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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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CBS 11: Marital Tension Disturbs The Family Bond

Spouses admit that when conflict and tension arise between one another, their relationships with their children suffer.

SMU, Kouros, Marital Conflict, CBS

Local CBS 11 News has covered the research of psychology expert Chrystyna Kouros, assistant professor in the SMU Department of Psychology.

Chrystyna Kouros focuses on understanding depressive symptoms and depression in the context of family stress.

One line of her research focuses on the etiology, maintenance, and progression of child and adolescent depression, and how symptoms change over time. She has a particular interest in the effects of children’s exposure to everyday marital conflict and parental psychopathology.

CBS 11 reviewed the research of Chyrstyna Kouros concerning how marital disputes can damage the relationship between parent and child in the article “Study: Marital Tension Disturbs The Family Bond,” which published Aug. 29.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By CBS 11
A new study from researchers at Southern Methodist Universityfound that arguments between couples may negatively impact bonds between children and parents.

Researchers discovered that when parents reported higher tension levels or conflict in their marriage, the interaction with their child, during that time, was also greatly strained. This was more commonly experienced in fathers, who pushed greater amounts of stress onto relationships in family life, according to the study.
Overall mothers were more likely to compartmentalize issues than fathers in a bad marriage.

Read the full story.

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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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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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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.

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Inside Higher Ed: NSF Aims For Family Friendly Science

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.

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The Atlantic: Being a College Professor Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be

The Atlantic has covered the research of SMU’s Anne Lincoln, an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology. The article “Being a College Professor Isn’t All It’s Cracked Up to Be” was published Aug. 10 in the online edition of the The Atlantic.

Lincoln’s study 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.

Read the full story.

EXCERPT:

By John Hudson
The Atlantic

Though it consistently ranks as one of the most desired professions in the country, being a college professor isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Sure, professors have reduced summer hours, have flexible schedules, and their kids get discounted tuition, but according to a new study by sociologists Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University and Anne Lincoln of Southern Methodist University, the job’s got a number of hidden downsides. Here’s what they found and here’s what they missed in their examination of the great ivory tower occupation.

It’s bad for fathers
The sociologists’ study, as reported by The Wall Street Journal, noted that men, in particular, were more dissatisfied with their work-and-family lives than women and that “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.” Dr. Ecklund adds that “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.”

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.

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Wall Street Journal: Is Science Incompatible With Family?

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.

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Time: Scientists — “We want more children”

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.

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Many top US scientists wish they had more children, with men especially dissatisfied

25 percent of scientists consider leaving the profession for family life

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, according to a new study by Rice University and Southern Methodist University (SMU).

The study, “Scientists Want More Children,” was authored by sociologists Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University, Houston, and Anne Lincoln of Southern Methodist University, Dallas, and appears in the current issue of the journal PLoS ONE.

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.

“In short, academic science careers are tough on family life because of the long hours and the pressure of publishing and grant-getting needed to get tenure,” Ecklund said.

Survey data from more than 30 research universities and 2,500 scientists indicated that twice as many women (45.4 percent) as men (24.5 percent) reported that they had fewer children than they wanted as a result of having a career in science, Ecklund said. The researchers expected to find that women would be harder hit by this reality than men. However, when they did more analysis, they 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.

“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,” Ecklund said.

The study also provides insight into the impact of family factors on the projected career track for those just entering the profession. Among junior scientists (graduate students and postdoctoral fellows), a greater proportion of women than men worry that a science career will prevent them from having a family. When surveying graduate students, the researchers found that 29 percent of women but only 7 percent of men worry that a science career will keep them from having a family.

“It is not surprising that by the time scientists reach the postdoctoral level, women are much less likely than men to report considering a tenure-track academic job at a research university,” Lincoln said.

Ecklund and Lincoln also confirmed earlier work done on family life and science careers. They found that in contrast to men (11.5 percent), a greater proportion of women (15 percent) were dissatisfied with their roles as faculty members. Both men and women with children work fewer hours than those without children. But Ecklund and Lincoln said they were surprised to find that women with children do not work fewer hours than men with children (54.5 hours for women vs. 53.9 hours for men).

The study also shows that about 25 percent of both men and women are likely to consider a career outside of science entirely due to what is perceived as constraints on their family lives because of their science careers.

“Graduate students who have had fewer children than desired are 21 percent more likely to report considering a career outside science, and postdoctoral fellows are 29 percent more likely to report the same interest,” Lincoln said. “Having had fewer children than desired due to a science career is the only factor that predicts seeking a career outside science.”

Data for the study was collected from the nation’s top 20 Ph.D. programs in astronomy, biology and physics. The programs were ranked by the National Research Council (1995) and correlated with the rankings of U.S. News & World Report (2008).

“This study has particularly important implications for early career scientists at top research universities, those who will guide the future of science in the U.S.,” Ecklund said. “Given these findings, universities would do well to re-evaluate how family-friendly their policies are.”

For example, the researchers said that top universities might leverage additional resources to help foster scientists’ work-family balance, such as providing on-site day care. “Mentoring programs — for both men and women — may need to focus more on how to balance academic science work with family life,” Ecklund said. — Rice University

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British Veterinary Association journal: Sex and the profession

Veterinary Record, the journal of the British Veterinary Association, covers the research of SMU sociologist Anne E. Lincoln in which she explains the changing face of veterinary medicine.

An assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at SMU, Lincoln is an expert on how occupations transition from being either male- or female-dominated.

The article notes that Lincoln’s research has found that women now dominate the field of veterinary medicine — the result of a nearly 40-year trend that is likely to repeat itself in the fields of medicine and law. Lincoln found three factors that appear to be driving the change: the 1972 federal amendment that outlaws discrimination against female students; male applicants to graduate schools who may be deterred by a growing number of women enrolling; and the increasing number of women earning Bachelor’s degrees in numbers that far exceed those of male graduates, Lincoln says.

Read the full story.

Excerpt:

Veterinary Record
WHAT accounts for the increasing proportion of women in the veterinary profession, and does it actually matter?

These are not new questions, but they are worth revisiting in the light of a report in the Journal of the American Veterinary Association this month. In the USA, as in the UK, the gender balance of the veterinary profession has changed dramatically over the past 30 to 40 years; having previously been very much in the minority, women now make up about 50 per cent of the profession, and the proportion is set to rise further given that women account for nearly 80 per cent of students at veterinary school. The report describes a study undertaken in the USA by Anne Lincoln, a sociologist at the Southern Methodist University in Dallas, which tried to find out why this has been happening.

Using data provided by the Association of American Veterinary Colleges, Dr Lincoln examined a number of factors that could have affected enrolment to US veterinary colleges between 1975 and 1995. Enrolment of male students fell from 89 per cent in the 1969/70 academic year to 22.4 per cent in 2008/09, with the switch to a female majority occurring around 1987.

The shift to more female students started after 1972, when legislation was introduced in the USA prohibiting discrimination against female students. “I found that, after 1972, when the barriers to entry were dropped, women began enrolling in larger numbers,” Dr Lincoln said. “Male applicants dropped sharply after 1976, the first year that applicant statistics were collected.”

After that, the findings suggested that, in the USA at least, men were put off going to veterinary school by the increasing enrolment of women — a phenomenon Dr Lincoln referred to as ‘pre-emptive flight’. “There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools,” she said. “So perhaps a young male student says he is going to visit a veterinary medical school, and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That is what the findings indicate.”

The study found no evidence that men were more concerned about the cost of tuition and salaries. “There has always been this notion for any field that feminises that women don’t care about salaries because they have a husband’s earnings to fall back on,” Dr Lincoln said. “But this study found that men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries.” She also noted that, in the USA, where veterinary medicine is a postgraduate degree, “fewer men than women are graduating with a Bachelor’s degree, so they aren’t applying because they don’t have the prerequisites.”

Read the full story.

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Gender gap: Selection bias snubs scholarly achievements of female scientists with fewer awards for research

Scientist%2C%20Lincoln%2Csmall.jpg

Analysis shows that female scientists win fewer awards for their research, more often for service and teaching

Women scientists must confront sexism when competing for scholarly awards, according to a new analysis.

Research funded by the National Science Foundation and sponsored by the Association for Women in Science found that female scientists win service or teaching awards in proportion to the number of women in the PhD pool for their discipline, says sociologist Anne Lincoln at Southern Methodist University. That’s not the case, however, for awards for their research, says Lincoln, one of three authors on the analysis, which was reported in Nature.

The number of women who win scholarly awards is far fewer, the authors report.

“Using data in the public domain on 13 disciplinary societies, we found that the proportion of female prizewinners in 10 of these was much lower than the proportion of female full professors in each discipline,” the authors write.

Why the gap? Lincoln, an assistant professor in the SMU Sociology Department, and her co-authors point to the award selection process.

An analysis of selection practices found that selection committees carry out their duties with few guidelines, minimal oversight and little attention to conflict-of-interest issues, the authors write. The researchers’ investigation found that the chances a woman will win an award for her research improve if a woman is serving on the committee. The analysis found, however, that many committees have no female members, that few have female chairs, and there are few female nominees, said the authors.

Nomination letters for women typically include personal details and contain stereotypically female adjectives, such as “cooperative” and “dependable,” the authors report in the article.

“Notices soliciting nominations, by contrast, tend to use language that fosters male images, such as ‘decisive’ or ‘confident,'” they say.

Co-authors were Stephanie H. Pincus, founder of the RAISE Project, sponsored by the Society for Women’s Health Research; and biochemist Phoebe S. Leboy at the University of Pennsylvania and past president of the Association for Women in Science.

Seven U.S. science societies are working now with the Association for Women in Science and using the findings to change selection committee practices, say the authors. — Margaret Allen

SMU is a private university in Dallas where nearly 11,000 students benefit from the national opportunities and international reach of SMU’s 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 Dr. Lincoln or to book her in the SMU studio, call SMU News & Communications at 214-768-7650.

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AVMA: Study seeks to explain feminization of veterinary profession

A Dec. 15 article on the web site of the American Veterinary Medical Association covers the research of SMU sociologist Anne E. Lincoln in which she explains the changing face of veterinary medicine.

An assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at SMU, Lincoln is an expert on how occupations transition from being either male- or female-dominated.

AVMA writer Malinda Larkin notes that Lincoln’s research has found that women now dominate the field of veterinary medicine — the result of a nearly 40-year trend that is likely to repeat itself in the fields of medicine and law. Lincoln found three factors that appear to be driving the change: the 1972 federal amendment that outlaws discrimination against female students; male applicants to graduate schools who may be deterred by a growing number of women enrolling; and the increasing number of women earning Bachelor’s degrees in numbers that far exceed those of male graduates, Lincoln says.

Read the full story.

Excerpt:

By Malinda Larkin
American Veterinary Medical Association

The fact that women will soon dominate the field of veterinary medicine has been widely reported (see JAVMA, Feb. 15, 2010, page 376). As of 2010, the veterinary profession is about 50 percent men and 50 percent women for the first time, according to AVMA figures, while enrollment in veterinary colleges is about 80 percent women.

Yet, the cause behind this increase in the percentage of female veterinarians isn’t as well known. Recently, a sociologist at Southern Methodist University in Dallas endeavored to find an answer.

Anne E. Lincoln, PhD, is an assistant professor in the department of sociology at SMU and an expert on how occupations transition from being male- or female-dominated.

Her study, “The Shifting Supply of Men and Women to Occupations: Feminization in Veterinary Education,” was published in the July 2010 issue of Social Forces.

Dr. Lincoln analyzed “the feminization of veterinary medicine” from a different perspective: by examining data from the pool of applicants to U.S. veterinary schools and colleges from 1975-1995. (After 1995, veterinary schools implemented varying application procedures, making comparisons unreliable.) The Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges supplied data from its annual, confidential survey of all U.S. veterinary schools and colleges for the study.

Conventional occupational research identifies a flip in the gender make-up of a profession by looking at the number of men and women who get hired into that profession, Dr. Lincoln said. Her study broke with that convention, and, instead, measured the number of men and women applying for enrollment in training programs.

Read the full story.

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Toronto Star: Male students getting rare as hen’s teeth at Ontario Veterinary College

A Nov. 27 article in the Toronto Star newspaper cites the research of SMU sociologist Anne E. Lincoln in which she explains the changing face of veterinary medicine.

An assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at SMU, Lincoln is an expert on how occupations transition from being either male- or female-dominated.

Toronto Star journalist Leslie Scrivener notes that Lincoln’s research has found that women now dominate the field of veterinary medicine — the result of a nearly 40-year trend that is likely to repeat itself in the fields of medicine and law. Lincoln found three factors that appear to be driving the change: the 1972 federal amendment that outlaws discrimination against female students; male applicants to graduate schools who may be deterred by a growing number of women enrolling; and the increasing number of women earning Bachelor’s degrees in numbers that far exceed those of male graduates, Lincoln says.

Read the full story.

Excerpt:

By Leslie Scrivener
Toronto Star

At this time of year, as Elizabeth Lowenger scouts out new students for the venerable Ontario Veterinary College, she eyes candidates with good marks — usually the mid-80s.

Among those high achievers she’s particularly interested in are those who for generations were the mainstay of veterinary medicine and now are rare as white horses — men.

She makes sure there are images of men on recruitment pamphlets and videos. When choosing students to speak on behalf of the college at high school career days, she ensures that men are included. “Everything I do has to have a male on it, but not exclusively,” says Lowenger, diversity and careers coordinator for the oldest veterinary college in Canada and the United States. “We have to make sure that they can say, ‘I can see myself there.’ ”

That might be a problem these days. Of the 114 students who entered the Doctor of Veterinary Medicine program at the Guelph campus this fall, 87 per cent are women. The dean is also a woman, while the faculty is about 60 per cent male.

The feminization of veterinary medicine, as researchers call it, is not lost on practitioners. “It’s gotten so it’s like the last of the Mohicans out there,” says one woman veterinarian. “You occasionally work with a male.”

The gender disparity has evolved over decades.

Dr. John Reeve-Newson still remembers how an assistant dean targeted the handful of women students in a discouraging “welcome” address at the college in 1960.

It went something like: “Ladies, I don’t think you should be here and I will do everything in my power to see that you don’t stay.”

How did he intend to achieve that, one might wonder.

“Ride their ass,” recalls Reeve-Newson, a Toronto veterinarian with a Mutual Street practice.

By 1971, when Dr. Jiggs Gough of Mount Brydges, Ont., graduated from the college, she was one of eight women. “They were aghast,” she says of the administration. “They thought the place was going to the rats.”

Things at veterinary schools have shifted dramatically in 40 years, and those changes reflect shifts in society at large. Lowenger says statistics show fewer men are going to university — more than 60 per cent of university graduates are women. Men still want to go to vet school, she contends, but fewer of them are studying science, and women are outperforming them.

More women than men are graduating in other professions. Sixty per cent of the youngest lawyers in Ontario are women, and nearly 60 per cent of the 2010 graduates from the University of Toronto’s Faculty of Medicine are women.

Men tend to avoid professions that are dominated by women, argues Anne Lincoln, a professor of sociology at Southern Methodist University, adding that veterinary medicine was once the most male-dominated profession in the U.S. Until 1972, she reports, Cornell University capped women’s enrolment in veterinary medicine at two per year.

“There’s something about the presence of women (in the classroom) that serves as a deterrent,” she says in a phone interview. Her research, reported in the July issue of the journal Social Forces, notes that for every one per cent increase in women in veterinary college, about 1.7 fewer men apply the following year.

Read the full story.

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Veterinary medicine shifts to more women, fewer men; pattern will repeat in medicine, law fields

Women now dominate the field of veterinary medicine — the result of a nearly 40-year trend that is likely to repeat itself in the fields of medicine and law.

That’s the conclusion of a new study that found three factors that appear to be driving the change: the 1972 federal amendment that outlaws discrimination against female students; male applicants to graduate schools who may be deterred by a growing number of women enrolling; and the increasing number of women earning Bachelor’s degrees in numbers that far exceed those of male graduates, says sociologist Anne E. Lincoln.

An assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Southern Methodist University in Dallas, Lincoln is an expert on how occupations transition from being either male- or female-dominated.

Her study is the first of its kind to analyze the feminization of veterinary medicine from the perspective of examining the pool of applicant data to U.S. veterinary medical colleges from 1975 to 1995, Lincoln said.

As of 2010, the veterinary profession is about 50 percent men and 50 percent women, according to the American Veterinary Medical Association, while enrollment in veterinary medical colleges is about 80 percent women.

Departure from convention; new methodology
Conventional occupational research identifies a flip in the gender make-up of a profession by looking at the number of men and women who get hired into that profession, Lincoln said. The current study broke with that convention and instead measured the number of male and female applicants to veterinary medical colleges.

In looking at the applicants for each year, the study controlled for variables that could be a factor: class size, proportion of women on faculty, proportion of women in the classroom, increased tuition and declines in the profession’s average salary. Lincoln found no evidence that any of those factors was statistically significant in explaining why more women than men are applying, she said.

By quantifying the number of men and women attempting to enter veterinary medical colleges the study could determine whether feminization is caused by gender bias in the acceptance process. Lincoln found no evidence of acceptance bias.

Study finds preemptive flight; challenges long-held notions about women
“There was really only one variable where I found an effect, and that was the proportion of women already enrolled in vet med schools,” Lincoln said. “So perhaps a young male student says he’s going to visit a veterinary medical school, and when he sees a classroom with a lot of women he changes his choice of graduate school. That’s what the findings indicate.”

The study puts to rest the long-held notion that men are more concerned than women about the cost of tuition and salaries when choosing a professional field, according to Lincoln.

“There’s always been this notion for any field that feminizes that women don’t care about salaries because they have a husband’s earnings to fall back on,” Lincoln said. “But this study found that men and women are equally affected by tuition and salaries, and that what’s really driving feminization of the field is what I call ‘preemptive flight’ — men not applying because of women’s increasing enrollment. Also, fewer men than women are graduating with a Bachelor’s degree, so they aren’t applying because they don’t have the prerequisites.”

The U.S. Department of Education’s National Center for Education Statistics reports that for the academic year 1980-81, the number of men and women earning Bachelor’s degrees was about the same, around 460,000. From that year on, however, the number of women earning a Bachelor’s increased much faster than the number of men. For 2009-10, 811,000 women earned Bachelor’s degrees, compared to 562,000 men.

First study of its kind to look at college applicant data
Lincoln’s findings are reported online in “The Shifting Supply of Men and Women to Occupations: Feminization in Veterinary Education” in the international journal Social Forces. For a link to the journal abstract and more information, see www.smuresearch.com.

The Association of American Veterinary Medical Colleges made available data from its annual, confidential survey of all U.S. veterinary medical colleges for Lincoln to analyze.

The data represented the applications to each of the 27 veterinary medical colleges in existence in the United States from 1975 to 1995. After 1995, veterinary schools implemented substantially different application procedures, making comparisons between pre- and post-1995 data unviable for this study.

Title IX removed barriers to women in vet med
In 1960, the U.S. Census reported that the field of veterinary medicine was 98 percent male, Lincoln found. For the academic year 1969-70, the national average for veterinary medical college male enrollment was 89 percent.

Veterinary medicine began to shift after the 1972 passage of Title IX, the federal amendment that prohibits discrimination against female students. The amendment forever altered the way vet med colleges responded to female applicants, Lincoln said.

“I found that after 1972, when the barriers to entry were dropped, women began enrolling in larger numbers,” Lincoln said. “Male applicants dropped sharply after 1976, the first year that applicant statistics were collected.”

Vet med shifts in 50 years from 98 percent male to 50-50
By 2008-09, the national average for veterinary medicine male enrollment had declined to 22.4 percent. Cornell University’s enrollment, for example, is currently more than 80 percent female, according to the American Association of Veterinary Medical Colleges.

“It’s really remarkable that in the past 50 years the pendulum has swung the other direction. Today the profession is 50-50,” she said. “It takes time for the men to cycle out. But because the number of women enrolled has been greater than the number of men since 1984, there’s been a wave of women entering the profession.”

“That’s why this study is really pushing the boundaries,” Lincoln said. “This is an occupation that is changing even as I analyze it, so I can watch it as it’s changing. Indications are that it will continue to shift even further toward women, beyond the current 50-50.”

Feminization likely for law, medicine professions
The same phenomenon likely will be seen in coming years in the male-dominated fields of medicine and law, given the increasing numbers of women now entering those fields.

“We can use veterinary medicine as a predictor of what is going to happen in medicine and law,” Lincoln said. “It may take 27 years for medicine and law to become gender-integrated. The pharmacist profession earlier experienced this ‘occupational jostling.’ It takes decades for a profession to feminize because an occupation that is mostly male is going to have generational turnover as the more senior practitioners retire.” — Margaret Allen

SMU has an uplink facility 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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Inside Higher Ed: Having fewer children hits male scientists hard, finds Anne Lincoln research

Inside Higher Ed covered the research of SMU sociologist Anne Lincoln in an Aug. 16 article “Parenthood Gaps and Premiums.”

Lincoln presented the research in mid-August at the annual meeting of the American Sociological Association.

The research, which Lincoln conducted with Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University, examined physicists and biologists in academic careers and various aspects surrounding their marital and family status, including satisfaction with the number of children they have. The study was based on a survey of faculty members at the 20 top-ranked graduate programs in both physics and biology, according to the article.

The publication noted: “Why are some disciplines more successful than others at attracting female faculty members and having them rise through the ranks? After decades of discussion of gender equity in the professoriate, increasing attention is going to the phenomenon that disciplinary patterns differ — both in attracting a critical mass of women and in their satisfaction levels.”

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.

Also covering the research:

EXCERPTParenthood Gaps and Premiums“:

While men are in the majority for both fields, women make up 43 percent of biologists in the departments and only 20 percent of the physicists. The men and women in the study differed in key family characteristics. Men were more likely to be married (83 percent vs. 72 percent) while women were more likely to be divorced (22 percent vs. 16 percent). Men had only slightly more children than did women in the two fields, with men having an average of just over two children, and women just under two.

While the gap in numbers of children was small, attitudes about children and careers were notably different. Of the women in the survey, 45 percent said they had fewer children than they would have liked because of their scientific careers. Only 24 percent of men felt that way. While the numbers show that these regrets are much more prevalent among women, the authors of the paper wrote that they found the male regrets to be “striking.” In fact, the title they gave to their presentation was “Male Scientists Want to Be Fathers.”

Read “Parenthood Gaps and Premiums.”

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Gender gap at top U.S. universities for women scientists

Lincoln2.jpgAccording to the National Research Council in 2006, women earned 44.7 percent of the doctorates awarded in the biological sciences between 1993 and 2004. Yet women comprised only 30.2 percent of the assistant professors at the top 50 U.S. universities.

In physics, the gap is far wider. Anne Lincoln, assistant professor of sociology in SMU’s Dedman College, is researching the reasons for the gender disparities.

In September Lincoln received a three-year grant from the National Science Foundation’s Research on Gender in Science and Engineering program.

Lincoln will examine women’s and men’s reasons for pursuing academic science careers as well as their perceptions about women’s contributions to academic science.

Lincoln and a team of four sociology undergraduate students are nearing the completion of the sampling database. They have been preparing a list of all faculty and graduates students at top-20 biology and physics graduate departments in the United States. From that they will randomly select 2,500 to participate in an Internet-based survey.

ecklund.jpgA subsample of about 150 respondents will later be selected for more in-depth interviews, which will take place in 2009.

“In 2010, we will be wrapping up the study and mostly running analyses on the data,” she says.

Lincoln’s co-investigator is Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University.

In addition to expanding recent scholarly findings related to the role perceptions have in the decision to pursue a career in academic science, Lincoln’s research is expected to provide the “necessary research underpinnings to build university policies and practices that encourage women’s interest in science majors and careers.”

Related links:
Anne Lincoln
Elaine Howard Ecklund
SMU Department of Sociology
National Research Council
Dedman College of Humanities and Sciences