[HN Gopher] The Unequal Impact of Parenthood in Academia (2021)
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The Unequal Impact of Parenthood in Academia (2021)
Author : pepys
Score : 48 points
Date : 2023-04-25 13:04 UTC (2 days ago)
(HTM) web link (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov)
| gadders wrote:
| I'd be interested to see if this gap still prevails in the social
| sciences. I would expect (given how progressive they are) that
| this gap would not exist.
| bell-cot wrote:
| If 1% of the effort that goes into re-re-re-verifying systematic
| sexism in academia was re-directed to actually _doing something
| useful_ about the problem...
|
| But ([re-]^n)verification is a PC and peer-friendly source of
| funding for endless studies. Vs. actually _doing_ anything would
| involve confronting actual academics over their behaviors,
| biases, ...
|
| So fat chance.
| myrmidon wrote:
| "Actually doing something about it" is easier said than done.
|
| I don't think that 1% of the effort of a few studies would get
| you very far at all-- you would already exceed that by
| basically sending the whole staff (not just the people doing
| the studies, but the whole university) to a (mandatory) one-
| afternoon-awareness-raising event, and even without trying to
| ridicule the concept, that does not sound like it would achieve
| ANYTHING...
|
| We're probably best off with the Max-Planck approach of
| advancing non-discrimination one funeral at a time...
| bell-cot wrote:
| If you believe many of the studies - just swapping male-
| sounding and female-sounding applicant names on resumes and
| papers submitted for publication would do a great deal of
| good. The Max-Planck approach does not actually work WRT
| human sexism.
|
| (Yes, know that awareness-raising events are _only_ useful
| for wasting staff 's time while covering management's *ss.)
| Mezzie wrote:
| I'd be really interested to see this broken down further:
|
| * Single mothers, married mothers, single fathers, and married
| fathers - does being married have an impact on productivity? If
| married parents produce more, then perhaps the issue is the
| mothers not having as much help as the fathers in aggregate.
|
| * Same sex couples vs. Heterosexual ones. Do lesbian mothers
| suffer from the same productivity penalty? Or do gay male faculty
| members take a similar hit to mothers since they're acting as
| primary caregivers?
|
| * Adoptive/non-biological parenthood versus giving birth: Is it
| _being a mother_ that causes the dip or _birthing a child_?
| syngrog66 wrote:
| [flagged]
| dekhn wrote:
| When I was an undergrad I worked with a prestigious professor
| whom I respected greatly.
|
| One day, I stumbled into lab, apparently looking fairly love-
| struck (i'm a man, and was seeing a new girlfriend), and he said:
| "dekhn, if you want to be successful in science, you can't have a
| wife or a girlfriend or kids. They are a distraction and to be
| successful, you have to dedicate your whole life to science.
| Nights, evenings, everything. A wife and kids will just waste
| your time".
|
| I'm glad I ignored his advice and got married to that new
| girlfriend (and had kids, after establishing my career). He later
| narrowly missed out on the Nobel Prize and married his postdoc.
| But he was right: to be truly successful in science today, unless
| you're a charismatic genius, requires an extraordinary level of
| dedication- and a lot of family support.
|
| That said I'm surrounded, in my job, with successful women
| scientists who came from academia and have kids. This sometimes
| leads to weekend meetings where both of us end up saying "Oh, I
| have to go now to take my kid to soccer"...
|
| [edit: I realized I left out an important bit. Both my wife and I
| got phds and have professional jobs. But I optimized for high
| salary and status, while she optimized for "freedom"- the freedom
| to drive kids around to activities, etc. Which in some sense, I
| guess, is just another anecdote supporting the paper.
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| What exactly does 'truly successful' mean here? If Nobel prize
| is the standard that's ridiculous. As someone who is a fairly
| successful (by conventional metrics) tenured academic at a
| top-10 school in the physical sciences, this was really dumb
| advice but not atypical from previous generations (along with:
| "make sure you have a wife at home to take care of everything"
| which, btw, was the more common advice to get, since almost
| every male academic had a wife and kids)
|
| It is quite possible to get grants, do valuable work, advance
| your field (and get awards, if that's your jam) and still live
| a pretty normal life. In my case my spouse is also a successful
| (by conventional metrics) academic, and we have kids. It's not
| without challenges, but it's quite plenty of positives. And
| neither of us are charismatic geniuses. We have talents, sure,
| but the more important thing is that we are organized.
|
| The unequal impact highlighted here is very real. As the man in
| a dual-career academic couple, I have actively worked (along
| with my wife of course) to counter it. Simple examples include
| strongly encouraging and supporting a spouse, including
| crucially owning/ being the primary point person on childcare -
| especially needed when they are in the midst of grant
| applications or important conference presentations, even in
| early childhood years.
| dekhn wrote:
| are you a professor at a tier-1 university (you say "tenured
| academic at a top-10 school in the physical sciences")? Is it
| in an expensive city? what's your h-index? How much time do
| you spend writing papers and going to conferences, versus
| doing research. Is it lab work or theory? how much money do
| you bring in? Do you work weekends? Do you ever have to go to
| a conference and it means your spouse has to do extra work
| around the house?
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| Yes. Very expensive. h-index > 35. It varies. Both.
| ~$0.5-1M/year. Sure. Yes, and vice versa for my spouse as
| well.
| dekhn wrote:
| You run a lab on $1M/year (grant money?). When I was a PI
| over a decade ago, that's enough to employ at best 2-4
| research scientists.
|
| What I actually meant was salary- because if you live in
| an expensive city, it's almost impossible to buy a house
| on an academic salary. Certainly you could buy in the
| worst part of town, far from your institution, with
| higher crime rates and lower quality of houses...
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| $1M / year is on the upper end in the engineering school
| I'm at (average faculty brings in less than half that). I
| mostly have Ph.D. students (as do most people in my
| field) that cost ~$100K/ year incl. overhead, or postdocs
| that cost ~$150K/ year incl. overhead. Things are very
| different in medical schools where staff scientists are
| more common and also you have to fund your own salary.
|
| Total household income is > $450K/year, which along with
| lots of saving early in our career, allows us to live in
| a home close to work and in a nice neighborhood.
| Everyone's experience will be different, and we are
| certainly lucky, but I am in a pretty similar situation
| to a dozen other recently-tenured faculty I know in my
| career/life stage at my university. We work hard, but the
| differences in hours etc. relative to my friends working
| at various Bay Area companies seem modest. YMMV.
| dekhn wrote:
| Thanks for sharing.
|
| Your experience is atypical in my field (medical
| biology/ML/drug discovery)/region(SF Bay Area). Think
| UCSF/UC Berkeley. My professor at UCSF was soooo happy he
| could hire starting professors at $70K a year (20 years
| ago; now it's about $120K).
|
| A typical PI would have $10M/year in grants, have no grad
| students (or 1-2), only postdocs (who are already
| publishing), live fairly far away (45+minute commute).
| Once they reach full tenure it's about $250K/year salary
| (with summer free, but usually 1 day a week consulting
| with pharma instead), plus a heavy teaching load. And
| every single one of them is working nights and weekends
| to just barely keep up.
|
| I looked at that, and concluded there was no way for me
| to be happy, and moved to industry, where I get paid
| more, work less, and have a far better work/life balance.
| I even have more time to do independent research and
| publish than I ever did as an academic. So I'm always
| interested in what attributes people who managed to pull
| off the "two body problem" in the physical sciences are
| doing.
| zamfi wrote:
| That's a fascinating comparison.
|
| It's true that there are major differences in academia
| across different fields. NIH funding is typically so much
| more $$ than NSF[1] -- and I wonder if this has an effect
| on how these fields are structured and thus who enters
| them. In particular, could the soft money[2] salary
| encourage people who are willing to take that bet?
|
| But also UCSF/UCB's biomed stuff is kind of a different
| machine as far as I can tell -- it's not as focused on
| training (hence, fewer students and more postdocs/post-
| PhD researchers) and more akin to a traditional
| industrial research lab. But then: who are they teaching
| exactly at UCSF (where's the "heavy teaching load" coming
| from) if there are so few PhD students -- med school
| students?
|
| For those reading along:
|
| [1] Think medical/biomed/bioeng/pharma/etc. (NIH) vs
| physics/astronomy/computing/social science/etc. (NSF)
|
| [2] "Soft money" means your (PI) salary is paid from the
| grants you get; don't get enough grants to cover your
| salary and you're out, typically, if you can't get a
| friend to sponsor you under their grants.
| strangeloops85 wrote:
| $10M/ year seems unusually high, even for med schools -
| are you sure those are annualized costs? Perhaps it's
| because I'm familiar with the more basic science (non
| clinical trial) parts of NIH, but a typical R01 is
| $250K-$500K/ year in direct costs so that would imply
| having to hold ~15 of them (with overheard) to reach
| $10M/year.
|
| It seems like $10M in total value of active grants in a
| given year (~5 R01s) might be more typical (though the
| standard for tenure I've heard of in med schools is maybe
| ~2-3 R01s, so 5 would make you top tier and highly sought
| after).
|
| For clarity, when I'm referring to $1M/year in annual
| funding, that's coming from ~6-7 active grants whose
| total value might be in the $5M range total.
| dekhn wrote:
| R01s are too small to be worth applying for, typically.
| Or rather, most PIs have an R01 that pays for themselves
| and maybe some travel and publication feeds. Most of
| these people end up making center grants or finding other
| mechanisms (like non-NIH funding, such as CZI).
|
| There's no way I personally would have been able to
| manage 5-6 active R01s a year; but then, when I did grant
| review, I noticed that other folks did a lot of
| copy/pasting and exagerating about their publications
| significance, which is not something I was willing to do.
| [deleted]
| chrisbrandow wrote:
| That's incredibly stupid advice. I got my Ph.D. at Caltech, and
| as far as I know, every Nobel Prize winner in the chemistry
| department had a wife and children.
| Misdicorl wrote:
| Its callous, not stupid. Consider whether those individuals
| best work (nobel prize granting e.g.) came before or after
| they started families. Consider how involved they can be with
| their families given how often you likely saw them around the
| department. Yes, it can be done. But its hard. And you're
| unlikely to be ultra successful if you devote the time your
| family deserves (not to mention the
| luck/charisma/skill/dedication needed on top of that).
| leroy-is-here wrote:
| Maybe it's that being married and having children helped
| them be successful.
| lbeltrame wrote:
| I was told the same: that if I weren't able to give up
| everything "I would not be successful". 8 months later and with
| a breakdown, I was fired from that lab. Better, because people
| were forced to work (literally forced: even if you had nothing
| to do you needed to stay until 8pm) at least 12 hours per day,
| no weekends, no days off, nothing. And my scientific
| productivity _tanked_.
|
| I managed to somehow continue to a PhD and then I even got a
| permanent position, but for that mindset I am "failed
| scientist": I'm over 40, I don't lead anyone, I don't have
| grants (only two failed ones that caused me so much stress that
| I didn't want to do them again), nor I have a teaching position
| (I would gladly get one if it were just teaching, and not the
| hell of grant seeking). I do the same stuff I was doing during
| my postdoc years, with a little more job security, of course.
|
| FTR, I made sure that my connections outside work were nowhere
| near labs, and nowhere around science. Much better for work-
| life balance.
|
| Academia seems so obsessed with "excellence" it's not even
| funny. And that excellence needs to be obtained at absolutely
| any cost. Probably I wouldn't have chosen this career had I
| known beforehand what I was getting into.
| photochemsyn wrote:
| The researchers should have asked whether their metric,
| publication count, is all that great for assessing a professor's
| actual academic productivity:
|
| > "If the productivity gap between men and women is entirely
| caused by gendered parenthood effects, then the productivity
| trends of men and women without children should be
| indistinguishable. To investigate this hypothesis, we examined
| each professor's publication history and calculated their
| cumulative productivity over the 5 years before and 10 years
| after beginning their first assistant professor position."
|
| First, publication inflation is a common tactic in academia, in
| which a study that really could be published in one or two papers
| is broken up into two or three times as many in order to pad the
| professor's CV. Some academics have taken this practice to fairly
| ridiculous extremes, and that is going to skew the results.
|
| Second, there are multiple other plausible productivity metrics,
| such as the number of graduate students the professor has
| successfully mentored through a Master's or PhD program, the
| amount of grant dollars brought in, and the number and/or quality
| of courses taught at the undergraduate level (all adjusted to
| time spent as a professor).
|
| All these measures are also value judgments of some kind - the
| university administration may have its eyes on the grant dollars
| above all else, but in the larger societal context, well-trained
| young engineers, doctors, scientists etc. might be the more
| valuable academic product.
| goodcanadian wrote:
| I take your point, and even agree with it. However, publication
| count is by far the most important metric considered by hiring
| committees and is thus critical to advancing your career. We
| can argue all day about whether it _should_ be the case, but it
| certainly _is_ the case.
| marcodiego wrote:
| There was a place I worked at where it was well known that if you
| were a parent you had higher chances of getting higher pay. I
| asked why and people explained me that employees who are parents
| are more willing to make extra efforts to keep their jobs.
| analog31 wrote:
| It works the other way too. The only people I've known who
| wanted the thankless but higher paying jobs like middle
| managers were parents.
|
| In some cases it helped compensate for a spouse's loss of
| income.
|
| I became a project manager when my daughter was born.
| influx wrote:
| After having kids, I know I can be a better manager after
| thinking about someone else's needs 24/7, anticipating how to
| coach them, grow them into successful individuals, and having
| coaxed a 3 year old to get dressed and put on shoes, I'm way
| more confident I can help software engineers ship product ;)
| PeterisP wrote:
| There are positions where I was thinking that the perfect
| hire for that role would be someone who was successful as a
| kindergarten teacher; all the other skills can be gained on
| the job but the ability to coax a bunch of figurative three
| year olds into something resembling organized activity is
| challenging and rare.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| I think it contributes to a renewed sense of purpose and
| dedication that comes from knowing you are responsible for
| other people and a desire to show them a positive role model.
| mandmandam wrote:
| Maybe it does - but does that balance out the sleeplessness,
| tiredness, extra stress, less free time and mindspace etc of
| parenting?
|
| I'd be confident the extra leverage on parents is a larger
| factor.
| gnarbarian wrote:
| so maybe the additional leverage makes employers more
| comfortable paying them more because they don't believe
| they will leave as readily?
|
| Increased leverage to me would imply suppressed wages.
|
| edit:
|
| I also think employers will often empathize with new
| parents who may be operating on reduced sleep and hours,
| giving them a little more leeway than otherwise. I know I
| do this with my employees.
| HPsquared wrote:
| Maybe the employees who are parents push harder in salary
| negotiations because they have people depending on them.
| TexanFeller wrote:
| Nailed it. People with kids are way more likely to seek
| out higher earning jobs and be bucking for a promotion,
| they've gotta pay for those kids' educations! I have no
| kids, so I don't currently have any interest in getting
| promoted and get to just nope out of the rat race.
| [deleted]
| sdwr wrote:
| Or it's need-based - parents need more income to support
| dependents.
| pc86 wrote:
| This is close to "we're going to let $A go instead of $B
| because $B [needs the job more/needs the money more/will have
| a harder time finding another job]" when by any objective
| measure $B is the lower performer. It has no place in this
| type of decision-making (both the bad side with layoffs, and
| the positive with raises or promotions) but it is still
| probably there.
| Zach_the_Lizard wrote:
| Some of the other comments have some good ideas as to why that
| is--motivation to earn more, management not wanting to fire
| parents as readily, etc.--but I wonder if on top of all of
| that, parents have some other selection effects going on.
|
| Maybe whatever hoops must be jumped through to get married and
| have children are similar in size and shape to hoops that help
| in the workforce, so group averages move a bit in some positive
| way.
|
| Time for some light reading...
| djoldman wrote:
| It is interesting that it seems studies generally consider
| "academic productivity" == "number of publications".
| fwungy wrote:
| It's actually the impact of the paper that matters, how many
| cites it gets.
| neogodless wrote:
| Related:
|
| https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=35716768 The Wealth Gap in
| Science: How Your Parents's Income Affects Your Career
| (youtube.com - 1 day ago, 86 comments)
| fwungy wrote:
| How about an article on the unequal impacts of prison, suicide,
| and homelessness?
| zubiaur wrote:
| Quoting Russ Roberts, discussing Charles Darwin's musings about
| this topic:
|
| "So, the Darwin thing is a somewhat--well, a number of thoughtful
| people have written about it, including Agnes Callard and others.
| We have access to Darwin's journal. You can get online and you
| can look at Darwin's own handwriting in his journal. And, he's
| trying to decide whether to get married. He's 29 years old and he
| makes a list of pros and cons.
|
| And, he's smart enough to know that there's a lot at stake for
| him because he is going to have a chance to be a serious
| scientist. I don't know if he knew he had a chance to be one of
| the top two or three scientists of all time, but he's worried
| about how marriage might bite into his productivity as a
| researcher. And, he's worried about whether he is going to have
| to go visit his wife's relatives a lot. He's worried she might
| not like London, so he's going to be stuck out the countryside.
| He's worried he's going to have to spend time with her or the
| kids instead of his work. And, he makes a list of the pros and
| the cons and--unbelievably embarrassing list in 2022--one of the
| pros is female chitchat, and at one point: There's someone to
| come home to, parentheses, 'better than a dog anyway'. So, it's a
| little bit awkward. He'd be canceled.
|
| He may still be canceled when my book comes out, but let's take
| him as a man of his time for a moment.
|
| Anyway, he makes this list. And, what I thought about when I
| looked at it was--and by the way, sorry, important point: the
| negatives way outweigh the positives. And, they're bigger. It's
| pretty clear that he shouldn't get married if he's going to make
| a rational choice based on his list. That kind of bothers him.
| And so, at one point he comes back to the list and he has this
| stream of consciousness, and he says, 'Ahhh, got to be in a dingy
| apartment by myself, late in life, no one to talk to, no kids--
| ehhh, I'm going to get married."
|
| And he wrote on his journal... MARRY MARRY MARRY Q.E.D.
|
| Darwin's journal: https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/tags/about-
| darwin/family-lif... https://www.darwinproject.ac.uk/tags/about-
| darwin/family-lif...
| OldGuyInTheClub wrote:
| The snark during my grad school/postdoc years was to have both a
| spouse[0] and a sidepiece. You tell the spouse you are with the
| sidepiece, the sidepiece you're with the spouse so you can go to
| the lab and get stuff done.
|
| [0] Updated for current norms
| JoeAltmaier wrote:
| Young Professor driving candidate (friend of mine) back to the
| airport after being interviewed by faculty. "How do you think I
| did?"
|
| Answer: "The moment they learned you had kids, you were out.
| They're going to hire a man; you had no chance."
|
| That was years ago. I hoped it was better now.
| crackercrews wrote:
| As of 2015 it is.
|
| > National hiring experiments reveal 2:1 faculty preference for
| women on STEM tenure track [1]
|
| 1: https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.1418878112
| meepmorp wrote:
| A preference for women isn't the same thing as no longer
| penalizing people with kids.
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