Leaky pipeline

The movement to increase female representation in the academic workforce has identified and been (partially) perplexed by a leaky pipeline.  There are currently a large fraction of females attending undergraduate programs in STEM fields but the proportion in faculty positions, especially more senior positions, remains low.  While, I am sure that there are LOTS of reasons for this, I'd like to ponder some of the challenges facing women pursuing this career path that occur particularly at the postdoctoral stage. (Note that this is my based on my own experiences and does not represent any quantitative analysis of postdoctoral experiences.)


The postdoc stage is a strange one.  There is no entering and conquering cohort of students with whom to share and despair. Instead, you enter the strange limbo that is postdoctoral land.  A land in between formal education and, as my husband puts it, 'a real job'.  Coincident with this limbo often comes, for both men and women, changes on the home front.  While there is really no 'good' time to have kids in this career path, the postdoctoral stage seems to be either the best of the worse or at least coincide with the biological clock setting off alarms.  Juggling work and life becomes much harder with kids in the picture.  Gone are the 14 hour days, 7 days a week of work.  In many ways this is a good thing... but not usually for a publish or perish career.  Thus more pressure to have a family and the additional time that family consumes could be an obvious reason for a (large) hole in the pipe at the postdoctoral stage.

There are ways that the hole could be clogged to slow the leak - or at least, I have a few thoughts that I think would make my (and probably other postdocs') life and career path... simpler? smoother? better?  Some are simple, others are complex and probably never going to happen.

1) Increase postdoctoral funding and the length of postdocs.  While this may sound counter-intuitive - we're trying to get females into faculty positions, not stall them as postdocs - a longer and more stable postdoc would, I think, help in juggling family life and getting papers out the door.  Changing jobs takes lots of time and often money.  You must stress about needing a new job, apply to job openings, interview, move, learn the new lab & bureaucracy - all things that take time and energy away from scientific productivity and quality family time.  So note that I am not advocating being a postdoc for longer per se, but rather having one single longer postdoctoral experience as compared to multiple 2-3 year postdoctoral positions.

This sounds easy to fix, but with NSF funding cycles, it may be difficult.

2) CHILDCARE! This is a biggie.  Childcare is expensive and often difficult to acquire.  Even if I could get past the ~3 year waiting list at my institution, I couldn't afford to send my kids there.  But, oh would it be nice to be able to drop the kids off and pick them up with out any additional commuting time.  The time it takes to commute from daycare to the office and back is really what limits the amount of time in the office.

Additional and subsidized childcare centers associated with the workplace would help both the employee and the employer by increasing productivity all around!  I know that some places are making strides in this area, but there are still many places that need improvement.  My institution has bragged that they have the largest number of daycare slots compared to other agencies, but when you consider the per capita numbers, they don't fair as well.

3) Childcare also goes beyond just the office to other places of work, like conferences and other meetings.  Right now, I'm in my hotel room writing this post instead of out networking with colleagues at the SICB meeting over a beer because my infant son is asleep in the crib next to me.  My options were - don't go to the meeting, bring the whole family, or pay a babysitter.  As I am on the job market, it is important to attend meetings to meet new people, stay in touch with old people... 'network'.  It was $800+ to fly out the rest of the family, so that was out.  The conference isn't offering any childcare services, but the hotel did recommend a babysitting service.  Now a babysitter sounds just fine, but in reality, at $15-20 an hour for a 4.5 day conference which runs from 8am to sometimes 10pm with socials and plenaries, I can't really afford a babysitter on a postdoc salary either. So, I've chosen a hybrid - attend the meeting with part-time child care.  This means that I miss out on some networking opportunities but get to attend the meeting, have productive meetings with collaborators, keep up on progress in my and related fields, and not starve my infant son.

This issue is almost exclusively a female one due to female biology.  For the first few months plus, many mothers serve as the sole source of food for their babies.  Thus, the babies have to come along for the ride.  Just like travel grants, there could be assistance with childcare costs either from the home institution or from the meeting to help mothers with infants.

4) Transition to faculty position.  This is the toughest right now.  The slump in the economy has made a really deep pool of applicants for nearly every faculty position.  I've heard numbers ranging from 75-400+ applications per position.  I know that makes it extremely onerous for search committees, but it doesn't look too good from the other side either.  A recent job search at Princeton in Integrative Ecology, Evolution and Behavior has chosen 6 candidates (4 males & 2 females) for interviews - all but one has over 12 publications with at least one in a 'one named journal' and a few in second tier PNAS type journals. The paucity of jobs and ultra competitive market will inevitably cause people (of both genders) to drop out of the pipeline.  However, consider a single guy and a mom of two.  Who do you think is more likely to drop out?

So, is the problem that we're training too many PhDs or that there aren't enough faculty positions?  I would guess a little of both.  If you consider academic pedigree, it is inevitable that there will be a near exponential growth in the number of PhDs.  To check this, some of them must leave the pipeline, and honestly some should.  The trick is to make sure that filter removes the right people and isn't biased.