Here’s some follow-up from the Edge about the Pinker-Spelske debate on how differences in men’s and women’s brains might affect women’s participation in the sciences, which in itself was a follow-up to the uproar following some comments from Lawrence Summers of Harvard back in January. In this round, four academics react to points brought up in the Pinker/Spelske debate. I found Alison Gopnik’s description of how genes and environment interact to be particularly interesting. She suggests that one big environmental consideration that hampers women, the need for scientists to establish themselves in their careers during a woman’s prime reproductive years, could be changed by things like making part-time tenured positions available for both men and women who are raising children. This makes me curious about how the whole system got set up in the first place. I’m pretty sure that in mathematics, there is a perception that a person does his or her best work when young, and I wonder to what extent that perception is true, and whether or not it is true to any degree in the sciences as well.
http://www.edge.org/discourse/science-gender.html
My undergrad degree is in astrophysics, but I chose not to go for a PhD and continue with a career in astronomy, in part because I had two young children and wasn’t willing to have my time with them subject to the long hours, financial uncertainty, and frequent relocations that are involved in establishing a career in astronomy. Do I ever miss astronomy? Sometimes. Would I make the same choice if I had it all to do again? Absolutely! Was there any way the experience of getting a PhD and going through post-docs and tenure-track positions could have been made more palatable to a woman with two small children? Perhaps; certainly at the time I railed against what I saw as the harsh demands of a career in science. But the kind of career you would have with a more family-friendly career path might be fairly different from what you would have otherwise, and so you would still have to make a choice, not between having a family and having a career, but a choice about what kind of career and what kind of family life you want to have. I think it would be good if men faced the same dilemmas as women here (i.e., if child-care responsibilities were shared as much as possible), but I think it genuinely is a dilemma. Having a family shouldn’t close off all other options for your life, for men or women, and I like the idea of family-friendly jobs, but raising children is an occupation itself, and it might simply be incompatible with some kinds of higher-powered careers (and not just in science). If more parenting-friendly options were available for scientists, and more women than men chose them, would there be complaints that the parenting-friendly options don’t provide as much opportunity (like complaints about the “Mommy track” in other occupations)? Quite possibly, but I don’t think gender bias would necessarily be involved. Sometimes you really do have to choose; that’s one of the challenges of being thinking meat. “There is never enough time to do or say all the things that we would wish.” (Charles Dickens)
