More discussion on why women leave the sciences and the timing of having a family. "Given that the average age of a Ph.D. awardee is 31, women postdocs fall somewhere on the sharply declining portion of the female fertility curve. This is a crucial biological difference between women and men that may partly explain the skew in departures from academic science. Men can put off having children until they land a tenure-track job with relatively few reproductive consequences, but if a woman knows she wants to have a family, the wise bet on her own fertility is on having at least the first child before that point, as a postdoc or earlier. Thus, many women postdocs have children, which dramatically increases the odds of their departure from the road to being a principal investigator."
Posted on: Tue, 16 Jul 2013 17:03:54 +0000
Trending Topics
Recently Viewed Topics
© 2015