Nerd bravado, cont'd.

[mmcirvin]

Via Daring Fireball: Philip Greenspun's brutal article advances a theory as to why there are fewer women than men in science: "They found better jobs." Greenspun thinks that the nerd-macho emphasis on ultimate intellectual achievement prevents young male students from recognizing that by any rational standard science really, really sucks as a career. Willful blindness or no, I suspect that anyone who is or has been in the business will snicker at his essay with dark recognition.

I'm not sure it explains everything, such as the differences between male and female fractions in different disciplines, and different countries. ...Or maybe it does. I remember that Physics Today did a big transnational study years ago and found that the countries where physics was most overwhelmingly male were countries were it was commonly held to be something you could only do if you had innate talent. Maybe it isn't that that attitude drives out women; maybe the women are just being economically rational and the thought of being ratified as an innate genius disproportionately attracts men, especially young men, who wouldn't have any reason to stick with it otherwise.

I know that stubborn pride was a part of what kept me going as long as I did; in some corner of my mind I still think of my decision to quit upon getting the Ph.D. as washing out rather than selling out. But that wasn't the whole appeal. Fundamentally, in hindsight, I think I didn't so much want to be a physicist as I wanted to be a guy who knows about physics, specifically general relativity and quantum field theory. Aside from some imagined prestige emanating therefrom, these were things I didn't understand and was curious about, and I got as far as I needed to in order to get the information.

Comments

[iayork.livejournal.com]

I've heard (without stats) that it's easier to get tenure in Canada than in the US. I'm having a hard time finding stats at all, though, for either country. The best I've done so far is a claim that somewhere between 6 and 35% of PhDs get tenure within 5-6 years of their degreee -- but that's essentially meaningless, not only because of the wide range, but because almost no one I know even comes up for tenure within 5 years of their degree. These days, a 5-6 year post-doc is standard, and then if and when you move into academia you have another maybe 5 years before you come up for tenure.

The stat I want to see is what proportion of assistant professors (tenure track) ultimately get tenure, and I can't dig that up via Google or other sources. My hunch is that it's around 40-60%, but I don't know if that's even close.