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The Motherhood Crunch: Worse for Scientists?

In which sector do women have it worst? According to a new report by economist Sylvia Hewlett and her co-authors, science comes out looking bad as usual, this time in the private sector. Women are 41 percent of entry-level hires in science, technology, and engineering firms. But 52 percent of them leave. Hewlett, the founder-director of the Center for Work-Life Policy, points out that women's careers stall out somewhat more between the ages of of 35 and 44. (That's when 46 percent of women leave these jobs, as opposed to 40 percent between the ages of 25 and 34, and 40 percent between 45 and 60.)

The timing of the drop-off matches the findings of Mary Ann Mason, former graduate dean at UC-Berkeley, about women with kids in academia. Mason shows in her book Mothers on the Fast Track that mothers more often leak out of the pipeline to tenure after they get their Ph.D.s, and when they come up for associate professor, than when it's time for the tenure decision. It's that 30s and early-40s crunch, when jobs are most demanding and so are kids, if you have them. Mason asked science postdocs, who tend to be in their 30s, about whether they were thinking of leaving the field. Fifty-nine percent of women with children said yes, compared to 39 percent of men with children and 39 percent of single women without children. Those numbers look at lot like Hewlett's drop-out figures.

Hewlett thinks women are tripped up in science, tech, and engineering by the usual suspects: an entrenched sexist culture, the demand to work extreme hours, lack of support, etc. Of the 1,493 women she surveyed (along with 1,000 men), 63 percnet said they'd experienced sexual harassment. Men and women complain at nearly the same rates that they're isolated and lack mentors, but women are substantially more likely to say that the path to career advancement is mysterious, and to worry over juggling work and family (that last stat is 57 percent of women vs. 14 percent of men). Hewlett makes a strong pitch that companies can address all of this—and that rather than chasing workers from around the globe, they should, especially since this is a sector of the economy that's still growing. Her accounts of model programs makes you think that if a firm just makes it clear that it cares about retaining women, it can. Hewlett also found that it doesn't take that much: If a mere 10 percent of women are managers, for example, "all the key variables change dramatically."