Gender Disparity in Physics: A Multifaceted Challenge

Barbara Whitten and coauthors point out in their article that family issues play a significant role in career decisions and suggest several steps departments can take to be more family friendly. However, they don’t mention the tenure process and its effect on career choices. Although conflicts between family and career occur in nearly all professions, the problem is greatly exacerbated in academia.

To obtain tenure, young professors are often forced to work extremely long hours. Therefore, they have the least time for child rearing during precisely the same years—their late twenties to mid-thirties—when they want to start families. Undergraduate women who perceive that the tenure process will force them to choose between career and family may shy away from academic careers.

Surely part of the problem arises from an overwhelmingly male academic culture that discourages women professors from having children. In my experience, many female science students, both undergraduate and graduate, are acutely aware of the disparity. They see that women professors who start families are labeled as less dedicated than their male counterparts and as having priorities incommensurate with the tenure process. I know a tenure-track female faculty member (not at my university) who worked from home after having a child and was chided by male faculty for “not spending enough time in the office.” Conversely, another female faculty member, who often brought her young child to the office, was described by the same faculty as being “distracted from her work.”

Such punitive attitudes encourage women to delay starting families until after they get tenure—often in their late thirties—even though fertility rates drop and rates of pregnancy complications rise.

I feel little progress will be made in attracting women to science until the tenure process is greatly modified and attitudes about women professors with children change.