The gender gap among science PhDs in California has narrowed a fair bit, according to a new analysis by the Sacramento Bee:
In the UC system between 1994 and 1996, 527 women received doctorates in those disciplines, according to the California Postsecondary Education Commission. From 2003 to 2005, the most recent years available, that number rose to 681. That’s a roughly 30 percent increase.
A big, obvious gap still exists — but it’s shrinking. Across the UC system, the ratio of men-to-women doctorates in those four disciplines went from 4.8 to 1 a decade ago to 3.5 to 1 in the most recent figures.
The Bee found similar numbers for private colleges, and said the number of women getting PhDs in the sciences nationally went up about 20 percent in the past decade. The reason? A “snowball” effect: the more women role models you have in the sciences, the more women get into the sciences, and so on. Offhand, these statistics sound like a good start, but obviously a 1:1 ratio would be better. And the next hurdle for these women, once they have their PhDs, is getting a tenure-track job.
In my discipline (biology) it’s about 55/45 for PhDs, but for every n% of men who go on to postdoc, 0.8n% women do, i.e. it skews farther. And applicants are about 30-35%. Currently nationwide women are 20-25% of biology faculty. [Numbers from the NAS and NSF reports.]
So it’s great! The gap is shrinking in math, engineering, etc.! But the structural inequalities, even after a good thirty years of women in biology, are still having a huge impact. I imagine that it will be the same in math and such. Of course, I’m a pessimist.
I recently talked to one of my doctoral advisors. From the sound of it, only three of his female Ph.D.s (out of about a dozen over twenty years) still work in engineering. I hope to leave it soon so that will make it two and those two are very recent grads. I’m sure retention issues broaden the gap substantially.
[...] I don’t know why she needed PhDs instead of students, but this sort of reminds me of the comment thread on my post the other day. It’s hard enough for a woman with a PhD in the sciences to be taken seriously and get a secure job track. I’m sure very very few female science PhDs feel secure enough to portray themselves as sex objects on top of that. So don’t blame the sexual double-standard in this case — it’s much more to do with the leaky pipeline in general. [...]