Why Women Leave Academic Physics

Poor pay. Long hours. The two-body problem. Family-unfriendly environment. Having to move repeatedly. The grant grind. Sexual harassment. These are some of the reasons that female physicists and astronomers leave academia, according to an ongoing survey launched in early March.

The survey asks why people left, whether they felt gender discrimination, and how happy they were before and after leaving academia. By press time, some 75 women from all rungs on the academic ladder had filled out the survey.

The most interesting trend, says survey author Sherry Towers, a postdoc in particle physics at Fermilab, “is that women who left academia after doing at least one postdoc appear to be far more unhappy with the field upon leaving than women who leave academia immediately after finishing their PhD.” None of the respondents, she adds, said they left academia because they felt they couldn’t match the performance of their male peers. (Read the responses or participate in the survey at http://www-d0.fnal.gov/~smjt/survey_response.html .)

Posting the survey responses on the World Wide Web “gives people a chance to look at what’s going through other people’s heads,” says Towers. “Leaving academia is often seen as a failure, and the culture of physics academia strongly discourages people from even talking about the fact that they might be considering alternate career paths.”

Among the survey’s flaws, says Towers, are that “the responses are voluntary, so you don’t know if they are just some unhappy tiny fraction of people, or the norm. And you don’t know if men leave for the same reasons that women complain about—they couldn’t see balancing work and family, no role models, isolation, discrimination.” What’s more, given that the survey was advertised on list servers for women in physics, it’s unlikely to reach those who have not kept close ties with the field. Towers says her next step will be a more statistically rigorous survey, of both women and men, that would “look at whether there are career dissatisfactions that are gender dependent.”

For her part, Towers is job hunting—outside of academia. “Having two or more kids, in my subfield, is often the kiss of death to your academic career if you are a woman,” she says. “So it looks like I’ll leave academia this summer. I don’t want to leave. I adore physics.”