From ScienceMag:

Held to higher standards. Left off invitations. Pointed to as “diversity” but ignored. These are just some of the hundreds of examples of devaluation women faculty in the United States shared with computational social scientist Katie Spoon. These experiences, more common for women than men, are to blame for the higher rate of attrition for women faculty, Spoon, a postdoctoral fellow at Stanford University, and colleagues report in an analysis published today in PNAS Nexus.

The new study “gets at things that are hard to measure, which is the climate in academia,” says Donna Ginther, an economist at the University of Kansas who studies the academic workforce. “It speaks to the subtle experiences of women not feeling like they belong.”

The work builds on an enormous survey of 10,000 U.S. current and ex-faculty, spanning institutions and fields, which found that women leave because they feel pushed out—not pulled toward another opportunity. At the end of that survey was a free-text box inviting respondents to “tell [their] story” and share negative experiences or reasons they left academia, says Spoon, then a graduate student at the University of Colorado Boulder.

Little did Spoon know she’d get 6615 responses—an outpouring of heartbreak, documenting instances of disrespect, struggles with work-life balance, lack of institutional support, and more. “I was like, ‘OK, I think we need to do like a follow-up study instead of just ignoring all of that,’” she says.

Trained as a computer scientist, Spoon saw the opportunity to spot patterns that could explain why women feel pushed out. Working with sociologist Lauren Rivera at Northwestern University, they manually assigned themes to each response and then looked for relationships with identity and attrition. Categories included issues directly related to professional responsibilities of research, service, and teaching, as well as topics capturing the work environment, such as administrative policies, caretaking responsibilities, and leadership.

Of the 12 distinct themes investigated, devaluation—feeling excluded, disrespected, mistreated, or held to different standards—showed the biggest gender gap: Forty-one percent of women versus 18% of men who left comments felt this way. Informal devaluation was more common than formal devaluation such as problems during official evaluation procedures. This may suggest policy changes aimed at reducing discrimination in these processes are having some effect. But systems are still failing in other ways. Frequently cited alongside experiences of devaluation was so-called “institutional betrayal”—institutions failing to take complaints seriously.

And whereas the gender gap in other issues remains steady or even narrows with seniority, for devaluation it widens. It seems men gain respect over their careers, while women continue to report “‘I have all these accolades, and I have all this stuff, and [yet], I have to keep proving myself,’” Spoon explains.

And that, more than anything else, pushes them out. Devaluation accounted for the majority of the gender gap in those considering leaving, and in those who had left—far more than topics such as work-life balance and child care, which are major targets of interventions.

Devaluation was also the most racialized issue, affecting nearly half of all women of color. White women were the next most affected, followed by men of color, then white men.

“It was a very impressive study,” says Bruce Weinberg, an economist at Ohio State University. Although survey responses inevitably overrepresent negative experiences, the breadth of the study “[gets at] the pervasiveness of this,” he says. Evidence of these types of issues is often anecdotal or narrow in scope, which can make it harder to address. Of the new study, though, he says, “I would call this data,” making it possible to analyze intersections with career stage and race. “That’s valuable.”

Ginther questions whether the problem is specific to academia or persists across careers. Regardless, one definite problem in academia, she notes, is the unusually slow pace of turnover, meaning “there’s not a lot of change in department climate and culture.” And with more women than men departing midway through their careers, Spoon adds, it’s not a given that any improvements at the junior level today will trickle down.

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From ScienceMag:

Every day as I walked to my office, I felt a pang. The research institute where I worked was on a university campus, but it felt a world apart. I saw my academic colleagues building fulfilling relationships with students through teaching and mentoring—opportunities I could only engage in on a limited basis, in the time I had left after completing my research responsibilities. My decision a few years earlier to leave academia and pursue more applied research had felt completely logical. Several colleagues had made similar moves, and they seemed happy. I had packed my boxes and told myself I was closing one chapter for good. But I was starting to wonder whether there might be a way back.

For some time, I convinced myself I had made the right choice. I worked on projects I enjoyed and was proud of, building national and international collaborations, writing policy reports, and contributing to R&D that had a direct impact on farmers and farming communities.

And I still had some opportunities to interact with students. Colleagues from the university sometimes invited me to cosupervise Ph.D. students with relevant research interests. I jumped at the chance, even though I had to do it on my own time as it was not an official part of my job responsibilities. I gave and attended occasional lectures at the university, and the resulting interactions with students were always invigorating. I loved that every year new students arrived with fresh perspectives, different cultural backgrounds, and questions that sometimes forced me to rethink assumptions I did not even realize I was making. After a lecture a few years ago, one student asked why a particular crop was not grown in a specific region—a simple question that stopped me midsentence. That conversation eventually grew into a research proposal. Every time I supervised or mentored a student or gave a lecture, I left feeling energized. I couldn’t deny that I wanted more.

I was also growing frustrated with some of the challenges and limitations of working at a research institute, where bureaucracy and multiple levels of management can slow even seemingly simple actions such as bringing visiting researchers on for collaborations. Universities, of course, have their own challenges, limitations, and bureaucracies. Competition for funding is intense. Teaching takes time. I was under no illusion that returning to academia would solve every frustration.

Still, whenever I came across a faculty job posting, I felt a spark of excitement and often found myself wondering whether I should give it a try. I even bookmarked a couple of faculty job ads, returning to them for days before finally closing the tabs.

A committee meeting for a Ph.D. student I co-supervise was the final push I needed. The student mentioned how overwhelming it felt to start a Ph.D. in a new country, and we spent a few minutes talking about how he could build a support network. When the meeting ended, I realized the most enjoyable part of my week had been that hour with a student. I no longer wanted to relegate the most rewarding parts of my professional life to essentially a side project. Having made what I thought was a career-defining pivot away from academia, I decided to find a way back.

It’s often said that once you leave the established path to the professoriate it is hard to get back on, and returning hasn’t been easy. My CV looks quite different from those of many others going up for university professor jobs through the traditional tenure-track route. But I talked to my professional network, explored unconventional on-ramps back to academia, and applied for openings, highlighting my unique background and the skills I’ve developed as a result. I was offered a part-time university appointment, and I now have two students to help get my research program off the ground.

I have come to realize teaching, mentoring, and academic life are part of who I am. No matter where my career or destiny takes me, I do not think I can completely walk away from them.

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From ScienceMag:

I was rushing out of the office to pick up my two young children from day care when I ran into a senior colleague in the hallway. They wanted to chat about a proposal I was working on and how I was settling into my new tenure-track position. I was grateful for their interest and collegiality, and I didn’t want them to think I wasn’t giving the job my full attention. So, I acted as if I had all the time in the world. I didn’t mention where I was headed, or that I had a kids’ pickup deadline. I barely made it. That night after dinner and bedtime I caught up on emails, never letting on that I was working so late because of my family responsibilities. I was convinced I had to manage my demands invisibly.

To the outside world, I was building a lab, mentoring students, teaching, writing grants, and pursuing the milestones expected of an early-career faculty member. But outside the margins of my CV, I was also coordinating child care, navigating day care illnesses and closures, recovering from pregnancies, breastfeeding, pumping, and trying to think clearly through antepartum and postpartum brain fog.

For a while, I thought the solution was to become more efficient. If I planned carefully enough, woke up early enough, answered enough emails after bedtime, maybe I could make the chaotic parts of motherhood invisible in my professional life. I could be the same kind of early-career scientist I had imagined before children, just with less sleep.

This approach almost worked, until it didn’t. Day care would call and a sick child would erase a carefully planned day. School closures would rearrange an entire week. Travel anywhere involved heroic efforts to organize small lives in addition to mine. No amount of optimization gave me full control and I was simply exhausted. There was almost always something I felt I was not doing as well as I wished I could.

Then, when I was a little over 1 year into my faculty position and pregnant with my third child, an email landed in my inbox inviting me to join a gathering for pretenure mothers at my institution. A few assistant professors had bonded over the ups and downs of juggling motherhood with the responsibilities of a tenure-track faculty member, and they wanted to connect with others doing the same. The invitation offered something I had not realized I needed: a space where my identities as a mother and scientist did not have to remain separate. I filled out the scheduling poll.

At our lunches, I kept hearing people say aloud the things I had been facing silently: the guilt of leaving campus early, the exhaustion of writing after bedtime, the pressure of keeping up with peers whose lives might look very different from ours. We shared strategies, offered reassurance, and considered what types of support we actually needed. Those conversations did not magically make working life easier. But they made it less lonely.

I began to see that my struggle was not a personal failure to become efficient enough. The many demands in my life were real, even if academic culture kept them out of view.

I became more willing to acknowledge my limitations, accept help, and resist blaming every disruption on poor organization. If I need to move a meeting because of child care pickup or a sick child at home, I say so plainly. I am careful not to make my trainees responsible for my family logistics, but I also do not pretend those logistics do not exist. I want my trainees to see that being a good scientist does not require pretending to have a life untouched by caregiving, illness, rest, or limits.

This shift has also changed how I think about my life outside the lab. Recently I was volunteering at my oldest son’s kindergarten Aloha Day party. Another mother arrived with a watermelon carved to look like Stitch from Lilo & Stitch. It was spectacular compared with my store-bought popsicles. The old me might have felt a familiar pang: Should I be doing more? Does my contribution betray my divided attention? Then I looked at the delighted children and felt grateful. This parent had offered something I could not, but I had shown up in the best way I could. I did not need to disguise the constraints of my career to prove I was a devoted mother, just as I do not need to disguise the demands of motherhood to prove I am a serious scientist.

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From ScienceMag:

When I interviewed for my postdoc position, the group leader gave me a hypothetical research problem and asked, “So, Jingkai, how would you approach this?” I opened my mouth but didn’t know how to answer. To fill the silence, I scrambled to connect half-formed ideas, experimental techniques, and bits of terminology into something that sounded vaguely convincing. He smiled and proceeded to tell me he didn’t know either, which was why the question was interesting. I got the job. But afterward, I couldn’t shake the feeling that I hadn’t been good enough in that interview. It left me with a lingering sense that I couldn’t reveal any more gaps in my knowledge if I wanted to build my credibility.

Previously, as a Ph.D. student, I had sometimes felt embarrassed after asking questions that I feared came across as overly basic or ill-informed. Being hired into a postdoc position didn’t make that feeling go away. Instead, I felt I had reached a professional stage where I was supposed to know the answers, or at least look as though I did. So I made every effort I could to present myself as knowledgeable to those around me.

I brought a notebook to every seminar. I rarely wrote anything in it, but holding it made me feel protected. In meetings, I nodded in slow motion. Even coffee breaks became performances. As colleagues talked, I would stand there smiling and nodding while my coffee slowly went cold. During these conversations, questions would pop into my head, only to be cut off by the same inner voice: Don’t show your cards.

The performances were exhausting. But I kept them up for months, until I started to notice how one of the senior postdocs in our lab approached uncertainty. One day, a persistent leak crippled one of our laboratory instruments. I watched him investigate the problem and waited for the confidence I associated with experience. It never arrived. “I have no idea yet,” he said cheerfully. The sentence caught me off-guard. I had spent months trying not to say those words myself. He spent the morning testing one possibility after another. Most of them failed. Yet he never seemed bothered by that. Each dead end simply led to another attempt. Eventually, he figured it out and laughed with genuine satisfaction.

As I worked with him more, I found that “I don’t know” seemed to be one of his favorite phrases. I also noticed the same comfort with uncertainty in researchers further along in their careers. In meetings, our group leader often became most animated when discussing projects we had not yet figured out. His eyes would light up as he described a question we might pursue, a mechanism we might test, or an uncertainty we might turn into an experiment. He did not speak about the unknown as something embarrassing, to be hidden. He spoke about it as something worth moving toward.

Only then did I understand what I had missed in that interview: I had treated the moment like a test I had failed. But my group leader had admitted he didn’t know the answer and seemed genuinely excited to explore it.

After that realization, I began to change my approach. When I started to work with colleagues in a research area that was unfamiliar to me, I resisted my old instinct to search for every answer on my own. Instead, I asked questions openly. Those questions often led to discussions, and the discussions to ideas we could test. My colleagues, in turn, shared their own perspectives more freely. I got up to speed faster, avoided unnecessary detours, and, perhaps most important, stopped feeling that every gap in my knowledge had to be hidden.

For a long time, I thought becoming a scientist meant learning how to appear certain, composed, and knowledgeable. But the people I came to admire have held on to their willingness to ask questions and to be excited by what they did not yet know.

I still bring a notebook to seminars. But now it reminds me how much I have left to learn, rather than helping me pretend I already have the answers.

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