are the greatest sources of
satisfaction and happiness in your life?" almost always the answer "my
children" comes back. At the age when people are choosing careers, the idea
of having children is often unappealing and certainly few have the idea that
one should choose a "kid-friendly" career. Old people, on average, also have
higher income requirements than young people. A youngster is happy to
backpack around the globe, stay in youth hostels for $20 per night, and sleep
in a tent. Most oldsters become devoted to their creature comforts and get
cranky people; most oldsters need their own apartment or house (edging up
towards $1 million in America's nicer neighborhoods).

The most serious concern is that the field that a youngster found fascinating
at age 20 will no longer be fascinating after 20 or 25 years. If you have a
narrow education and have been earning an academic salary, it is much tougher
to change careers at age 45 or 50 than for someone who was in a job where the
earnings are higher and begin at a younger age. A doctor who practices for 10
years can easily save enough to finance a switch to almost any other
occupation. A successful lawyer can walk away after 15 or 20 years, commute
to school from his oceanfront and town houses, and become a furniture maker
(my friend's dad did this).  Why do American men (boys, actually) do it?
Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why any
young American would do it. Yet we do find some young Americans starting out
in the sciences and they are mostly men. When the Larry Summers story first
broke, I wrote in my Weblog:

    A lot more men than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such
as become petty criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and
keep tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American
Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male). Should we be
surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their heads
against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a $35,000/year
post-doc job? 

Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation for
men going into science is the following:

   1. young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group

   2. men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the
question "is this peer group worth impressing?" 

Consider Albert Q. Mathnerd, a math undergrad at MIT ("Course 18" we call
it). He works hard and beats his chest to demonstrate that he is the best
math nerd at MIT. This is important to Albert because most of his friends are
math majors and the rest of his friends are in wimpier departments, impressed
that Albert has even taken on such demanding classes. Albert never reflects
on the fact that the guy who was the best math undergraraduate school to get
his PhD, his choice will have the same logical foundation as John Hinckley's
attempt to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan.

It is the guys with the poorest social skills who are least likely to talk to
adults and find out what the salary and working conditions are like in
different occupations. It is mostly guys with rather poor social skills whom
one meets in the university science halls.

What about women? Don't they want to impress their peers? Yes, but they are
more discriminating about choosing those peers. I've taught a fair number of
women students in electrical engineering and computer science classes over
the years. I can give you a list of the ones who had the best heads on their
shoulders and were the most thoughtful about planning out the rest of their
lives. Their names are on files in my "medical school recommendations"
directory.

In Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, it is Werther, not Lotte, who
decides to kill himself, anticipating the modern statistic fact that men are
about five times more likely to commit suicide than women.  Conclusion

    "Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living
at it." -- Albert Einstein 

Most people go to work primarily in order to earn a paycheck. Workers prefer
a higher salary to a lower salary. Jobs in science pay far less than jobs in
the professions and business held by women of similar ability. A lot of men
are irrational, romantic, stubborn, and unwilling to admit that they've made
a big mistake. With Occam's Razor, we should not need to bring in the FBI to
solve the mystery of why there are more men than women who have chosen to
stick with the choice that they made at age 18 to be a professor of science
or mathematics.  Appendix A: What about becoming a scientist in industry?
The conference where Larry Summers got into trouble was concerned with the
percentage of women among tenured professors. Considered strictly as a career
(paycheck, working hours, job security), aren't there better opportunities in
industry? And might these be good enough to make pursuing a PhD in science or
mathematvailable tend to be at government research labs in obscure corners of
the U.S. where a spouse would probably object to living. For people with PhDs
in Biology, there are a lot of jobs at pharmaceutical companies paying more
than $100,000 per year. Considered on purely economic grounds, these jobs
don't justify the time and foregone income invested in a PhD. There are
22-year-olds earning $150,000 per year selling home mortgages.

What about the working conditions? Surely it is more interesting to be a
scientist at a drug company than to be selling home mortgages? It depends on
the worker's personality. Are you introverted? Want a job where you seldom
have to meet anyone new? Want to sit at the same desk or bench year after
year and work mostly by yourself? Get most of your satisfaction from solving
puzzles? Have we got the job for you: industrial scientist! If you are
extremely introverted, you might prefer to work as a computer programmer.

Most workers, however, get a lot of satisfaction from meeting new people,
working with others collaboratively, being thanked by customers, teaching,
having a direct positive impact on other people. Jobs such as medical doctor,
lawyer, schoolteacher, airplane mechanic, and plumber all provide greater
amounts of these satisfactions than most jobs in science. In fact, the only
science job that regularly offers any of these satisfactions is professor,
which we've already discussed from the point of view of salary and job
security.

A friend of the author says that most medical doctors choose the wrong
specialty: "They pick based on what part of the body they think is the most
interesting. They should really pick based on whether or not they want to
have the responsibility of running an office, having employees, and marketing
themselves or whether they want a shift job and can walk away at the end of
the shift." She finds some of her colleagues less than optimally happy
because they chose to be plastic surgeons and don't enjoy being the boss and
not being able to take eight weeks of vacation per year. On the other hand,
she finds some emergency medicine doctors who, while ctice.

A person who says "I love Chemistry and therefore I will become a chemist" is
potentially making the same mistake as these medical doctors who end up in
the wrong specialty. There are many aspects to a job other than what exactly
you occupy your mind with. Here's a partial list:

    * work mostly collaboratively?

    * meet a lot of new people?

    * work mostly with competent people?

    * work mostly with interesting people?

    * able to see the direct impact of one's work?

    * able to teach others?

    * get to travel to interesting places on a regular basis?

    * able to leave work behind when you go home at the end of the day? (or
do you have to prepare, read email, answer phone calls, etc. when at home?)

    * able to take long blocks of time off for exotic travel?

    * cog in a large bureaucracy?

    * satisfaction of being the boss?

    * value to employers increases with age and experience?

    * able to move to any part of the country and find a similar job? (or
effectively stuck in one or two cities where an industry is concentrated) 

Different people will assign different values to these aspects of work.
Extroverts and introverts might assign opposite values to the "met a lot of
new people" aspect, for example. Probably the easiest way to evaluate what
kind of job the average person most enjoys is to look at the kinds of job for
which the average person is willing to volunteer. Very few volunteer jobs
have the characteristics of an industrial science job. The job of university
professor, especially the teaching aspect, is closer to what people are
observed to do as volunteers (which may explain why university employers are
able to recruit highly trained staff for such low salaries).

Appendix B: Interesting Comments from Readers

I posted a link to this article, in draft form, to my Weblog. Here are the
most interesting comments.

>From Geoff B: Perhaps men have a greater buffer of time to recover from
career mistakes. I actually know a couple of guys who got PhD's, then went to
MBA or JD degrees. While they may have enjoyed their PhD programs (heh), from
an earning standpoint they probably wasted a good 5-7 years. But they can
just pretend ths all the time. It's harder for women to pull this off. So
maybe math and science PhD's are just another incarnation of the recklessness
of youth - something men have historically been able to indulge in, without
the consequences women would experience.

>From me (responding to someone who asked how I would change the incentives so
that more women would be attracted to science): What's my idea for changing
the incentives? I don't have any. I'm not one of the people who complains
that there aren't enough women working as professors, janitors, or whatever.
For whatever reason we've decided that science in America should be done by
low-paid immigrants. They seem to be doing a good job. They are cheap. They
are mostly guys, like other immigrant populations. If smart American women
choose to go to medical, business, and law school instead of doing science,
and have fabulous careers, I certainly am not going to discourage them.
Imagine if one of those kind souls that Summers was speaking to had taken
Condoleezza Rice aside and told her not to waste time with political science
because physics was so much more challenging. Just think how far she might
have gone...

Appendix C: What would the world look like if anyone actually cared about
this?

When employers are seriously about hiring more people with certain
qualifications, they pay them more. Harvard University, where this entire
debate occurred, earned $4.5 billion in investment income in 2006. The basic
operation of the university, research and teaching, was cashflow-neutral and
therefore Harvard could spend this $4.5 billion in any way that it chooses.
Typically universities spend their tax-free investment winnings on lavish
real estate development, e.g., $200 million buildings by signature architects
that Saddam Hussein or a Saudi royal would have been proud to include among
his palaces, and thus we may infer that lavish new buildings are a real
priority for them.

With control of the budget at a university, one could change the sex ratio in
science and math very quickly. Here's how it might look:

    * female undergraduates majoring in science or math pay no tuition, room,
or board fees. If a woman maintains an A average, she gets a stipend of
$10,000 per year to spend however sheut triple what male graduate students
earn.

    * female assistant professors in science and math earn a starting salary
of $300,000 per year, up there with the average medical specialist

    * female tenured professors in science and math get paid $500,000 per
year, comparable to what a high-talent professional might earn in mid-career 

What would this cost? The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences employs 700
professors, only a small portion of whom are in science or math. Suppose that
our goal is to switch 200 faculty positions from being held by men to being
held by women. That would cost approximately $50 million per year in
incremental salary by the preceding schedule. Adding in the costs for a
(well-paid) mostly-female population of math and science students, it would
be difficult to get to a cost of $100 million per year, or only about 1/45th
of investment income.

If a woman scientist is worth more to the university and to society than a
male scientist, she should be paid more. The fact that she isn't indicates
that this issue is lower priority than any of the things that the
universities does spend money on, e.g., those palatial new buildings.

Appendix D: Data on University Pay

How much exactly do universities pay PhDs in science? Let's consider the
University of California at Berkeley. This is one of America's leading
research institutions, located in a city full of delightful cultural and
leisure opportunities, and blessed with excellent weather. For the fall of
2007, the university pays Instructors $45,900 per year. Assistant Professors
earn between $53,000 and $69,000 per year. Associate Professors can earn up
to $83,700 per year. A full professor can earn between $77,800 and $142,000
per year. The AAUP ranks U.C. Berkeley as the highest paying public
university in the United States.

A family-sized (four-bedroom) house in Berkeley sold for an average of
$965,000 in the middle of 2007, just slightly more than double the price of a
house that the top-paid full professor could afford, according to some online
calculation tools.

Data on addition schools: http://chronicle.com/stats/aaup/ and wed scientist.
I plead guilty to having majored in mathematics as a college undergraduate
(age 14-18--how would you like to be held accountable for decisions that you
made as a teenager?), but otherwise I have spent my life as a humble
electrical and software engineer, not as a scientist (my PhD is in Electrical
Engineering and Computer Science; I started the program, without intending to
finish, because I was curious to learn how my stereo system worked and
because I was earning enough every month as a Lisp Machine programmer to pay
my annual living expenses; I finished the program because I am a stubborn
testosterone-poisoned guy). I do love science and enjoy talking to and
learning from scientists. Starting in 2001, I've been doing a lot of flying
in airplanes and helicopters, including several cross-continent trips in
light aircraft, and this has sparked an interest in meteorology and geology.
Taking advantage of my location in Cambridge, I have sat in on some classes
at MIT in Atmospheric Physics, Biology, and Geology. I also teach a software
engineering lab course at MIT every three or four semesters (textbook). But
for me, the university has mostly been a source of entertainment; I have
never looked to it as a source of income. In my guide to early retirement, I
suggest that university towns are great places to live for a person of
adequate means.

The Last Word

"A man of science may earn great distinction, but not bread," Thomas Henry
Huxley, mid-19th Century, quoted on page 278 of Terrible Lizard: The First
Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science (Cadbury; 2002). Text
copyright 2006 Philip Greenspun. Photo is copyright 2005.  philg at mit.edu