Читать книгу The State of Science - Marc Zimmer - Страница 18

The easy and convenient explanation for the low numbers of women in the upper levels of science is that they have more family responsibilities . Many will even argue that this is a fait accompli and that nothing can be done about it. I disagree. Some of the differences may be due to family reasons, but with proper incentives these differences can be made negligible, and there are other, more significant factors that cause women to exit the pipeline. If family issues are the only problem, why have the last 30–40 years seen such great improvements in gender diversity (and even racial diversity) in the life sciences, while the physical sciences, computer science, and engineering have lagged behind? Physics and astronomy require very similar skills, yet astronomy has twice the percentage of women faculty as physics.^[32]

A study of gender diversity in the life sciences sector in Massachusetts was conducted by Liftstream and MassBio, in which over 900 people working in the biotech sector were surveyed. The 2017 report found that women have career breaks more often than men, related not just to parenthood but also to caring for elderly parents. More important, the researchers found that parenthood isn’t the only cause for the “leaky pipeline.” In fact, more women leave the biotech sector because they are opting out of the corporate culture than for parenting reasons.^[33]

Patricia Fara is the president of the British Society for the History of Science and a fellow at Clare College, Cambridge. She has an undergraduate degree in physics from Oxford but is one of the many who leaked out of the “pipeline.” In a February 2018 National Public Radio interview, she talked about why she had dropped out of the system. For her it was a choice between quality of life and status. To succeed in science and academia routinely requires a 24/7 commitment. Fara feels that she and many other women have wisely opted for a better quality of life and that “perhaps in time, the really smart men will realize that’s a better option than earning more money but having no time to spend it.”^[34] She might be right that faculty at the elite institutions have little or no life outside of work and that getting tenure requires extraordinary sacrifices, especially in one’s family life. Progressive policies such as paid parental leave, high-quality, on-site child care, and tenure ‘clock stops” will improve the quality of living of STEM faculty and make STEM careers more appealing to new generations, but they won’t completely close the gender gap.

In their aptly titled paper “Do Babies Matter? The Effect of Family Formation on the Lifelong Careers of Academic Men and Women,” Mason and Goulden have shown that women with children don’t advance any slower than women without children. That doesn’t mean having babies doesn’t matter; it matters a great deal. The study showed that there is large gap in achieving tenure between women and men who have babies within five years of getting their PhDs. But most important, based on all the data in their study, Mason and Goulden conclude that “babies are not completely responsible for the gender gap, and that there are other factors at work, perhaps including the thousand paper cuts of discrimination.”^[35] Most of these “paper cuts” are a result of implicit bias. They are unconscious, involuntary, natural, and unavoidable assumptions that all of us make on the basis of subconscious assumptions, preferences, and stereotypes.