Women in Science
Women in Science
in February 2006; updated September 2014
: One Article
Larry Summers was fired from his job as president of Harvard University
partly for saying the following:
"There are three broad hypotheses about the sources of the very
substantial disparities that this conference's papers document
[percentage of women among tenured professors of science] and have been
documented before with respect to the presence of women in high-end
scientific professions. One is what I would call the-I'll explain each
of these in a few moments and comment on how important I think they
are-the first is what I call the high-powered job hypothesis. The second
is what I would call different availability of aptitude at the high end,
and the third is what I would call different socialization and patterns
of discrimination in a search. And in my own view, their importance
probably ranks in exactly the order that I just described."
This fired up an international debate about whether or not there were
enough women with the towering intellects required to make it as top
scientists and mathematicians, the sorts who would be likely to receive
tenure at elite universities.
Summers was deservedly castigated, but not for the right reasons.
claimed to be giving a comprehensive list of reasons why there weren't
more women reaching the top jobs in the sciences.
Yet Summers, an
economist, left one out: Adjusted for IQ, quantitative skills, and
working hours, jobs in science are the lowest paid in the United
This article explores this fourth possible explanation for the dearth of
women in science: They found better jobs.
Why does anyone think science is a good job?
The average trajectory for a successful scientist is the following:
age 18-22: paying high tuition fees at an undergraduate college
age 22-30: graduate school, possibly with a bit of work, living on a
stipend of $1800 per month
age 30-35: working as a post-doc for $30,000 to $35,000 per year
age 36-43: professor at a good, but not great, university for
$65,000 per year
age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the
university ("denied tenure" is the more polite term for the folks that
universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where
employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to
in college.
He got into Stanford for graduate school.
He got a postdoc
His experiment worked out and he was therefore fortunate to
land a job at University of California, Irvine.
But at the end of the
day, his research wasn't quite interesting or topical enough that the
university wanted to commit to paying him a salary for the rest of his
He is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for
job with a "second rate has-been" label on his forehead.
Why then, does anyone think that science is a sufficiently good career
that people should debate who is privileged enough to work at it?
Sample bias.
Suppose that you go to the airport trying to figure out how crowded the
airplanes are.
You stand by the baggage claim and ask people "How full
was your flight?"
You write up your conclusions: Most flights are
nearly full.
The sample bias here comes from the fact that full flights
contain more people than empty flights.
At an airport, you are much
more likely to encounter someone who just stepped off a packed flight
than someone who was on a plane that was only one-third full.
College undergraduates do the same thing in choosing careers.
students, we'll call him Bill, in an introductory computer science class
said that he wanted to be a biologist when he grew up.
What biologists
had Bill met?
They were all professors at MIT and about half of them
had won the Nobel Prize.
This is hardly an average sample of people who
went to Biology graduate school!
Fortunately, Bill was a tall
good-looking fellow.
He managed to score himself a lovely girlfriend
during the semester, we'll call her Theresa.
Theresa was a biology
postdoc, with a PhD from an elite institution and a plum job at MIT.
Bill got to see how Theresa was treated in the lab, count her working
hours, see the pay stubs she received as a young woman in her 30s with a
PhD, wave goodbye as she got fired after her experiment did not work
out, and write email to Theresa at her new postdoc at Stanford.
end of the semester, Bill said, "I think I want to be an architect."
[Four years later, I attended the MIT graduation ceremony and was
pleasantly surprised to hear Bill's name called out for the degree of
Master's in Architecture.]
In short, some young people think that science is a good career for the same
reason that they think being a musician or actor is a good career:
can't decide if I want to be a scientist like James Watson, a musician
like Britney Spears, or an actor like Harrison Ford."
There are some old people who think a career in science makes sense,
including the people who attended the conference where Larry Summers was
hoist by his own petard.
Basically these functionaries in university
bureaucracies are saying "If young women were really smart, they'd be
just like me."
Indeed, that might have been true in the 1970s when
these folks chose their undergraduate major.
What has escaped their
notice, however, are the enormous returns to high IQ and ability that
have arisen in many occupations since the presidency of Ronald Reagan.
In medieval times, having a high IQ didn't change your life.
were born noble, the peasants had to get out of your way whether your IQ
was 75 or 150.
If you were a peasant with an IQ of 150, you might have
very interesting reflections as you dug for roots or harvested grain,
but it wouldn't turn you into a nobleman or woman.
In the middle class
society that America was in the 1950s through 1970s, the best paying
jobs were lavish, but not spectacular compared to being an assembly line
worker or college professor.
Today, you can't spit in the street
without hitting a millionaire and oftentimes it is simple wages that got
him or her to that point.
Salaries for professionals, Wall Street money
shufflers, artists, athletes, executive recruiters, et al., are all up, but the
data are not readily available.
By contrast, compensation for
executives at public companies is reported every year.
Forbes magazine
reports that in 2005, the CEOs of the Fortune 500 helped themselves to a
54 percent pay raise, resulting in an average per-executive salary of
$10 million for the year.
University salaries are not that much lower than they were in the 1970s,
but all the other smart people in the U.S. have gotten so rich that
faculty and postdoc salaries seem lower.
Any resource that is scarce,
such as real estate, is snapped up by society's economic winners.
science researcher at Harvard now earns an annual salary that is only
1/50th the price of a family-sized house in Cambridge, a fact that may
not be lost on an intelligent female Harvard undergraduate choosing a
Science versus the professions and business
Science can be fun, but considered as a career, science suffers by
comparison to the professions and the business world.
Consider someone taking the kind of high IQ and drive that would be
required to obtain a tenure-track position at U.C. Berkeley and going
into medicine.
This person would very likely be a top specialist of
some sort, earning at least $300,000 per year.
Instead of being fired
at age 44, our medical specialist would be near the height of her value
to her patients and employer.
Her experience and reputation would
continue to add to her salary and prestige until she was perhaps 60
years old.
[A woman who wanted to spend more time with her children can
choose from a variety of medical careers, such as emergency medicine,
that involve shift work and where a high salary can be earned with just
two or three shifts per week.
She could also work from home as a
radiologist reading data transmitted via Internet.]
Consider taking the same high IQ and work ethic, going into business,
and being put on the fast track at a company such as General Electric.
Rather than being fired at age 44, this is about the time that she will
be handed ever-larger divisions to operate, with ever-larger bonuses and
stock options.
A top lawyer at age 44 is probably a $500,000 per year partner in a big
firm, a judge, or a professor at a law school supplementing her $200,000
per year salary with some private work.
Even a public schoolteacher actually does better than a scientist.
Consider the person of unusual ability who takes that bachelor's in
science and decides to become a schoolteacher instead of going to
graduate school.
At age 22, the schoolteacher is earning a living wage
and can begin making plans to get married and have children.
By age 30,
when the scientist is forced to start moving around to those $35,000 per
year postdocs, the schoolteacher is earning $50,000 per year.
44, when the scientist is desperately trying to switch careers, the
schoolteacher is making more than $90,000 per year for working nine
months (only the better school systems pay $90,000 per year, but
remember that we posited a person with a high IQ and motivation
sufficient to get through graduate school in science).
Being a public
employee and a member of a union, the schoolteacher cannot be fired but
may at this point in his or her life begin thinking about a comfortable
early retirement and some sort of second career.
A good career is one that pays well, in which you have a broad choice of
full-time and part-time jobs, in which there is some sort of barrier to
entry so that you won't have to compete with a lot of other applicants,
in which there are good jobs in every part of the country and
internationally, and in which you can enjoy job security in middle age
and not be driven out by young people willing to work 100 hours per
How closely does academic science match these criteria?
17-year-old Argentine girl on a tour of the M.I.T. campus.
She had no
idea what she wanted to do with her life, so maybe this was a good time
to show her the possibilities in female nerddom.
While walking around,
we ran into a woman who recently completed a Ph.D. in Aero/Astro,
probably the most rigorous engineering department at MIT.
What did the
woman engineer say to the 17-year-old?
"I'm not sure if I'll be able to
get any job at all.
There are only about 10 universities that hire
people in my area and the last one to have a job opening had more than
800 applicants."
And that's engineering, which, thanks to its reputation for dullness and
the demand from industrial employers, has a lot less competition
for jobs than in science.
What about personal experience?
The women that I know who have the IQ,
education, and drive to make it as professors at top schools are, by and
large, working as professionals and making 2.5-5X what a university
professor makes and they do not subject themselves to the risk of being
With their extra income, they invest in child care resources
and help around the house so that they are able to have kids while
continuing to ascend in their careers.
The women I know who are
university professors, by and large, are unmarried and childless.
the time they get tenure, they are on the verge of infertility.
Science versus collecting child support
Speaking of fertility... A $400/hour divorce litigator said "Knowing
what I know now, I could have made a lot more money going to a bar and
working for one night than I have made by going to college, law
school, and working for 20 years. It turns out that I was sitting
on something worth a lot more than a law degree." What's the cash
value of fertility compared to working in science?
U.S. Department of Labor's Bureau of Labor Statistics lists the 2012
median pay of "Biochemists and Biophysicists" as $81,480 per year (source)
and the "entry-level education" required as a "Doctoral or
professional degree". After taxes, that's $56,666 for a single
Massachusetts resident according to the ADP Paycheck Calculator.
Child support in Massachusetts and can be collected until a child
turns 23, and, as in all other states, is tax-free. Women have
opportunities to profit from child support that men don't have. A
woman can decide whether or not to terminate a pregnancy, for example,
following a one-night encounter. How profitable is child support? By
formula ( guidelines), the most that can be collected is
$40,000 per year from a defendant earning $250,000 per year. However,
the actual costs of a child can be collected on top of that $40,000,
such as health insurance, day care or nanny, and a child's cash
expenses. Subtracting the USDA estimated $8000 per year incidental
costs of a child, such as housing and food, each child yields only a
$32,000 per year profit. Thus a woman would need to have two children
in Massachusetts with $250,000-per-year defendants in order to exceed
the after-tax personal spending power of a mid-career PhD
biochemist. However, the present value of the child support
plaintiff's earnings are larger because the income stream can start at
age 18 or even younger and does not require any investment in college
or graduate school.
A woman who is smart and organized enough to earn a PhD in science
would also likely be smart and organized enough to find a
higher-income co-parent. What is the profit potential when suing
someone earning more than $250,000 per year? At that point there is no
statutory limit in Massachusetts and the profit number is up to the
judge's discretion. It is tough to get comprehensive data because
Massachusetts regarding unmarried child support cases are sealed in
Massachusetts. However, in a lawsuit following a four-year marriage,
Kosow v. Shuman (Middlesex County 10D0588), Judge Maureen
Monks explained the system in a June 22, 2011 status conference:
Now, the 20 percent [of defendant's income] is probably along the
lines of what I would be looking for in terms of, you know, when I set
a percentage. Based on the bonus, when I look at how the current
guidelines play out against most parties' income it comes around
between 20 and 25 percent, sometimes it's a little higher. If there's
a big disparity it's closer to 28 percent. Does that mean it makes
sense is that what to assess up to a certain amount on his
income. Maybe there is no limit right now."
In other words, if a tipsy dermatologist earning $500,000 per year can
be located, the revenue from a one-night encounter would be $2.3
million tax-free against USDA-estimated costs of only about $200,000
(the father will typically be ordered to pay for college costs if he
has a higher income than the mother). The child support plaintiff also
typically enjoys better financial security than the working PhD
Biochemist. The judge who orders a $100,000 per year stream of child
support will also typically order the defendant to purchase life
insurance to secure the future profits.
In the Kosow v. Shuman case, the plaintiff was a
38-year-old with a two-year-old daughter from the marriage. During the
pendency of the lawsuit "the Wife underwent breast augmentation
surgery ... paid for in part by her boyfriend" (Judge's Findings and
Memorandum of Decision, June 30, 2012). There was evidence that the
plaintiff become unhappy in the marriage because the husband limited
her personal spending on clothing, etc., to about $30,000 per
year. Rather than get a job to increase her spending power, she sought
redress by filing a lawsuit seeking $235,080 in annual child support.
How did it work out? The short-term bride/plaintiff ended up with
$150,000 in cash and 20 years of free housing in a $1 million house,
with expenses such as insurance, maintenance, and property tax paid by
her former housing. She also got $50,000 per year in taxable
alimony. The defendant father was ordered to pay for health insurance
for both the plaintiff and child. He also was ordered to pay for a
nanny so that the mother did not have to perform any child care tasks
during the roughly 57 percent time that she was technically speaking
going to care for the child. The defendant was ordered to pay half of
the plaintiff's legal fees so that her profits would not be reduced
too much by expenses. The father was finally ordered to pay $93,808
per year in tax-free child support and to purchase $1 million in life
insurance so that the plaintiff could profit from him either dead or
alive. Judge Monks found that the plaintiff had a Ivy League
bachelor's degree (from University of Pennsylvania) and, after
awarding her a mostly tax-free income of $143,808 per year plus a free
house and all-expenses-paid child, admonished her that "she now has a
responsibility to contribute to her child's financial needs
commensurate with her training and skills. There are no health issues
that would prevent her from seeking or maintaining some employment at
this time. . She is capable of earning at least part-time employment,
especially given the employment of the full-time nanny and [the
child's] attendance at pre-school and camps."
An engineering or science degree, especially a PhD, would have been
harmful to Jessica Kosow's case for child support. A judge could have
used his or her discretion to impute income to Kosow, e.g., the
$81,480 per year that the BLS says a Biochemist earns. This would have
reduced her child support claim by formula in Massachusetts and in
other states using the "income shares" model. "A degree in poetry is a
lot better than a degree in medicine when you're a child support
plaintiff," observed one litigator.
What if a woman absolutely hates children to the point that having a
child around part of the time would be irksome, even with the
assistance of a paid-for-by-the-father nanny? In Massachusetts and
other states with lucrative child support guidelines, women are able
to market abortions following brief encounters. The typical price is
about $250,000 or roughly five years of what the BLS figures as the
annual after-tax earnings of a scientist. Abortions are often marketed
with the aid of an attorney and, according to Harvard Law School
professor Jeannie Suk, this is a perfectly legal way to make money:
"It is not extortion to threaten to have a child."
As Judge Monks noted, there is no limit to the revenue that can be
obtained via child support. However, there are limits to the potential
earnings of an academic scientist. "For a woman with a functioning
reproductive system, the decision to attend college and work is seldom
an economically rational one in the United States," summarized a
divorce litigator.
[Note to international readers: Don't try this in a Civil
Law jurisdiction.
is fairly typical and the maximum child support award obtainable there
is about $8,000 per year, i.e., similar to what a U.S. state would pay
to a foster parent and similar to the USDA estimate of the real cost
of having a child in the home.]
For whom does academic science as a career make sense?
The picture so far is pretty bleak.
The American academic scientist
earns less than an airplane mechanic or child support profiteer, has
less job security than a drummer in a boy band, and works longer hours
than a Bolivian silver miner.
Roger W. Bowen, general secretary of
the American Association of University Professors, in a March 2, 2006
discussion run by the Chronicle of Higher Education
summarized the situation of the tenure lottery winners:
"The average full professor, someone who has been teaching for, say,
fifteen years or longer, is making five times less than the average
works 60 - 70 hour weeks, uses holidays
to do research, and tries desperately to find time to be a good spouse,
father, mother, or partner. The life of the mind may seem cushy, but it
Does this make sense as a career for anyone?
Absolutely!
get out your atlas.
Imagine that you are a smart, but impoverished, young person in China.
Your high IQ and hard work got you into one of the best undergraduate
programs in China.
The $1800 per month graduate stipend at University
of Nebraska or University of Wisconsin will afford you a much higher
standard of living than any job you could hope for in China.
desperate need for graduate student labor and lack of Americans who are
interested in PhD programs in science and engineering means that you'll
have no trouble getting a visa.
When you finish your degree, a small
amount of paperwork will suffice to ensure your continued place in the
legal American work force.
Science may be one of the lowest paid fields
for high IQ people in the U.S., but it pays a lot better than most jobs
in China or India.
Once in the U.S., of course, you don't have to remain a drone in the
A friend of mine was a physics professor, let's call him
"Professor Jones", at MIT looking for a new graduate student.
from China, let's call him "Yuan", approached him and said "I want to
work in your lab.
I will do anything you tell me to do and work harder
than any of your other graduate students.
However, I'm not interested
in physics and I won't finish my Ph.D., so you can't count on me being
here more than three years."
Professor Jones was curious.
What was Yuan
doing in the physics department?
"Back in China," Yuan replied, "we
heard that it was a good way to get a job on Wall Street."
Yuan spent his first year in the lab learning how to be an American.
questioned the American-born students at MIT intently, asking them where
they shopped for clothing, how often they took a shower, what books they
Yuan spent his second year in the lab learning how to present
himself to an employer.
He signed up at the placement office for
several interviews per week, simply for practice.
Like Bill Murray
methodically determining what particular women wanted to hear in the
movie Groundhog Day, Yuan wrote down what worked and did not work until
he had figured out exactly what to say.
Yuan spent his third year
actually trying to get a job.
Reading the Wall Street Journal one day,
he learned about a new boutique investment bank that had spun out of a
larger firm.
Yuan had heard that one should always Fedex one's resume
rather than mail it, to make it seem more important.
Being a graduate
student, he chose the Fedex economy afternoon delivery service.
resume arrived at the office of the new boutique firm on a Friday
afternoon, when the founding partner had already left for his beach
house in the Hamptons.
The secretary, assuming that it must be
important, re-Fedexed the package to the partner for Saturday morning
Thus did Yuan's resume arrive as one of the only business
documents that this guy had available to read while out at the beach
Yuan ended up being hired just about the time that his advisor,
Professor Jones, was denied tenure ("fired") by MIT and had to shut down
[When a population of workers is primarily made up of immigrants, you're
going to get a lot more men than women.
Every migration of people for
work starts with young men.]
What about the excitement and fun of science?
Is life all about money and job security?
What about excitement and
Isn't that a good reason to choose a job?
I love every
minute of my $8 per
hour job as a ,
but on the other hand I don't say that it is a great career and I can't
understand why there aren't more women helicopter instructors.
Some scientists are like kids who never grow up.
They love what they
do, are excited by the possibilities of their research, and wear a big
smile most days.
Although these people are, by Boston standards,
ridiculously poor and they will never be able to afford a house (within
a one-hour drive of their job) or support a family, I don't feel sorry
Unfortunately, this kind of child-like joy is not typical.
The tenured
Nobel Prize winners are pretty happy, but they are a small proportion of
the total.
The average scientist that I encounter expresses
bitterness about (a) low pay, (b) not getting enough credit or
references to his or her work, (c) not knowing where the next job is
coming from, (d) not having enough money or job security to get married
and/or have children.
If these folks were experiencing
day-to-day joy at their bench, I wouldn't expect them to hold onto so
much bitterness and envy.
How did so many smart people make such bad mistakes in planning a
career for themselves?
Part of the answer may be that young people fail
to appreciate the risk that they will become more like old people when
they are old.
The young person sees the old tenured academic, ignored
by his younger colleagues in a culture that values hot new ideas, sign
up to be on committees.
The youngster never asks "This oldster has
He draws the same salary regardless of whether he sits through
those interminable boring committee meetings.
Why would he agree to do
Why wouldn't he rather be playing squash, riding a horse, flying an
aircraft, walking his dog, etc.?"
The distressing possibility that the
oldster agreed to be on the committee so that he would have a venue in
which people would listen to him does not occur to the youngster.
In the personal domain, young people are very different from old people.
If you interview old people and ask "What are the greatest sources of
satisfaction and happiness in your life?" almost always the answer "my
children" comes back.
At the age when people are choosing careers, the
idea of having children is often unappealing and certainly few have the
idea that one should choose a "kid-friendly" career.
Old people, on
average, also have higher income requirements than young people.
youngster is happy to backpack around the globe, stay in youth hostels
for $20 per night, and sleep in a tent.
Most oldsters become devoted to
their creature comforts and get cranky in anything less than $200 per
night private hotel room.
Young people don't mind one $400 per month
room in a dingy 4BR apartment shared with three or four other young
most oldsters need their own apartment or house (edging up
towards $1 million in America's nicer neighborhoods).
The most serious concern is that the field that a youngster found
fascinating at age 20 will no longer be fascinating after 20 or 25
If you have a narrow education and have been earning an academic
salary, it is much tougher to change careers at age 45 or 50 than for
someone who was in a job where the earnings are higher and begin at a
younger age.
A doctor who practices for 10 years can easily save enough
to finance a switch to almost any other occupation.
A successful lawyer
can walk away after 15 or 20 years, commute to school from his oceanfront and town
houses, and become a furniture maker (my friend's dad did this).
Why do American men (boys, actually) do it?
Pursuing science as a career seems so irrational that one wonders why
any young American would do it.
Yet we do find some young Americans
starting out in the sciences and they are mostly men.
When the Larry
Summers story first broke, I wrote in my Weblog:
A lot more men
than women choose to do seemingly irrational things such as become petty
criminals, fly homebuilt helicopters, play video games, and keep
tropical fish as pets (98 percent of the attendees at the American
Cichlid Association convention that I last attended were male).
we be surprised that it is mostly men who spend 10 years banging their
heads against an equation-filled blackboard in hopes of landing a
$35,000/year post-doc job?
Having been both a student and teacher at MIT, my personal explanation
for men going into science is the following:
young men strive to achieve high status among their peer group
men tend to lack perspective and are unable to step back and ask the
question "is this peer group worth impressing?"
Consider Albert Q. Mathnerd, a math undergrad at MIT ("Course 18" we
He works hard and beats his chest to demonstrate that he is
the best math nerd at MIT.
This is important to Albert because most of
his friends are math majors and the rest of his friends are in wimpier
departments, impressed that Albert has even taken on such demanding
Albert never reflects on the fact that the guy who was the
best math undergrad at MIT 20 years ago is now an entry-level public
school teacher in Nebraska, having failed to get tenure at a 2nd tier
university.
When Albert goes to graduate school to get his PhD, his
choice will have the same logical foundation as John Hinckley's attempt
to impress Jodie Foster by shooting Ronald Reagan.
It is the guys with the poorest social skills who are least likely to
talk to adults and find out what the salary and working conditions are
like in different occupations.
It is mostly guys with rather poor
social skills whom one meets in the university science halls.
What about women?
Don't they want to impress their peers?
they are more discriminating about choosing those peers.
I've taught a
fair number of women students in electrical engineering and computer
science classes over the years.
I can give you a list of the ones who
had the best heads on their shoulders and were the most thoughtful about
planning out the rest of their lives.
Their names are on files in my
"medical school recommendations" directory.
In Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, it is Werther,
not Lotte, who decides to kill himself, anticipating the modern
statistic that men are about five times more likely to commit
suicide than women.
Conclusion
"Science is a wonderful thing if one does not have to earn one's living
at it." -- Albert Einstein
Most people go to work primarily in order to earn a paycheck.
prefer a higher salary to a lower salary.
Jobs in science pay far less
than jobs in the professions and business held by women of similar
A lot of men are irrational, romantic, stubborn, and unwilling
to admit that they've made a big mistake.
With Occam's Razor, we should
not need to bring in the FBI to solve the mystery of why there are more
men than women who have chosen to stick with the choice that they made
at age 18 to become a professor of science or mathematics.
Appendix A: What about becoming a scientist in industry?
The conference where Larry Summers got into trouble was concerned with
the percentage of women among tenured professors.
Considered strictly
as a career (paycheck, working hours, job security), aren't there better
opportunities in industry?
And might these be good enough to make
pursuing a PhD in science or mathematics an intelligent decision?
It depends on which branch of science and whether a person wants a job
where work is done primarily in isolation.
In some of the hardest hard
sciences, e.g., Physics, there aren't too many jobs outside of
universities.
Those jobs that are available tend to be at government
research labs in obscure corners of the U.S. where a spouse would
probably object to living.
For people with PhDs in Biology, there are a
lot of jobs at pharmaceutical companies paying more than $100,000 per
Considered on purely economic grounds, these jobs don't justify
the time and foregone income invested in a PhD.
There are 22-year-olds
earning $150,000 per year selling home mortgages.
What about the working conditions?
Surely it is more interesting to be
a scientist at a drug company than to be selling home mortgages?
depends on the worker's personality.
Are you introverted?
Want a job
where you seldom have to meet anyone new?
Want to sit at the same desk
or bench year after year and work mostly by yourself?
Get most of your
satisfaction from solving puzzles?
Have we got the job for you:
industrial scientist!
If you are extremely introverted, you might
prefer to work as a computer programmer.
Most workers, however, get a lot of satisfaction from meeting new
people, working with others collaboratively, being thanked by customers,
teaching, having a direct positive impact on other people.
Jobs such as
medical doctor, lawyer, schoolteacher, airplane mechanic, and plumber
all provide greater amounts of these satisfactions than most jobs in
In fact, the only science job that regularly offers any of
these satisfactions is professor, which we've already discussed from the
point of view of salary and job security.
A friend of the author says that most medical doctors choose the wrong
specialty: "They pick based on what part of the body they think is the
most interesting.
They should really pick based on whether or not they
want to have the responsibility of running an office, having employees,
and marketing themselves or whether they want a shift job and can walk
away at the end of the shift."
She finds some of her colleagues less
than optimally happy because they chose to be plastic surgeons and don't
enjoy being the boss and not being able to take eight weeks of vacation
On the other hand, she finds some emergency medicine doctors
who, while they enjoy the freedom and flexibility to work as much or as
little as they choose in any given year, would prefer to have the
responsibility and prestige of running their own practice.
A person who says "I love Chemistry and therefore I will become a
chemist" is potentially making the same mistake as these medical doctors
who end up in the wrong specialty.
There are many aspects to a job
other than what exactly you occupy your mind with.
partial list:
work mostly collaboratively?
meet a lot of new people?
work mostly with competent people?
work mostly with interesting people?
able to see the direct impact of one's work?
able to teach others?
get to travel to interesting places on a regular basis?
able to leave work behind when you go home at the end of the day?
(or do you have to prepare, read email, answer phone calls, etc. when at
able to take long blocks of time off for exotic travel?
cog in a large bureaucracy?
satisfaction of being the boss?
value to employers increases with age and experience?
able to move to any part of the country and find a similar job?
effectively stuck in one or two cities where an industry is concentrated)
Different people will assign different values to these aspects of work.
Extroverts and introverts might assign opposite values to the "met a lot
of new people" aspect, for example.
Probably the easiest way to
evaluate what kind of job the average person most enjoys is to look at
the kinds of job for which the average person is willing to volunteer.
Very few volunteer jobs have the characteristics of an industrial
science job.
The job of university professor, especially the teaching
aspect, is closer to what people are observed to do as volunteers (which
may explain why university employers are able to recruit highly trained
staff for such low salaries).
Appendix B: Interesting Comments from Readers
I posted a link to this article, in draft form, to my Weblog.
the most interesting comments.
From Geoff B: Perhaps men have a greater buffer of time to
recover from career mistakes. I actually know a couple of guys who got
PhD's, then went to MBA or JD degrees. While they may have enjoyed their
PhD programs (heh), from an earning standpoint they probably wasted a
good 5-7 years. But they can just pretend that those 5-7 years never
existed. A 40 year old man can get married to a 31-year-old woman, and
just pretend he's 31. Happens all the time. It's harder for women to
pull this off. So maybe math and science PhD's are just another
incarnation of the recklessness of youth - something men have
historically been able to indulge in, without the consequences women
would experience.
From me (responding to someone who asked how I would change the
incentives so that more women would be attracted to science): What's my
idea for changing the incentives? I don't have any. I'm not one of the
people who complains that there aren't enough women working as
professors, janitors, or whatever. For whatever reason we've decided
that science in America should be done by low-paid immigrants. They seem
to be doing a good job. They are cheap. They are mostly guys, like other
immigrant populations. If smart American women choose to go to medical,
business, and law school instead of doing science, and have fabulous
careers, I certainly am not going to discourage them. Imagine if one of
those kind souls that Summers was speaking to had taken Condoleezza Rice
aside and told her not to waste time with political science because
physics was so much more challenging. Just think how far she might have
Appendix C: What would the world look like if anyone actually cared
about this?
When employers are seriously about hiring more people with certain
qualifications, they pay them more.
Harvard University, where this
entire debate occurred, earned $4.5 billion in investment income in
The basic operation of the university, research and teaching, was
cashflow-neutral and therefore Harvard could spend this $4.5 billion in
any way that it chooses.
Typically universities spend their tax-free
investment winnings on lavish real estate development, e.g., $200
million buildings by signature architects that Saddam Hussein or a Saudi
royal would have been proud to include among his palaces, and thus we
may infer that lavish new buildings are a real priority for them.
With control of the budget at a university, one could change the sex
ratio in science and math very quickly.
Here's how it might look:
female undergraduates majoring in science or math pay no tuition,
room, or board fees.
If a woman maintains an A average, she gets a stipend
of $10,000 per year to spend however she wishes.
female graduate students in science and math earn $70,000 per year,
about triple what male graduate students earn.
female assistant professors in science and math earn a starting
salary of $300,000 per year, up there with the average medical
specialist
female tenured professors in science and math get paid $500,000 per
year, comparable to what a high-talent professional might earn in mid-career
What would this cost?
The Harvard Faculty of Arts and Sciences employs
700 professors, only a small portion of whom are in science or math.
Suppose that our goal is to switch 200 faculty positions from being held
by men to being held by women.
That would cost approximately $50
million per year in incremental salary by the preceding schedule.
Adding in the costs for a (well-paid) mostly-female population of math
and science students, it would be difficult to get to a cost of $100
million per year, or only about 1/45th of investment income.
If a woman scientist is worth more to the university and to society than
a male scientist, she should be paid more.
The fact that she isn't
indicates that this issue is lower priority than any of the things that
the universities does spend money on, e.g., those palatial new
buildings.
Appendix D: Data on University Pay
How much exactly do universities pay PhDs in science?
Let's consider the University
of California at Berkeley.
This is one of America's leading research
institutions, located in a city full of delightful cultural and leisure
opportunities, and blessed with excellent weather.
For the fall of
2007, the university pays Instructors $45,900 per year.
Professors earn between $53,000 and $69,000 per year.
Professors can earn up to $83,700 per year.
A full professor can earn
between $77,800 and $142,000 per year.
The AAUP ranks U.C. Berkeley as
the highest paying public university in the United States.
A family-sized (four-bedroom) house in Berkeley sold for an average of
$965,000 in the middle of 2007, just slightly more than double the price
of a house that the top-paid full professor could afford, according to
some online calculation tools.
Data on additional schools:
/stats/aaup/
Appendix E: About the Author
Some folks read this and assume that the author is a bitter or
disappointed scientist.
I plead guilty to having majored in mathematics
as a college undergraduate (I started college at age 14 and graduated at
18--how would you like to be held accountable for decisions that you
made as a teenager?), but otherwise I have spent my life as a humble
electrical and software engineer, not as a scientist (my PhD is in
Electrical Engineering and Computer S I started the program,
without intending to finish, because I was curious to learn how my
stereo system worked and because I was earning enough every month as a
Lisp Machine programmer to pay my an I finished the
program because I am a stubborn testosterone-poisoned guy).
science and enjoy talking to and learning from scientists.
Starting in
2001, I've been doing a lot of flying in airplanes and helicopters,
including several cross-continent trips in light aircraft, and this has
sparked an interest in meteorology and geology.
Taking advantage of my
location in Cambridge, I have sat in on some classes at MIT in
Atmospheric Physics, Biology, and Geology.
I also teach a software
engineering lab course at MIT every three or four semesters (textbook).
But for me, the university has mostly been
a sou I have never looked to it as a source of
In , I suggest that university towns are great places to live
for a person of adequate means.
The Last Word
"A man of science may earn great distinction, but not bread," , mid-19th Century, quoted on page 278 of Terrible
Lizard: The First Dinosaur Hunters and the Birth of a New Science
Photo is copyright 2005.