Gals, I know y’all can do physics if you’re bound and determined—I did it for a while, without being a genius. But as I know I’ve mentioned before, you need to ask yourself why you would want to. Sure, making it as a tenured professor sounds great, but so does winning the lottery. You can’t realistically count on either outcome happening.
This experimental condensed matter physicist blogger is telling it like it really is:
This is also why I am so disgusted with certain attitudes in hiring new faculty or new staff members (if we are talking about the parallel universe of national labs). The attitude is basically – we created a situation when there are hundreds of candidates desperately applying for every position available, and because we can afford to be so selective, we can scoop the best of the best of the best, invite them for a song-and-dance presentation (”Impress me!” approach), and treat the rest of applicants who didn’t make the shortlist cut as garbage not worthy [of] our attention. The arbitrary nature of [the] selection process never ceases to amaze me, even though it’s remarkable how programs that are not even nationally ranked can attract people with stellar research records (as far as I am concerned) in hope that they may get desperate enough to accept a position that utilizes those skills in a very marginal fashion, if at all. It’s as if classically trained opera singers were hired to sing catchy commercial tunes at a supermarket to attract more customers for minimum wage pay.
Therefore, I find it somewhat disingenuous when people start talking about how to encourage certain underrepresented groups [to] enter graduate schools in sciences. We should encourage interest in science, but should we encourage more bright and talented people to follow the career path that has 95% chance of leading nowhere (after 6-7 years of living on Raman noodles through grad school and relocating a few times for a couple of 3 year postdoc stints that quickly become the norm)? I am not so sure…
Neither am I. Plus female job candidates have to deal with the swirl of biases out there that stay alive amid entrenched faculty (just check out FemaleScienceProfessor’s blog if you want a taste).