Science is not a family-friendly career

There is a brief article in this week's Nature entitled "Tenure or family?"

Marriage and childbirth are what stop most female US graduate students from becoming tenured researchers, according to a report by Washington DC think tank the Center for American Progress (CAP) and the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law. Staying Competitive: Patching America's Leaky Pipeline in the Sciences found that married mothers with a PhD are 35% less likely to enter a tenure-track position in the sciences than married fathers with PhDs, according to a National Science Foundation survey. And they are 27% less likely than their male counterparts to get tenure after securing a tenure-track post. The report advises universities and funding agencies to create family-friendly policies, including six weeks of paid maternity leave and a week of paid parental leave.

Obviously there is an enormous problem in career progression for women in science. A 35% reduction at the tenure-track stage and a 27% further reduction at the tenure stage - women get whittled out of the academic career pathway. This article kind of misses the point though. Marriage and children are not what stops women progressing in science. Extra maternity leave is not going to help if it puts women further behind the publication scramble. To put it bluntly, in my opinion this is the real problem:

1. A career in science is horribly unfriendly to a balanced life. There is no security or safety, every step of the way 90% of people are going to jump or be pushed. Everyone is smart at the top, that isn't enough, you also have to be lucky and obsessively determined. Most tenure-track professors don't even take weekends or holidays - they can't afford to be left behind.

2. Society still has structural sexism built in. Yes, women are now free to pursue any career they want, in addition to their previous workload. If it was purely child-rearing that was a problem the blockade would be in all scientists who have children. Instead the burden falls disproportionally on women scientists who have children, because on average they still end up doing more of the work than men. Consider the recommendations of the report: six weeks of paid maternity leave and a week of paid parental leave. Even if the recommendation is passed, women will be expected to do six times more child-rearing work than men.

These problems are much harder than simply paid parental leave, although obviously that would be a positive contribution. Instead we need to tackle the two fundamental issues. The science career needs to be made more family friendly, or at least not a horrific all-consuming ordeal. We can't continue with the same massive bottle-necks in careers or with a system where every person works themselves to death to stay in the game one more round. Competitive peer review has grown into a destructive monster that chews people up and spits them out. Secondly men need to pull their own weight rather than expecting women to sacrifice their time to make up for a thoughtless spouse.