In 2004 I developed a career satisfaction survey posted to the physicists at the lab as part of the registration for a conference at the lab. 500 people registered for the conference, of which around 250 responded to the survey.
The respondents were males and females at all stages of the academic career ladder, from graduate student to full professor. The survey was developed in conjunction with a sociologist at the University of Colorado at Boulder who had done previous studies of gender-issues in the sciences.
Because I have been talking about this survey a lot in recent posts, I spent some time over the last couple of evenings and dug out the data and the analysis programs.
Here are some gems:
There were 54 and 14 male and female professors, respectively, who responded to the survey. 20% of the males had to do two or more postdocs before going on tenure track. In contrast, 50% of the females had to do two or more postdocs before going on tenure track. The p-value testing the hypothesis that the fractions for the two groups are actually the same is p<0.02 To summarize, females are more than twice as likely as the males to have to do two or more postdocs before being deemed "experienced" enough to go on to tenure track. Even though we only had around 70 respondents who were professors, the differences between the two groups were large enough to be statistically significant. Notably, this result does not change if we examine physicists with and without children separately.
Of great interest in the survey is the responses of the younger physicists (ie; those less than 40 years old), who are unlikely to have tenure and are in the process of building their careers. The young physicists are composed of 116 and 39 males and females, respectively. The age distribution of the males and females less than 40 years old is nearly identical.
The survey asked these young physicists how many peer reviews they had performed of publications in the last five years. The mean for the males is 0.66 publications with a standard error on the mean of 0.13. The mean for the females is 0.31 publications with a standard error on the mean of 0.11. The p-value testing the hypothesis that the means of these two groups are actually the same is p<0.02. To summarize, young males are more than twice as likely to be asked to peer review publications.
The survey also asked these young physicists if they felt that their boss actively fostered their career. 34% and 50% of the males and females, respectively, felt that their boss did not actively foster their career (p-value<0.05). To summarize, females were around 50% more likely to feel that their boss did not actively foster their career.
The average weekly working hours of young males and females was virtually identical (around 52 hours per week on average, with a large standard deviation of 13 hours).
The young females in the survey (compared to the males) were less happy with their careers, less likely to see themselves in the field in five years time, and were less likely to see themselves ultimately obtaining tenure. The females were less likely than the males to have children, and, if they did have children, had on average fewer children than the males.
In a later post I will talk about the part of the survey that asked the physicists what their primary likes and dislikes were in the field. There were interesting gender differences in the responses to that portion of the survey.
