The Universality of the Biological Clock

image from Softpedia

Biological clocks are often blamed for the dearth of women in the faculty ranks of STEM (science, technology, engineering and math) disciplines. The argument is that women want to have babies and view the academic life as incompatible with motherhood so the drive to reproduce forces them out of the field. Certainly there is some truth to this argument. Academia does not look kindly on those who do not spend every waking minute of their pre-tenure career working and I'm told that bearing and raising children takes a non negligible amount of time. However, a new study presented at a recent American Chemical Society meeting and reported on by Inside Higher Ed, shows that some graduate programs in chemistry place many more women in faculty positions than others, casting doubt on the dominance of the biological clock effect.

The study looked at the faculties of the top 94 chemistry departments and found that about 50% of the faculty members hired between 1994 and 2003 came from 12 graduate programs. They then looked at the number of men and women each of those 12 programs supplied to those top 94 chemistry departments. The variation across campuses was astonishing. Berkeley educated 31 male and 21 female chem professors whereas 32 male but only 2 women graduated from Harvard. MIT fared similarly poorly, supplying 30 male and only 6 female faculty members. The effect was diluted when they looked at the institution where these faculty members did their post doctoral work, but in general women from West Coast post docs fared better than their East Coast counter parts.

So, what happens to the biological clock explanation when confronted with these numbers? As the study author, Valerie J. Kuck, points out, "the women at Berkeley have the same biological clocks as other women, but they are getting jobs." So if we postulate that the biological clock is universal, that there isn't something in Berkeley's water which inoculates it's women against the pull of motherhood, then we must acknowledge that there is some other effect that is contributing to the loss of women in the academic pipeline.

This loss, while small for physics, is a big problem for chemistry and it is termed the "leaky pipeline". At each step of the academic ladder, women leak out. As I talked about before, women obtain over 30% of the PhDs in chemistry but only about 15% of the faculty hiring pool. (In physics the faculty applicant pool is only a couple of percentage points lower than the PhD pool for women). This data seems to suggest that for some institutions the discrepancy might be even greater while others have learned to plug the leaks.

The study prompts a multitude of questions which more or less fall in the vein of "How does Berkeley do it? and why is Harvard failing its women?". That characterization of the questions might have some institutional bias (Go Bears!) in it but I think it's basically correct. Unfortunately neither the study nor the article have anwsers. I know that Berkeley's school of Chemistry founded the national chemistry women's honor society, Iota Sigma Pi, in 1907 and that it is quite active, hosting social events and career development workshops. Their 2008-2009 events include panels on choosing a research group, writing a resume and navigating academic and industry career paths. I was also interested in this workshop, which directly deals with a problem many intelligent women seem to face: Overcoming the Impostor Syndrome: How to Feel as Bright and Capable as Everyone Seems to Think You Are. (It's a whole 'nother can of blog posts.) I don't know if Harvard or MIT have similar organizations, but in comparison to the other women in science organizations I know about, the Berkeley ISP stands out as a well rounded, complete and effective organization. I suspect they have something to do with Berkeley's success in creating female academics.

I'd love to see a similar study for physics, but the numbers might be too small. In any case, this study, which I hope grows to a full publication, reminds us that we shouldn't become complacent and use biology as an excuse for the gender imbalance in the sciences.