Where are all the female PhD’s going?
Originally published at jkparker.ca. Please leave any comments there.
A study from the National Institute of Health in the U.S. says that many women spend 10-15 years getting advanced education, only to leave academia due to family responsibility and low confidence.
Although women comprise nearly half of all undergraduate, graduate and postdoctoral scientists nationwide, after committing 10 to 15 years to scientific training, many leave academic research during the career transition to faculty or tenured positions. For example, at the NIH, only 29 percent of the tenure-track principal investigators (PI) and 19 percent of tenured PIs - the NIH equivalent of assistant and full professors, respectively - are women. These figures have hardly changed over the last decade and mirror the disparities at most academic research institutions.
Where are all the women going? Are they choosing less stressful jobs? Becoming stay-at-home moms? I am curious how this plays out in Computer Science, in particular. Unlike the natural sciences, the percentage of female graduate students in Computer Science is nowhere near 50%.