Women Scientists Admit, “I Wanted More Kids”

3,455 people answered questionaires, the report doesn't say how many of these were men, how many were women.

It would be interesting to know that, and it would be interesting to know how many female sceientists weren't asked to take part in this study.

(For example, if there are 100,000 female scientists in the US, and only 1,600 of them were asked this question, is it really representative of the whole? [Most polls only ask 1000 people the questions, and then generalizations are made for the remaining hundreds of thousands of citizens of the US.)

Still...interesting...

From Bnet.com: Women Scientists Admit, “I Wanted More Kids”

Why don’t more women pursue careers in the sciences? A new study, published in the journal PLoS ONE, suggests a simple, if saddening, answer: Nearly half of women scientists say their career has caused them to have fewer children than they’d like. About a quarter of men also expressed similar disappointments–even though the male scientists polled seem to have about the same number of children as everyone else in the U.S.

The questions asked by the researchers, Elaine Howard Ecklund of Rice University and Anne Lincoln of Southern Methodist University, were brutally blunt. They asked how many hours each person worked, if they were married, if they had kids and if they had fewer children than they wanted because of the demands of their career. The researchers polled 3,455 scientists, from graduate students to tenured faculty, in astronomy, physics and biology in “top 20″ departments, as judged by the National Research Council in 2005 and U.S. News and Word Report. Here’s what they found:

* Nearly half of women scientists had fewer children than they’d like because of their careers. The strain seemed the worst among post-docs-55.4% of female postdoctoral students said they had fewer children than they wanted. Almost 40% of women grad students agreed, as did 45% of female science faculty.
* Men are missing out on some aspects of fatherhood, too. Again, the post-docs have it the worst: 39% of male postdocs say they have fewer children than they’d like, compared to 20.3% of male grad students and 24.5% of male faculty.
* Male scientists are more likely to be married than female ones. This holds true at every stage of their careers. By the time they become professors, about 64% of women professors are married, compared to 74.6% of male professors.
* Male scientists are more likely to have children than female ones. Again, this is true for grad students, postdocs, and faculty. About 83% of male professors are married, compared to 72% of females.
* Having fewer children than desired had a bigger negative effect on the ‘life satisfaction’ of male scientists than female ones. The survey also asked graduate students and post-docs if they were considering a career switch. One in four grad students and one in four post-docs said they were. Those who said they had fewer children than they would have liked were more likely to consider a switch to another field.
* The gender differences didn’t have to do with the number of hours worked. Male and female scientists work about the same number of hours.

Do Scientists Have Higher Expectations?

One particularly curious aspect of this research is that male scientists seem to have nearly the same number of children as everyone else in the U.S. In 2008, the U.S. fertility rate was 2.05 children per woman. The average male scientist has 2.05 children, so it’s interesting that so many of them would say they wanted more kids, and believe their career is to blame for the fact that they didn’t. For women scientists, the number of children is lower: an average of 1.88 children. But if nearly half of women scientists wanted more kids, that still seems pretty high.

What’s going on here? Are scientists more likely to want bigger families? Are they more likely to see their careers as detrimental to their personal lives? Is their work unusually demanding?

Or am I missing something in the statistics?