women in science and academia
New York Times article on female scientists in academia. (Thanks for the link, Kathleen!) Also, the National Academy of Sciences recently published a report on barriers encountered by women in science and engineering in research universities. One thing I found particularly interesting was the observation that around 90 percent of married female science and engineering faculty have spouses that are employed full time, whereas the percentage for male faculty is less than 50 percent.
December 25th, 2006 at 6:24 am
Were numbers (90% and 50%) based on only staff with spouses (i.e. were single males part of the
December 25th, 2006 at 7:46 am
Patrick, sorry about that — my post wasn’t very well written. (I’ve now added the word “married” to make it clearer.) The article summary says, “About 90% of the spouses of women science and engineering faculty are employed full-time; close to half the spouses of male faculty also work full-time.”
December 27th, 2006 at 6:15 am
Thanks for mentioning this topic. I am not surprised by the difference in the percentage of “employed spouses”. From my (humble) observation, the wives of older male faculty members tend to be homemakers. Only the very energetic wives are working.
(Note: The New York Time article is not accessible without signing up.)
December 30th, 2006 at 7:10 pm
the difference is probably a mixture of historical reasons, and because women are more interested in children than the hard sciences in general