Marc Goulden

Do Babies Matter? The Effect of Family Formation on the Lifelong Careers of Academic Men and Women.

When I first became the Dean of the Graduate Division at Berkeley last year, I had an extraordinary experience. Fifty-one percent of the 2,500 new graduate students whom I welcomed were women. Thirty-five years ago that number would have been closer to 10%. The students I welcomed included not only doctoral students, but also graduate students seeking professional degrees in law, public health, social welfare, optometry, etc. On the Berkeley campus there is no medical school, but if there were, women would be close to the majority in that profession as well.

Marriage and Baby Blues: Redefining Gender Equity in the Academy

Traditionally, gender equity in the academy is evaluated in terms of women’s professional success as compared to men’s. This study examines gender equity not only in terms of professional outcomes but also in terms of familial outcomes, such as childbirth, marriage, and divorce. Using data from the Survey of Doctorate Recipients as well as data from a 2002 to 2003 survey of the work and family issues facing ladder-rank faculty in the nine campuses of the University of California system, the authors followed more than thirty thousand Ph.D.s in all disciplines across their life course and surveyed more than eighty-five hundred active University of California faculty. Results indicate that gender equity in terms of familial gains is as elusive as gender equity in terms of professional employment, raising the fundamental issue of what gender equity means in a university setting or in any fast-track employment setting.

Keeping Women in the Science Pipeline

Premier science largely depends on the quality of the pool of future scientists. Women now represent a large part of the talent pool in the United States, but many data sources indicate that they are more likely than men to “leak” out of the science pipeline before obtaining tenure at a college or university. The authors’ research examines this issue in detail, drawing on multiple sources, including the Survey of Doctorate Recipients and several original surveys. Their findings show that family formation—most important marriage and childbirth—accounts for the largest leaks in the pipeline from graduate school to the acquisition of tenure for women in the sciences. The authors also find that researchers receive limited benefits when it comes to family responsive policies, such as paid maternity and parental leave, and that young scientists receive the least. Together, federal agencies and universities can make headway in solving this systemic problem.

Alone in the Ivory Tower

The authors use data from the 2000 Census Public Use Microdata Sample to examine the likelihood of a birth event, defined as the household presence of a child younger than 2 years, for male and female professionals. Physicians have the highest rate of birth events, followed in order by attorneys and academics. Within each profession men have more birth events than women. For men, occupational variation in birth events can be explained by marital status, income, and spousal employment. These factors only partially account for occupational differences in birth events for women.