Link here. I’m not sure if this is serious or a Jonathan Swift-worthy “modest proposal” designed to show the dysfunction of the current system. Later tweets suggest Chen is serious, but one can interpret the proposal either way. It’s worse than Chen thinks. The current standard career track then goes on to 1-2 years as a postdoc, 6-10 years assistant/associate professor, often with “delay the clock” visits to other institutions or “restart the clock” lateral moves. And the current ethic strongly pressures women to delay child-bearing until tenure. It’s also hard to have children when your job lasts 1-2 years so you know you will have to move. That all adds up to a lot closer to 40 than early 30s. And freezing eggs is not magic. Fertility treatment is not guaranteed. Many women who counted on technology discover in their late 30s that biology will not cooperate.
That all sounds exactly right. Begs the sticky question of tenure. Also which sort of institution do these observations apply to? They seem spot on for top 50 R1 universities. But there are far more jobs (?) at the remaining 1-2,000 other colleges and universities. Is the story the same there?
I have to confess that it’s too long for me to digest. But let me say one observation as a female who has done a PhD. I’ve seen many women earning their phds while having kids. Some even gave birth to 2 before finishing her PhDs in 5 years! Who the heck says that you’ll have to wait until having a tenure to have kids in the US? In fact, health insurance was the best when you’re a student. And when kids are at young age, it doesn’t cost much to raise and there’re lots of government subsidies for kids. Hence, I’ve seen more and more postdocs in biology or chemistry (yep, most of them will never be able to get out and become a tenure track professor if you know how competitive those fields are) got kids before they realized they would have to come out to industry to make more money. And, economics is still a really good major to get hired in industry. Even Amazon hires economists with a good salary. I think a better solution, probably is, to have more graduate student social events so to help female PhDs to find partners.
Economics is fascinating and a main, if not the main driver in human history. Still, we don t really need that many university economists. So much of what fills economic or finance journals is useless, pointless, repetitive blabla.
Solution is to admit fewer people to PhD programs - or eliminate tenure.
Problem is none of the top programs want to under admit for a variety of reasons (including what a crime it would be if a grad from a second tier institution got the tenure track job instead of a top tier grad).
MBA and law programs overproduce grads, but not even every graduate of a top program expects they will be nearly guaranteed a lifetime of success due to their degree (unlike grads in guilds like medicine).
Problem is academia comports itself as a guild but it doesn’t have jobs.
Thank you. I’m a 5th year PhD student in economics in a top 5 program. I got married in my third year and really wanted to have a child in my fourth. I think my department is lovely and would have been deeply accepting of it. However, I still chickened out. It felt like career suicide to be pregnant and have a baby when everyone was in a frenzy to write more and more papers. I was too and now I have a bunch of drafts on topics I find interesting and cool. However I’m on the verge of quitting academia. While I was able to make it this far and love what I do, I feel exhausted by the prospect of feeling this same way for the next 8-odd years on tenure track. I want to have many children, I want a stable job, I want to stop working at 6pm and give my time to my future babies. That seems impossible on the tenure clock. It is what it is. I don’t begrudge people whose preferences allow them to spend 18 hour days on research. I can’t. So I’m taking myself out of the race.
This modest proposal strikes me as sensible. My wife opted to leave a technical career field to have children. I greatly respect the personal and professional sacrifices she made over the years as a result. However, I sometimes wonder what professional impact she might have had if she would have taken a career-and-mom approach as she is a very sharp lady. My best to those contemplating such trade-offs.
Reading this makes me wonder - why would anyone put him/herself through the wringer for an academic career? I was in an MBA program in 1991, and one of my professors suggested I might be interested in the PhD program instead. I could only laugh at the prospect of entering the academic mill, and this was before so much of the workload went to adjuncts who have no career prospects.
Women in the military have similar issues. I have personally watched excellent female officers and enlisted personnel leave the military due this exact issue, when will I have time to raise a family. Just the opinion of an old hermit.
WWII really saw the transition from women on the sidelines in the labor market to full on supporting it. We're not on wartime footing anymore - or are we, but with a different existential threat(s)?
Kill the American PhD. Try the English (not British) system. 3 year undergraduate, 3 year PhD. Done and dusted by age 25. After all, if you can't produce one good paper in 3 years then perhaps academia really isn't for you (as it wasn't for me, I'm well outside the system).
A fairly brutal prescription but one that would actually work.
Well, I will come out of this from left field (or the bleachers. Maybe the parking lot).
First, too many educational programs have become self-referential.
Really, we can't have first-rate AB in law or business programs, followed by one- or two-year paid apprenticeships, and then you pass the bar or some sort of business-school test, get your LLB or MBA and that's that?
In econ, maybe the field needs to be restructured, so it is four-years heavy on econ to an AB, and then a two-year plan to the Phd. Or even less.
I wonder what fraction of coursework is ever used later in life.
And four-year programs in all fields need need to think about cutting down to three.
Many men also spend years and years in Phd-job hunting limbo developing depressions, unable to attract mates, or worse.
BTW, if the US has "labor shortages," then keeping millions out of the work force but in dubious college courses or graduate programs...might not be a good idea.
Last crack: Sometimes I see Phds and other papers on the web. No one ever reads them. Isn't this a big waste of time?
"This is a case where coordinated effort and norm-building is useful, not just throwing up our hands at market forces."
Why is that, because econ departments are non-profit and/or otherwise don't "truly" compete against each other? (Not a rhetorical question.) If econ departments compete against each other, even if just for non-pecuniary "prestige", then why wouldn't they reform their own career track norms to attract the best women economists to gain a competitive advantage over other departments, regardless of what other departments do? (What would Gary Becker say?) It seems like the lodestar for guiding all the issues raised --- admissions, hiring, and tenure criteria; quality vs. quantity of papers; predocs, masters; weeding out grad students; years before tenure decisions --- should be, "What allows the department to attract and develop the best economists?" What is the market failure here or is it simply that non-profits don't face the right incentives?
Also, how should econ departments "coordinate" with Silicon Valley and Wall Street to ensure that the "right" number of women become economists instead of data scientists? If econ depts coordinate amongst themselves but don't include Silicon Valley and Wall Street, then don't we run the risk that econ becomes so attractive to women that we end up with too many women economists and not enough women data scientists, AI engineers, and Wall St derivatives specialists?
Not trying to be snarky here, but just trying to understand the "Economics of Women in Economics".
Thank you for this post - came because I (like many others) saw the beginning tweet and had mixed feelings with it. Your post highlighted many of the things I've experienced as a woman in a top 5, who would in an ideal (or different) world would start to have kids about now, but in reality it won't happen for 3 years or more). The reasons, as I see it, are:
(1) My partner is doing a PhD across the country. I know many other female doctoral students in similar situations.
(2) The few women who had kids during the PhD in my program had a rough time, especially so in one case where there was a divorce involved. They had poor market outcomes.
(3) Momentum of research starting 3rd-4th year; I want to sustain at least through going on the market next year rather than have to stop and start
The first reason is pretty intractable. The second and third seem addressable in theory, but it's hard to imagine this changing soon. Although my university has relatively generous policies for students who have children, it's unthinkable (to me and, well, my committee) to have to "stop" and have a kid ... just as the job market is about to hit. Maybe if I knew someone who managed to have a kid within 2 years of successfully going on the market I'd feel more optimistic about this? But I've never heard of this.
The reality is that this dilemma affects women throughout the work world where there are "greedy" or, if you prefer "needy", jobs. I have always argued that those sorts of jobs do not favor men - they favor robots. The market of employment does not care if the employee has children, it cares if you are maximally productive (however they define that - papers or widgets).
That all sounds exactly right. Begs the sticky question of tenure. Also which sort of institution do these observations apply to? They seem spot on for top 50 R1 universities. But there are far more jobs (?) at the remaining 1-2,000 other colleges and universities. Is the story the same there?
I have to confess that it’s too long for me to digest. But let me say one observation as a female who has done a PhD. I’ve seen many women earning their phds while having kids. Some even gave birth to 2 before finishing her PhDs in 5 years! Who the heck says that you’ll have to wait until having a tenure to have kids in the US? In fact, health insurance was the best when you’re a student. And when kids are at young age, it doesn’t cost much to raise and there’re lots of government subsidies for kids. Hence, I’ve seen more and more postdocs in biology or chemistry (yep, most of them will never be able to get out and become a tenure track professor if you know how competitive those fields are) got kids before they realized they would have to come out to industry to make more money. And, economics is still a really good major to get hired in industry. Even Amazon hires economists with a good salary. I think a better solution, probably is, to have more graduate student social events so to help female PhDs to find partners.
Economics is fascinating and a main, if not the main driver in human history. Still, we don t really need that many university economists. So much of what fills economic or finance journals is useless, pointless, repetitive blabla.
Solution is to admit fewer people to PhD programs - or eliminate tenure.
Problem is none of the top programs want to under admit for a variety of reasons (including what a crime it would be if a grad from a second tier institution got the tenure track job instead of a top tier grad).
MBA and law programs overproduce grads, but not even every graduate of a top program expects they will be nearly guaranteed a lifetime of success due to their degree (unlike grads in guilds like medicine).
Problem is academia comports itself as a guild but it doesn’t have jobs.
No one in the real world gets tenure anymore. Time for academia to get real.
Thank you. I’m a 5th year PhD student in economics in a top 5 program. I got married in my third year and really wanted to have a child in my fourth. I think my department is lovely and would have been deeply accepting of it. However, I still chickened out. It felt like career suicide to be pregnant and have a baby when everyone was in a frenzy to write more and more papers. I was too and now I have a bunch of drafts on topics I find interesting and cool. However I’m on the verge of quitting academia. While I was able to make it this far and love what I do, I feel exhausted by the prospect of feeling this same way for the next 8-odd years on tenure track. I want to have many children, I want a stable job, I want to stop working at 6pm and give my time to my future babies. That seems impossible on the tenure clock. It is what it is. I don’t begrudge people whose preferences allow them to spend 18 hour days on research. I can’t. So I’m taking myself out of the race.
This modest proposal strikes me as sensible. My wife opted to leave a technical career field to have children. I greatly respect the personal and professional sacrifices she made over the years as a result. However, I sometimes wonder what professional impact she might have had if she would have taken a career-and-mom approach as she is a very sharp lady. My best to those contemplating such trade-offs.
Reading this makes me wonder - why would anyone put him/herself through the wringer for an academic career? I was in an MBA program in 1991, and one of my professors suggested I might be interested in the PhD program instead. I could only laugh at the prospect of entering the academic mill, and this was before so much of the workload went to adjuncts who have no career prospects.
Women in the military have similar issues. I have personally watched excellent female officers and enlisted personnel leave the military due this exact issue, when will I have time to raise a family. Just the opinion of an old hermit.
It's two stickey wickets, John:
1. The demand for temporal flexibility.
2. The OC of having an additional (or even one!)
child.
WWII really saw the transition from women on the sidelines in the labor market to full on supporting it. We're not on wartime footing anymore - or are we, but with a different existential threat(s)?
Kill the American PhD. Try the English (not British) system. 3 year undergraduate, 3 year PhD. Done and dusted by age 25. After all, if you can't produce one good paper in 3 years then perhaps academia really isn't for you (as it wasn't for me, I'm well outside the system).
A fairly brutal prescription but one that would actually work.
Well, I will come out of this from left field (or the bleachers. Maybe the parking lot).
First, too many educational programs have become self-referential.
Really, we can't have first-rate AB in law or business programs, followed by one- or two-year paid apprenticeships, and then you pass the bar or some sort of business-school test, get your LLB or MBA and that's that?
In econ, maybe the field needs to be restructured, so it is four-years heavy on econ to an AB, and then a two-year plan to the Phd. Or even less.
I wonder what fraction of coursework is ever used later in life.
And four-year programs in all fields need need to think about cutting down to three.
Many men also spend years and years in Phd-job hunting limbo developing depressions, unable to attract mates, or worse.
BTW, if the US has "labor shortages," then keeping millions out of the work force but in dubious college courses or graduate programs...might not be a good idea.
Last crack: Sometimes I see Phds and other papers on the web. No one ever reads them. Isn't this a big waste of time?
"This is a case where coordinated effort and norm-building is useful, not just throwing up our hands at market forces."
Why is that, because econ departments are non-profit and/or otherwise don't "truly" compete against each other? (Not a rhetorical question.) If econ departments compete against each other, even if just for non-pecuniary "prestige", then why wouldn't they reform their own career track norms to attract the best women economists to gain a competitive advantage over other departments, regardless of what other departments do? (What would Gary Becker say?) It seems like the lodestar for guiding all the issues raised --- admissions, hiring, and tenure criteria; quality vs. quantity of papers; predocs, masters; weeding out grad students; years before tenure decisions --- should be, "What allows the department to attract and develop the best economists?" What is the market failure here or is it simply that non-profits don't face the right incentives?
Also, how should econ departments "coordinate" with Silicon Valley and Wall Street to ensure that the "right" number of women become economists instead of data scientists? If econ depts coordinate amongst themselves but don't include Silicon Valley and Wall Street, then don't we run the risk that econ becomes so attractive to women that we end up with too many women economists and not enough women data scientists, AI engineers, and Wall St derivatives specialists?
Not trying to be snarky here, but just trying to understand the "Economics of Women in Economics".
Thank you for this post - came because I (like many others) saw the beginning tweet and had mixed feelings with it. Your post highlighted many of the things I've experienced as a woman in a top 5, who would in an ideal (or different) world would start to have kids about now, but in reality it won't happen for 3 years or more). The reasons, as I see it, are:
(1) My partner is doing a PhD across the country. I know many other female doctoral students in similar situations.
(2) The few women who had kids during the PhD in my program had a rough time, especially so in one case where there was a divorce involved. They had poor market outcomes.
(3) Momentum of research starting 3rd-4th year; I want to sustain at least through going on the market next year rather than have to stop and start
The first reason is pretty intractable. The second and third seem addressable in theory, but it's hard to imagine this changing soon. Although my university has relatively generous policies for students who have children, it's unthinkable (to me and, well, my committee) to have to "stop" and have a kid ... just as the job market is about to hit. Maybe if I knew someone who managed to have a kid within 2 years of successfully going on the market I'd feel more optimistic about this? But I've never heard of this.
The reality is that this dilemma affects women throughout the work world where there are "greedy" or, if you prefer "needy", jobs. I have always argued that those sorts of jobs do not favor men - they favor robots. The market of employment does not care if the employee has children, it cares if you are maximally productive (however they define that - papers or widgets).
Academic women are about 90% to 95% Communist, so great news they are NOT having children.