Tag: SMU Department of Sociology

Culture, Society & Family Researcher news

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

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date August 8, 2011

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

Tags Anne E. Lincoln, SMU Department of Sociology

Culture, Society & Family Researcher news SMU In The News

British Veterinary Association journal: Sex and the profession

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date February 18, 2011

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.

Tags Anne E. Lincoln, SMU Department of Sociology

Culture, Society & Family

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

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date February 17, 2011

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.

Tags Anne E. Lincoln, Dedman College, SMU Department of Sociology

Culture, Society & Family Health & Medicine Learning & Education Researcher news SMU In The News

AVMA: Study seeks to explain feminization of veterinary profession

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date January 14, 2011

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.

Tags Anne E. Lincoln, SMU Department of Sociology

Culture, Society & Family Health & Medicine Learning & Education Researcher news SMU In The News

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

Post author By Margaret Allen
Post date November 29, 2010

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.

Tags Anne E. Lincoln, SMU Department of Sociology

25 percent of scientists consider leaving the profession for family life

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news

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

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news

Book a live interview

Related links

More SMU Research news