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Research: Women hit harder by the pressures of elite academic science

“We find that the fixed view of the ideal scientist has a significant impact on the ability of both women and men to stay in and succeed in academic science.” — Lincoln, Ecklund

Work life in academia might sound like a dream: summers off, year-long sabbaticals, the opportunity to switch between classroom teaching and research. Yet, when it comes to the sciences, life at the top U.S. research universities is hardly idyllic.

Based on surveys of over 2,000 junior and senior scientists, both male and female, as well as in-depth interviews, “Failing Families, Failing Science” examines how the rigors of a career in academic science makes it especially difficult to balance family and work.

SMU sociologist Anne Lincoln and Rice University sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund paint a nuanced picture that illuminates how gender, individual choices, and university and science infrastructures all play a role in shaping science careers, and how science careers, in turn, shape family life. They argue that both men and women face difficulties, though differently, in managing career and family.

“We spoke with graduate students and postdoctoral fellows about their professional and personal aspirations — their thoughts about entering academic science, as well as the struggles they face in trying to obtain an academic science position while starting a family,” write the authors. “We spoke with those who have ‘made it’ in science by obtaining positions as professors, asking them about the hardships they face as they try to balance devotion to work and family, and what kinds of strategies they use to overcome the difficulties. We also examined their potential to change the institutional infrastructure of science. Through our interviews, we were able to dig into some deeper issues.”

Numerous women the authors interviewed indicated they had to hide the fact they had children until they were confirmed for tenure, said the authors.

But they also found that family issues had an impact on career, and were a cause of concern, for men also.

” … many of those who are parents noted that their family commitments often negatively affect their opportunities for career advancement,” write the authors. “They say senior male scientists subtly and overtly sanction them for devoting themselves too much to their families — for example, criticizing them for not being fully devoted to their work when they take time off after the birth of a child.”

While women are hit harder by the pressures of elite academic science, the institution of science—and academic science, in particular—is not accommodating, possibly not even compatible, for either women or men who want to raise families.

Perhaps most importantly, their research reveals that early career academic scientists struggle considerably with balancing their work and family lives. This struggle may prevent these young scientists from pursuing positions at top research universities—or further pursuing academic science at all — a circumstance that comes at great cost to our national science infrastructure. — NYU Press

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Times Higher Education: How work and family life conflict in the modern university

Academic science still operates on assumptions that have failed to catch up with the realities of today’s family lives, argue scholars

Times Higher Education covered the new book of SMU sociologist Anne Lincoln in a Sept. 29 article “How work and family life conflict in the modern university.”

The book, Failing Families, Failing Science (NYU Press, 2016), is based on research Lincoln conducted with Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University. They examined how scientists face a conflict between work and family. The research is based on a survey of faculty members at the 20 top-ranked graduate programs in both physics and biology. The survey of 3,500 biologists and physicists included 184 in-depth interviews.

The study was funded under a grant of the Research on Science and Engineering program of the National Science Foundation to understand the lack of gender diversity in academic science.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT

By Matthew Reisz
Times Higher Education

A new book explores how to “expand the family-friendliness of academic science”.

Failing Families, Failing Science: Work-Family Conflict in Academic Science is based on a survey of close to 3,500 biologists and physicists in top American universities, followed up by 184 in-depth interviews.

“We started out the project interested in women’s experiences, and thought of men as just a comparison group,” says Elaine Howard Ecklund, professor of sociology at Rice University, who co-wrote the book with Anne E. Lincoln, assistant professor of sociology at Southern Methodist University. “We weren’t that interested in studying men. And we were completely wrong!”

Although she points out that “there is much more of a ‘motherhood penalty’ than a ‘fatherhood penalty’” for those forging academic careers, today’s “young men are a lot more like women than older men in the importance they place on family life and the tensions they felt in combining it with a research career”.

Unfortunately, the book suggests, academic science (and particularly male-dominated disciplines such as physics) is still in thrall to the image of “the ideal scientist” – in essence an utterly single-minded “man with a supportive wife who takes care of all his personal matters” – and the notion that, as a source of “ultimate objective truth”, science is “the sort of activity that is worth putting everything else on hold to pursue”.
Failing Families, Failing Science includes many striking testimonies of what this means for individuals.

Read the full story.

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Txchnologist: Are Women’s Scientific Achievements Being Overlooked?

The Txchnologist blog covered the research of SMU sociologist Anne Lincoln.

In a July 5 entry, writer Joseph Castro discusses Lincoln’s latest findings surrounding discrimination against women in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math.

Dubbed “the Mathilda Effect,” Lincoln has shown that women in the STEM areas do not receive the same recognition for their research and achievements as do men in those fields.

In earlier research funded by the National Science Foundation and sponsored by the Association for Women in Science, Lincoln found that female scientists do not win awards for their research in proportion to the number of women in the PhD pool for their discipline.

An assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Lincoln also has done extensive research on how science careers can be incompatible for both women and men who also want to have a family.

Read the full article.

EXCERPT:

By Joseph Castro
Txchnologist

Despite the push in the last decade to close the gender gap in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) fields, women are still vastly underrepresented in these careers. But recent research shows the issue runs deeper than just jobs. Compared to men, women receive far fewer scientific awards and prizes than expected based on their representation in nomination pools.

This disparity, researchers found, is likely due to implicit or unconscious biases against women scientists that begin early in life. Numerous studies of school-aged children have found that when they’re asked to draw a scientist, they overwhelmingly depict an older white man working alone. Researchers have found that these biases can be curbed with education.

“I think counteracting these biases is going to be an ongoing process,” says Anne Lincoln, a sociologist at Southern Methodist University in Texas. “If little boys and girls are still drawing scientists that only look like men, I think that’s an indication this is still an issue.”

In 1968, the late sociologist Robert Merton coined the “Matthew effect,” which describes how famous scientists get more credit for collaborative research than their lesser-known colleagues, even if they took the backseat on a project. Twenty-five years later, science historian Margaret Rossiter noticed a similar thing happening to women scientists, whose work was often credited to men or glossed over completely. She called this sociological phenomenon the “Matilda effect.”

“The idea is that scientists strive to be unbiased and objective,” says Lincoln, who is the lead author of a study published in the April 2012 issue of the journal Social Studies of Science. “But if we’re overlooking scientific discoveries based on gender, that’s not a very scientific practice.”

Read the full article.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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Scientists face barriers to engaging with public, but still participate in outreach

Although scientists face a number of significant barriers to public outreach, some still engage in these activities, especially women and those with children, according to work published May 9 in the open access journal PLoS ONE, “How Academic Biologists and Physicists View Science Outreach.”

The study authors found that having children was positively correlated with participation in outreach activities; most of the activities study participants were involved in targeted school-aged children.

Some of the hurdles academic scientists face include the perceptions that research, not outreach, should be their top priority in their role as academics, and that participating in outreach may hurt their research output. Also, some say that the public’s disinterest or even opposition to learning about science discourages them from trying to engage in this type of outreach.

“These scientists perceive significant barriers to outreach at an individual level, within their institutions, and from the general public,” said study lead author Elaine Ecklund of Rice University in Texas. “And though they think their departments and universities value research productivity over all else, these academic scientists still engage in outreach activities.”

Anne E. Lincoln of Southern Methodist University and Sarah James of Rice University were collaborators in this study. Lincoln is an assistant professor in the SMU Department of Sociology.

The study was conducted with funding from the National Science Foundation.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility located on campus for live TV, radio, or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or book an SMU guest in the studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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Culture, Society & Family Economics & Statistics Researcher news SMU In The News

USA Today: Women scientists lose out on research prizes

USA Today’s “ScienceFair” blog has covered the research of SMU sociologist Anne Lincoln. In a March 13 entry, journalist Dan Vergano writes about Lincoln’s latest findings surrounding discrimination against women in the STEM fields: science, technology, engineering and math. Dubbed “the Mathilda Effect,” Lincoln has shown that women in the STEM areas do not receive the same recognition for their research and achievements as do men in those fields.

In earlier research funded by the National Science Foundation and sponsored by the Association for Women in Science, Lincoln found that female scientists do not win awards for their research in proportion to the number of women in the PhD pool for their discipline.

An assistant professor in the Department of Sociology, Lincoln also has done extensive research on how science careers can be incompatible for both women and men who also want to have a family.

Read the full ScienceFair article.

EXCERPT:

By Dan Vergano
USA Today

Male scientists still receive an outsized number of research awards compared to women, a study finds.

Women are nominated for research prizes just as frequently as men, however unconscious bias and men running prize panels seems to be swaying award outcomes, suggests the study in the current Social Studies of Science journal.

Varying widely by discipline, women receive about 40% of all doctorates in science (around 70% of psychology degrees but less in other fields) and engineering (about 10%), and have long suffered from lower odds of becoming full professors or attaining other markers of prestige in those fields.

“A large body of social science research finds that work done by women is perceived as less important or valuable that that done by men,” begins the study led by sociologist Anne Lincoln of Southern Methodist University in Dallas. In their research, the study authors looked at award patterns from 13 scientific and medical societies from 1991 (206 awards) to 2010 (296 awards).

At first glance, things looked better for women, who won 78% more awards in 2010 compared to two decades earlier. “Closer analysis shows that women continued to win far fewer of the more prestigious scholarly awards than the other types of awards, however – averaging just 10 percent. By comparison, women won 32.2 percent of service awards and 37.1 percent of teaching awards between 2001 and 2010,” says the study.

How come? The study authors found seven math, science and medical societies willing to open their award process for examination.

Read the full story.

SMU is a nationally ranked private university in Dallas founded 100 years ago. Today, SMU enrolls nearly 11,000 students who benefit from the academic opportunities and international reach of seven degree-granting schools. For more information see www.smu.edu.

SMU has an uplink facility on campus for live TV, radio or online interviews. To speak with an SMU expert or to book them in the SMU studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650 or UT Dallas Office of Media Relations at 972-883-4321.