Women, Family, and Pathways of Science/Engineering Careers

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Women, Family, and Pathways of Science/Engineering
Careers

• Yu Xie
• University of Michigan
• Georgia Tech, January 19, 2006
• Yuxie.com

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WOMEN IN SCIENCE Career Processes and Outcomes
(2003, Harvard University Press)
Yu Xie University of Michigan Kimberlee A.
Shauman University of California-Davis
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The Basic Question

• Why is there an underrepresentation of women in
  science?
• Why do we care?

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Two Sociological Reasons

• Science is a high-status occupation.
• Under-representation of women in science gt lower
  status for women in occupational structure.
• Science should be universalistic and open to
  women.

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A Policy Reason

• A shortage of scientific personnel?
• If talent for doing scientific work is unrelated
  to sex, the pool of potential scientists would be
  much larger (by 60) with women fully
  participating in science.

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Xies Proposition

• We will never fully understand the reasons why
  women are underrepresented in science if we fail
  to understand the important role of the family.

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The Legacy of the Pipeline

• There is a large body of literature on women in
  science based on the science pipeline metaphor.
• It has paid inadequate attention to marriage and
  family.

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The Pipeline is Leaking Women All the Way
Along. Science (1993)
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Human Capital Theory in Economics

• Becker (1973, 1974, 1991) Role specialization,
  with the wife specializing in household work and
  the husband specializing in market labor.
• Assumption consumption (economic well-being) is
  pooled at the family level, across all household
  members.

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Human Capital Theory in Economics

• Polachek (1979, 1981)
• Characteristics of female-typical jobs
  relatively high starting earnings, no penalty for
  withdrawal, flat growth over life-cycle.
• Not well supported, however (see Paula Englands
  work).
• Implication certain fields have trajectories
  that are more typical for female jobs than
  others.

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Trajectories Hypothesized to be typical of
Female versus Male Fields
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Life Course Approach in Sociology

• The occurrence of significant events and
  transitions in an individuals life is
  age-dependent, interrelated, and contingent on
  (but not determined by) earlier experiences and
  societal forces.

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The Life Course Approach Recognizes

• Interactive effects across multiple levels.
• Interactive effects across multiple domains
  education, family, and work.
• Individual-level variation in career tracks
• The cumulative nature of the life course

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Empirical Example 1

• Wife does more housework than the husband.
• The gender gap in housework is actually enhanced
  rather than reduced when the wife is the
  predominant breadwinner (Bittman et al 2003
  Brine 1994)
• The wife does inflexible housework that impedes
  market work the most, whereas the husband does
  flexible housework that does not impede market
  work (Noonan 2001).

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Empirical Example 2

• Economic potential or well-being is an important
  predictor of entry to marriage for men, but not
  for women (Xie et al. 2003 Manning and Smock
  1995 Smock and Manning 1997).

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Empirical Example 3

• Womens wages are negatively affected by having
  children (Waldfogel 1997 Goldin 1997).
• Many women who grew up in the 1950s now regret
  not having careers due to family responsibilities
  (Carr 2004).

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Main Features of our Study

• We study the entirety of a career trajectory.
• We analyzed seventeen large, nationally
  representative datasets.
• We spent more than 10 years.
• We try to be objective and value-free (in so
  far as it is possible).

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Synthetic cohort life course, career processes
and outcomes examined and data sources
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Does a Family Life Hamper Women Scientists
Careers?

• Marriage per se does not seem to matter much.
• Married women are disadvantaged only if they have
  children
• less likely to pursue careers in science and
  engineering after the completion of S/E education
• less likely to be in the labor force or employed
• less likely to be promoted
• and less likely to be geographically mobile

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Conceptualization of career paths following BS
Bachelor's
Degree in S/E
Graduate Studies
Working
No Grad,
Grad in
Working in
Grad in S/E
Working in S/E
Not Working
Non-S/E
Non-S/E
(State 1)
(State 3)
(State 5)
(State 2)
(State 4)
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Female-to-Male Odds Ratio by Family Status,
Recipients of BS Degrees
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Female-to-Male Ratio in Labor Force Outcomes by
Family Status
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Are Womens Geographic Mobility Limited?

• This may be true because women are more likely
  than men to be in dual-career families.
• However, we find
• Scientists in dual-career families do not have
  lower mobility rates.
• There are no overall gender differences across
  types of families.
• Only married women with children have lower
  mobility rates.

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Predicted Migration Rate by Gender and Family
Structure
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Primacy of Empirical Evidence

• The large literature on women in science has
  suffered from inattention to factual information.
  
• If we look at factual information from nationally
  representative samples, we find that childbearing
  and childrearing are strongly and consistently
  associated with negative career outcomes for
  women in science.

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Answer to the Basic Question?

• However, we do not think that there is a single
  simple answer, or a quick fix.
• There are two tendencies in finding simplistic
  explanations.
• Some scholars claim that everything is biology.
• Others claim that everything is discrimination.

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Work on the Importance of the Family Suggests

• It is not just (innate) ability to do science
  that differentiates men and women in science
  refutation of the biological explanation.
• Women married with children withdraw from science
  voluntarily it is not societal discrimination
  alone that keeps women out of science

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Individual Choice, Rational or Not?

• Individuals make occupational choices based on
  their expected experiences.
• Individuals make choices with limited
  information, rational only within the context
  of the information.
• Thus, rational choice is bounded by social
  structure and acts as an agent for social
  structure (Xie and Shauman 1997).

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Final Conclusion

• Complexity.
• Womens underrepresentation in science/engineering
  has deep social, cultural, and economic roots.
• We should give up the naive idea of finding
  simplistic explanations.