Academia as a woman who wants a family

[SteamKing]

He's a billionaire! He could look like Gollum and he'd have hoards of women after him!

A 'hoard' is a stockpile. OTOH, a 'horde' is a ravenous mob of people.

Still, the bigamy laws apply even unto billionaires. Gates, who shows no such tendencies, could engage in serial monogamy, but he can't take multiple wives simultaneously, even he moves to Utah.

 

[analogdesign]

A 'hoard' is a stockpile. OTOH, a 'horde' is a ravenous mob of people.

Touché.

Well, could you in that case say he has "Binders full of women?"

 

[MidgetDwarf]

I prefer the word coffers full of women.

And who says marrying women. I am sure bill gates has had enjoyed the flesh of many venuses throughout his 60 years of life.

 

[SteamKing]

I prefer the word coffers full of women.

And who says marrying women. I am sure bill gates has had enjoyed the flesh of many venuses throughout his 60 years of life.

Post #23

Bill Gates, Party Machine? I don't think so. His temperament is not that of a TMZ or Page 6 kinda guy. The big scandal in Bill's life has been Windows.

 

[moontiger]

So this is really something that's been bugging me for awhile, though I still have a lot of time. I'm only 21 now and in my 3rd year of undergrad. I plan to go on to graduate school, get a PhD, postdoc, and then become a professor. A long, arduous process, but one that I'm (so far) willing to attempt.

My question is this: do you know any women that have succeeded in academia (i.e., become a professor ideally) while still maintaining a family?

I'd really like to begin a family while I'm in my 20's or early 30's, but after I finish graduate school I'll probably be 28-29, then postdoc for a few years, and then all that is even before I start to look for a position somewhere.

Does anyone know a woman who has had children/a family during graduate school? A postdoc? Does she take some years off? How does it work?

Hello. I am a former female physics professor at a four-year college. No, typically you do not take time off; that will be a big red flag on your CV. Here are the phases when I have known people to have kids:

Grad School: I went to a Big 5 graduate school. I only know of one (male) physics student who had children during his PhD. It was very difficult for him (and probably more so for his wife), although he did manage to finish on time by choosing a very laid-back advisor who was not around much. The advisor recommended that he not continue further in academia, though.

Postdoc: I do know one woman theorist who married during graduate school and had two children as a postdoc. She was very, very brilliant and hardworking, and also had a supportive advisor who allowed her to work part time for several years. She is now faculty. Her husband was also a professor so they had a two-body problem but managed to find jobs near each other. I visited her once to give a talk. Her life was crazy busy but she was managing and doing very well. The other woman theorist I know who had two kids during her postdoc is still languishing in postdocs a decade post PhD. But she was in a field where she might not have found a job anyway.

Junior Faculty: I know a very large number of women who had children (usually two) after beginning tenure-track positions. This seems to be the most common path--people marry in grad school and then have children as soon as they become junior faculty. Of course you have to navigate all the two-body problems first. That's not easy.

I began my own TT position at 30. I initially thought I had the perfect job to raise children--located in a safe, idyllic college town where any future kids of mine would go to school with other professors' kids, schedule flexibility, unscheduled time whenever kids would have vacations, etc. I saw numerous women profs who were married with kids. But a semester or two in I realized the job was not really that family friendly--it was really, really time consuming. I was working as many hours as medical residents and investment bankers, and a lot of the work was just awful stuff like grading hundreds of exams and then meeting with 20 students who wanted to argue their grades. There was no such thing as sick leave if you got sick...any days you took off teaching, someone else had to cover--and that person was already probably working way too hard. And unfortunately due in part to all the moves and temporary positions I held beforehand, I had not actually met the right person. I had assumed it would happen for me; I'd meet another professor, or something. But the job was in a rural area and I rapidly realized that all the other women who were married with kids had all come there as married couples...they didn't meet their partners in Podunk, because there was nobody to meet.

I stayed a couple of years and got out. I'm now married with kids and I work in industry. Kids would not have been impossible in my TT job, but I find industry much friendlier.

 

[StatGuy2000]

Here is an unrelated question that I wanted to pose to all of you at Physics Forums. Which industries can be said to be the most family friendly in the US, in terms of allowing for flexibility for women to be able to raise children without going through too many hurdles, as well as providing the most generous family benefits to women?

 

[moontiger]

Here is an unrelated question that I wanted to pose to all of you at Physics Forums. Which industries can be said to be the most family friendly in the US, in terms of allowing for flexibility for women to be able to raise children without going through too many hurdles, as well as providing the most generous family benefits to women?

I would say something that does not require one to train into one's 30s, where the nature of work is such that working from home is possible, jobs do not require extensive travel, and where part-time opportunities are available. I would guess that jobs in software or web development might be likely to fit this bill, but I don't know. My only actual job experience is as a physicist.

 

[analogdesign]

Here is an unrelated question that I wanted to pose to all of you at Physics Forums. Which industries can be said to be the most family friendly in the US, in terms of allowing for flexibility for women to be able to raise children without going through too many hurdles, as well as providing the most generous family benefits to women?

I would say one good one is public health. It is the culture in that field to have a more "project-oriented" career where you change jobs ever couple of years and there isn't a lot of stigma for taking a few years off or becoming a consultant for a while. This is very hard in the other fields I have specific knowledge of (namely engineering and physics in academia and industry). It is also normal (in many public health organizations) to allow work part-time work which is rare in a professional career.

 

[JakeBrodskyPE]

Here is an unrelated question that I wanted to pose to all of you at Physics Forums. Which industries can be said to be the most family friendly in the US, in terms of allowing for flexibility for women to be able to raise children without going through too many hurdles, as well as providing the most generous family benefits to women?

Utilities tend to be stable, sedate places. The bureaucracy can be deep at times, but they do generally offer good job security and decent benefits. I have built a career at a large water utility where. After three years of service, one receives 19 days of annual leave per year and after 15 years of service we get 26 days of annual leave every year (literally one day off every two weeks), federal holidays, and not only maternity leave, but paternity leave as well. Overnight travel for work is rare. You can take some work home with you if you feel you must, but if you want to walk away from the crazy at the end of the day, you usually can.

However, senior staff positions are sometimes called upon for a week of 24 hour call. I was able to avoid that when my kids were too young to leave on their own.
I do know some who earned Ph.D degrees in other related fields who stumbled into this kind of work. They like it.

In general, this is not one of the sexier, high profile fields, We don't generally get people who go to school thinking, "when I graduate, I'm going to design stuff for a sewage treatment plant." But some smart people do stumble across this place. and a few find it relaxed and interesting enough to stick around.

 

[analogdesign]

In general, this is not one of the sexier, high profile fields, We don't generally get people who go to school thinking, "when I graduate, I'm going to design stuff for a sewage treatment plant." But some smart people do stumble across this place. and a few find it relaxed and interesting enough to stick around.

My father (now retired) designed waste-water treatment plants all over the world (although mostly in the US). I wonder if you've come across him over the years... small world. He worked for a consultant engineering firm, which I think is slightly less family-friendly that a utility.

 

[jack476]

I mostly agree with you. I'm in my late 30s and I have a baby on the way so obviously I didn't overthink it. That said, the incidence of some birth defects actually grows to numbers I would hesitate to call small. For example, by the early forties, a woman has a 2 - 3% chance of having a fetus with Down Syndrome. That's enough of a chance to give me pause.

But that's only Down syndrome. At any age, you have similar odds of having a child on the autism spectrum. You have anywhere between 5% and 10% chance of having a child with ADHD no matter what your own genetics are at any age. Your chances of having a child with bipolar are also between 2% and 3%, and your own age would have nothing to do with this. There is always a non-zero risk that your child will be born with a disability and nothing you can do about it.

My own experience with this argument is mostly that it's a statistic waved around by socially conservative types. It came up extremely frequently in our high school sex ed class, which was abstinence-focused and sponsored by a quasi-religious conservative PAC. Our book had an entire chapter devoted to the subject of why it's your social, moral, and biological priority to reproduce ASAP, and it reeked of BS.

 

[Arsenic&Lace]

It's doable. There are two female professors who are tenured and had children later, in their 30's, at my home institution. But my impression is that they have had to work even harder than their male counterparts, and they both have very supportive husbands.

 

[Niflheim]

But that's only Down syndrome. At any age, you have similar odds of having a child on the autism spectrum. You have anywhere between 5% and 10% chance of having a child with ADHD no matter what your own genetics are at any age. Your chances of having a child with bipolar are also between 2% and 3%, and your own age would have nothing to do with this. There is always a non-zero risk that your child will be born with a disability and nothing you can do about it.

My own experience with this argument is mostly that it's a statistic waved around by socially conservative types. It came up extremely frequently in our high school sex ed class, which was abstinence-focused and sponsored by a quasi-religious conservative PAC. Our book had an entire chapter devoted to the subject of why it's your social, moral, and biological priority to reproduce ASAP, and it reeked of BS.

I agree with the first part, but are you trying to imply that religious and conservative people think that people should reproduce as soon as they can?

 

[Dishsoap]

I also went to a religious school for middle and high school, and I can confirm that a lot of religious (though I'm not sure about conservative) people tend to be in support of a "God-planned" family, meaning no birth control... which, for obvious reasons, tends to result in having kids younger.

 

[jack476]

I agree with the first part, but are you trying to imply that religious and conservative people think that people should reproduce as soon as they can?

No, just that the curriculum had a very clear political angle and played rather loose with the facts. I said that the argument that it's somehow ideal to have children younger and that women ideally should be homemakers and child-rearers is typically a religious and conservative position, not that all religious conservative people argue that.