Tag: Anne E. Lincoln

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To book a live or taped interview with Anne Lincoln in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

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• Inside Higher Ed: Having fewer children hits male scientists hard, finds Anne Lincoln research
• Anne Lincoln
• Anne Lincoln research
• SMU Department of Sociology
• Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences

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Inside Higher Ed cites the research of SMU’s Anne Lincoln in a Sept. 27 article announcing new efforts by the National Science Foundation to make research grants more accessible to scientists who want to have children.

The move by the NSF is an effort to stem the tide of female scientists fleeing the fields of science, technology, engineering and math when forced to choose between their career and motherhood.

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

Lincoln found that nearly half of all women scientists and one-quarter of male scientists at the nation’s top research universities said their career has kept them from having as many children as they had wanted.

The study, “Scientists Want More Children,” appeared in the journal PLoS ONE. Lincoln authored the study with sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University, Houston.

For the past three years, Ecklund and Lincoln have been studying what junior and senior scientists in physics, astronomy and biology think about discrimination, family life and the state of their careers. They found that both men and women say having a science career means they will have fewer children than they wanted. They also found that women were actually more satisfied with their lives than were men. And having fewer children than wanted has a more pronounced effect on life satisfaction for male scientists.

Read the full story at Inside Higher Ed.

EXCERPT:

By Scott Jaschik
Inside Higher Ed
Just last month, researchers at Rice and Southern Methodist Universities released a study showing that female scientists were twice as likely as their male counterparts to regret not having more children. Further, these regrets were seen as prompting some female grad students and postdocs to consider leaving academic science.

On Monday, the National Science Foundation announced a series of new policies designed to make the agency’s grant-making policies reflect support for those trying to balance parenthood with research careers. White House officials said that the goal of the effort was to promote change not only at the NSF, but throughout research universities, with the aim over 10 years of raising the percentage of tenure-track faculty in STEM fields who are women (about 28 percent) to their representation among new STEM Ph.D.s (about 40 percent).

John P. Holdren, director of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy, said at a news briefing that the policy changes will help both fathers and mothers, but that “it is much more common for women to give up STEM careers” than it is for men, and that the shifts are designed to prevent those departures.

Specifically, the NSF will:

• Allow postponement for one year of grants because of childbirth or adoption.
• Allow grant suspension for parental leave.
• Provide supplementary funds to cover the cost of hiring research technicians to maintain laboratories when grant recipients are on family leave.
• Permit those serving on peer review panels to meet with their colleagues virtually, rather than in person, to reduce child-care needs created by travel.
• Fund more research on the effectiveness of policies that are designed to keep women in the science pipeline.

At the same time, the White House announced a series of related efforts by non-governmental groups. The Association for Women in Science is starting a new campaign to bring representatives of government, industry and academe together to discuss ways that work places can promote training, re-entry and retraining of women for science jobs. The Association of American Universities and the Association of Public and Land-grant Universities pledged to find ways to “promote more flexible work and learning environments for those in STEM and other disciplines.”

Read the full story at Inside Higher Ed.

Book a live interview

To book a live or taped interview with Anne Lincoln in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

Related links

• Inside Higher Ed: Having fewer children hits male scientists hard, finds Anne Lincoln research
• Anne Lincoln
• Anne Lincoln research
• SMU Department of Sociology
• Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences

More SMU Research news

Out-of-the-blue panic attacks aren’t without warning — body sends signals for hour before

New Texas Native: 96-million-year-old croc alters origins from Europe to North America

Physical activity a buffer for those at-risk for panic attacks

Mothers’ self-recorded audio gives real-time view of spanking

The Wall Street Journal has covered the research of SMU’s Anne Lincoln, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. The article “Is Science Incompatible With Family?” was published Aug. 9 in the online edition of the WSJ.

The research found that nearly half of all women scientists and one-quarter of male scientists at the nation’s top research universities said their career has kept them from having as many children as they had wanted.

The study, “Scientists Want More Children,” appears in the current issue of the journal PLoS ONE. Lincoln authored the study with sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University, Houston.

For the past three years, Ecklund and Lincoln have been studying what junior and senior scientists in physics, astronomy and biology think about discrimination, family life and the state of their careers. They found that both men and women say having a science career means they will have fewer children than they wanted. They also found that women were actually more satisfied with their lives than were men. And having fewer children than wanted has a more pronounced effect on life satisfaction for male scientists.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Rachel Silverman
The Wall Street Journal
Academia has always seemed like an attractive fit for a working parent, with its long summer vacations, flexible teaching and research hours and the possibility of life-long job security with tenure

But academia isn’t as family-friendly as it may seem. For one thing, as we’ve discussed, the timing of tenure is particularly tough for working mothers because tenure is often decided during peak childbearing years. Now a new study finds that academia isn’t a paradise for working fathers either, at least in the sciences.

Nearly half of all female scientists and one-quarter of male scientists at the nation’s top research universities said their career has kept them from having as many children as they had wanted. That’s according to a new study, “Scientists Want More Children,” by sociologists Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University and Anne Lincoln of Southern Methodist University (SMU), and published in the current issue of the journal PLoS ONE.

Survey data from more than 30 research universities and 2,500 scientists in physics, astronomy and biology, found that both women and men reported they had fewer children than they wanted as a result of having a career in science. The researchers found that long hours and the pressure of getting grants and publishing papers to make tenure, made academic science careers tough on family life.

When the researchers did more analysis, they found that women were actually more satisfied with their work-and-family lives than men. “The fact that having fewer children than desired has a greater impact on men’s life satisfaction is an important finding because most research on the relationship between family life and pursuing a career in science has focused almost exclusively on the lives of women,” said Rice’s Ecklund.

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 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.

Book a live interview

To book a live or taped interview with Anne Lincoln in the SMU News Broadcast Studio call News and Communications at 214-768-7650 or email news@smu.edu.

Related links

• Inside Higher Ed: Having fewer children hits male scientists hard, finds Anne Lincoln research
• Anne Lincoln
• Anne Lincoln research
• SMU Department of Sociology
• Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences

More SMU Research news

Out-of-the-blue panic attacks aren’t without warning — body sends signals for hour before

New Texas Native: 96-million-year-old croc alters origins from Europe to North America

Physical activity a buffer for those at-risk for panic attacks

Science journalist Tara Thean has covered the research of SMU’s Anne Lincoln, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. The article “Scientists: We want more children” was published Aug. 9 in the online edition of Time.

The research found that nearly half of all women scientists and one-quarter of male scientists at the nation’s top research universities said their career has kept them from having as many children as they had wanted.

The study, “Scientists Want More Children,” appears in the current issue of the journal PLoS ONE. Lincoln authored the study with sociologist Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University, Houston.

For the past three years, Ecklund and Lincoln have been studying what junior and senior scientists in physics, astronomy and biology think about discrimination, family life and the state of their careers. They found that both men and women say having a science career means they will have fewer children than they wanted. They also found that women were actually more satisfied with their lives than were men. And having fewer children than wanted has a more pronounced effect on life satisfaction for male scientists.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By Tara Thean
Time.com
We Ecocentric writers have the privilege of constant exposure to the most cutting-edge science research around — we’ve written about sexy birds, Arctic oil, paper solar panels, and countless other incarnations of the weird and wonderful. But sometimes it’s easy to overlook the hardworking folks behind these discoveries, and it looks like they’ve had to forget things too: their families. Almost half of all women scientists and a quarter of their male colleagues at the nation’s top research universities — Harvard, Princeton and Stanford among them — feel their careers have prevented them from having as many children as they had wanted, according to research by sociologists at Rice University and Southern Methodist University (SMU).

And the generation following them has noticed: the researchers found that a worrying one in four graduate students and one in five postdoctoral fellows is considering a career entirely outside science, largely because of these perceived limitations. But while this is troubling, it’s hardly surprising. A career in science means committing to the long hours and high stress that come with grant-writing, the pressure to publish, and colleagues who are all smarter than you, or at least scarily competitive. None of these things exactly screams “mom of the year.”

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 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.