This is an edited version of an original article, which I link to below. Edited text is underlined -SA
Visiting my alma mater recently, I paused, as I often do, before the framed graduation picture of the Class of 1973. It was startling for this member of the Class of 1993 when I saw it 20 years ago, and it’s downright unbelievable seeing it 40 years on in 2013. Among the Law ’73 grads, you will find exactly one — repeat: one — woman.
By the time I enrolled in law school in 1990, women made up about half of all science graduate school classes and were said to constitute as much as 60% of the incoming classes at some faculties. So the Class of ’73, as shocking as it was, seemed like a relic of a distant past. But it’s worth remembering just how male-dominated the legal profession has always been. Check out these figures compiled by the AAUW, and then check out this figure showing the proportion of female tenured faculty at UW. It seemed like a natural progression was underway towards a more balanced profession.
In 2006, only 22% of tenured faculty were female, and women enrolled in Grad School in the sciences than men.
The issue is especially acute after graduate school: women graduate, but they don’t end up in tenured positions, moving to industry, into the public sector, or out of active legal careers altogether.
In the graph above, women make up just 20% of tenured faculty. Take a moment to let that one sink in. The profession, to its credit, has been trying for the last 20+ years to address this problem, creating commissions, task forces and programs of all kinds to support women in science. Whatever impact these efforts have had, they have shown less evidence of successfully enabling more equitable status for women in academia than we should aim for..
I’m now coming to conclude that this is because all these efforts, well-intentioned as they might be, are looking at the situation the wrong way. We’ve been assuming that the lower numbers of women in science academia is a problem that needs rectifying. But what if we stop looking at women’s career choices as a failure that needs fixing, a failure to fit the traditional standards of success? What if, instead, we start looking at this trend as evidence of women’s eminently sensible and illuminating response to the state of the academic system?
Here’s my theory: women aren’t leaving academia at an abnormal rate. They’re leaving it at a perfectly rational and normal rate. It’s men who are staying at an abnormal rate. Women aren’t the faulty outliers; men are.
When you look at the situation that way, a lot of things start to make sense. Women who enter academia quickly and accurately diagnose that these are amateurish organizations that employ archaic workflow systems, inept pricing mechanisms, skewed compensation structures, and largely ineffective management, not to mention a whole lotta personal dysfunction. The typical contemporary university is nobody’s idea of a good business model, a satisfying workplace, or a solid bet for long-term future success. It shouldn’t surprise us that women abandon this model in droves. The question we ought to be asking ourselves is, why are men sticking with it in greater numbers than should rationally be expected?
Certainly, there are any number of advantages presented to men by the typical academic model — we created it in our own image, after all. Head and shoulders above all these benefits is the time- and effort-based pricing and reward system. Men continue to shoulder much less of the burden of family and household care than women do, giving them more time to devote to the university. And since time is the currency of academic success and the measure of dedication, it’s no wonder that men find the environment attractive and rewarding in that regard. The mystery is why we put up with all the other unpleasant, unresponsive and dehumanizing aspects of the model. Why do we accept and endorse a system that delivers exactly one benefit to us at the cost of so many other disadvantages to us, to our erstwhile female colleagues, and especially, to our research?
These contentions underlie my larger thesis: in the medium- to long-term, women will flood into science, but not because the profession or firms themselves have made various “accommodations” (a dangerous and ultimately demeaning word) to the standard model for women. It will be because that model itself will sink entirely beneath the waves of change, replaced by new approaches that more closely resemble modern business practices. My impression is that women are already a growing and increasingly potent force in modern solo practices, where they can make their own rules. The “solo” ethic will, as time goes on, start to spread to larger enterprises.
Inevitably, and especially with the advent of participation in the market, academia will lose their 19th-century trappings. They will cease to be clubs of privilege and start to be engines of value and productivity. And very shortly afterwards, not by coincidence, they will start to benefit from an influx of the amazing female talent they have been rejecting for decades. Five years ago, I wrote about an “Moneyball” approach to building groups that recognized and capitalized on the ridiculous undervaluation of women: our destination is a system in which that undervaluation comes to an end.
This will not happen overnight; but the current model is inarguably unsustainable, and when it finally falls away, real shifts in the gender mix should be one of the primary unlooked-for benefits. We can best prepare ourselves for that outcome by hastening the fall of the old model — and by considering the distinct possibility that women, far from constituting a “problem” to be “fixed,” have actually been pointing us in the right direction all this time.
Here is the original text. Do you think his point applies to science?
