An Academic Career in Science Continues to Be a Hard Sell for Women: Putting Ceci et al. (2023) Into a Broader Perspective.

In this issue, Ceci et al. (2023), in their careful, thoughtful, and extensive study “Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science,” present evidence of progress in gender equality in four important outcomes in the 21st century. Their work gives hope to those women seeking or working in a career in academic science that many of their efforts will be rewarded similarly to those of their male counterparts. It also validates the work done by administrators, foundation personnel, academics, and university officials to try to even the playing field in this sector once dominated by men. In identifying areas that need new initiatives to target stubborn and persistent inequality, the authors imply that the domains that they explore are only a subset of the areas in which women continue to struggle to maintain equal footing with men. This Commentary follows the authors’ line of thought and examines women’s academic career path in science using a broader lens. An academic career in science is a hard sell for a woman. First, there is the widespread belief that women have lower ability than men in mathematics, which inherently spreads to science. No matter how much women continue to succeed in these fields, if the president of Harvard University, an eminent economist, believed this strongly enough to make a public statement as recently as 2005,1 there must be a host of less well-educated people, including educators and high school counselors, who follow suit. And these are the people whose beliefs and behaviors impact the choices that girls and young women make. Second, the academic career is structured in ways that are likely to discourage entry or hasten the speed of exit of women from these professions. Generally, women, and increasingly men, are looking for careers that allow a balance of work and family. The price of workplace flexibility often includes lower wages, underemployment, or less interesting work in return for job interruptions, short weeks, a part-time schedule, and work flexibility during the day. At first glance, an academic career seems to tick off one of the boxes, schedule flexibility, as many academics can conduct research and write papers at home during periods of time when family responsibilities are absent. But a closer look reveals a more complex picture. Most academics teach college classes that adhere to a hard and fast schedule, albeit one that can be planned well in advance. Research in science, especially in the laboratory sciences, can be rigid, with precise experiments and tight schedules in expensively equipped college laboratories with a team of researchers. Further, the expected pattern of career advancement may be especially problematic for women. As economists point out, the structure of the early academic career resembles a tournament in which participants compete over a period of time and the outcome is an all-or-nothing prize. In most academic settings, the junior faculty member has 6 to 7 years to produce research output, the quality of which senior professors and administrators judge in order to determine whether the researcher is granted tenure. If the junior faculty member is awarded tenure, they have the opportunity to continue as a tenured member of the faculty of the institution until retirement. Failing to get tenure, the academic may look for a similar tenure-track job at a less prestigious institution, move to a non-tenure-track career path within the university setting, or leave academia altogether. These kinds of employment situations can result in a “rat race” equilibrium in which quality is hard to judge: If tournament officials use some measure of work intensity as a signal of quality when judging winners versus losers, the result will be an excessive amount of work by tournament winners. Landers et al. (1996) were the first to acknowledge this rat race in the 1170832 PSIXXX10.1177/15291006231170832PrestonPsychological Science in the Public Interest research-article2023