20 ms·

Academia is just as hostile. It is even a stated policy that you are supposed to move countries between your undergrad (up to masters), Ph.d, multiple postdocs,

Academia is just as hostile. It is even a stated policy that you are supposed to move countries between your undergrad (up to masters), Ph.d, multiple postdocs, all the way until you get tenure, to the point that some specific funding schemes require this. At the same time and without even a single bit of irony, they advertise a family friendly environment and a women first hiring policy.

sgt 3y ago
So people will inevitably postpone having children due to this (in addition to all the other reasons that may exist for you).
- mnky9800n 3y ago
  Or just not have them at all. Children are expensive and postdoc salaries suck.
  - vt85 3y ago
    [dead]
- BenoitP 3y ago
  Indeed. This coupled to the fact that female fertility is easier when younger (easier to become pregnant, fewer complications, better physical shape, not menopaused, etc.), is IMHO the number one factor in a lot of male/female statistical discrepancies. My wife studied law, and we saw every single one of her female friends abandon or pause a successful career in order to have children. Just like academia, careers in law often tend to invade nights and weekends; and that's just not compatible with having children.
  - escapedmoose 3y ago
    Fertility doesn’t have much to do with it after the kid is already born, and that’s when parental leave becomes relevant. The fact that women are still seen as the de facto parent responsible for childcare for all those nights and weekends is more a cultural thing than biological.
    - lotsofpulp 3y ago
      In my experience, for at least the first year, there is no replacing women as the de facto parent responsible for childcare due to breastfeeding, and the child’s emotional needs. Well into the post breastfeeding toddler years, no one but my wife would have been able to satisfy the needs of my kids, and I feel like that is probably nature more than nurture. Mothers should be given at least a year of bonding leave, and fathers too just so the market does not reward men over women.
    - rtkwe 3y ago
      Well there's one massive factor, at least until the kid is weaned, the mom is the easiest food supply for the kid. It's vastly easier than pump and bottle or even formula and bottle. Beyond that phase though it's true it's mostly societal, once the kid is eating real food there's little reason for a particular parent to be the primary care giver.
    - michaelt 3y ago
      True, but fertility will still matter if they decide to have another. Decide you want four kids at age 20? No problem. Start at age 33, though? I hope you weren't planning to drink beer for the next decade.
    - sgt 3y ago
      I can't explain it, but there's definitely a biological aspect too that matters a lot. The mother understands deeper things about the bond with the baby that us dads don't have a clue about.
  - cge 3y ago
    Academia often involves a lot of time, but often in informal and flexible ways, with relatively little inflexible time (eg, lectures), and campuses that are not necessarily child-unfriendly. Unlike law, most likely, it isn't necessarily incompatible with having children if the university accommodates it. In some ways universities can even have particular advantages in accommodating children: they may well have entire departments of students being taught to educate and care for children (this can also include both educators and medical students), and spaces and resources that can be useful, especially for older children, like libraries. They might already manage things like housing, and can help with some worries, like trying to look forward to college tuition. Neither my parents nor most of the academic parents I knew growing up paused or abandoned their academic careers. We just spent a lot of time on university campuses. Departments were often fine with even infants being brought to offices, and classes their parents were teaching, as long as they weren't too disruptive. Quite a bit of work could be done at home, and home was often quite close to campus. While I was usually was with my mother, I think there was also easily accessible childcare. By the time I was an undergraduate, I knew the campus and library very well, and many faculty and staff knew me.
- fsflover 3y ago
  Sounds like a good thing to me in terms of the climate emergency.
  - vt85 3y ago
    [dead]
  - Cthulhu_ 3y ago
    I don't like this line of thinking. Climate change isn't caused by population, but by industry, corporations and capitalism. Individuals and their choices are the least impactful pieces when it comes to reducing emissions and the like.
    - greedo 3y ago
      The world's population has more grown by 4.5B since I was born. The idea that this hasn't impacted climate change is naive at best.
      - hnbad 3y ago
        If those 4.5B lived like Americans, yeah, that'd be the cause of all of our problems. Luckily they don't. But if you want to cull population based on carbon footprint, you should start with the billionaire class, then work your way down the income brackets of the US and then the rest of the West. The Earth's resources could comfortably sustain the current population. In terms of resources we could also feed and provide shelter to every single person alive today, which would reduce population growth as child mortality, lack of access to reproductive care (including safe and legal abortions) and parental socio-economic distress are the biggest contributors to high birth rates. But we can't do all of that AND run the Global North's economy the way we do AND afford a billionaire class. Alas that seems to be what we are currently doing.
        gruez 3y ago
        >If those 4.5B lived like Americans, yeah, that'd be the cause of all of our problems Good luck convincing everyone on earth to downgrade their lifestyles. The amount of people who are committed to living a ascetic lifestyle to save the planet is negligible. >The Earth's resources could comfortably sustain the current population Without lifestyle downgrades? Given how much environmental problems we're running into already I find this to be unlikely. >But we can't do all of that AND run the Global North's economy the way we do AND afford a billionaire class. Alas that seems to be what we are currently doing. How much is the "billionaire class"'s contribution to global warming?
DiabloD3 3y ago
Academia has always seemed like a colossal joke to me. You pay a lot of money, give up a lot of opportunities to advance in life that are offered to everyone else, have no skills relevant to working in any industry related to your field of study, forced to give up family and community, will probably end up marrying someone who is also from Academia, all so you can have three little letters next to your name. Ain't worth it, man.
- chongli 3y ago
  That’s how status and externalities work. People choose academia for the non-monetary compensation. They want to work in a field that feels deeply meaningful to them. And they want the status that comes with being a professor.
- kemiller2002 3y ago
  I read an article a little while ago where someone recounted their academic career in Physics. What really hit home was his retelling of a class in undergrad where his professor (paraphrased here), "What you learn here really isn't physics, and most of you in this class aren't smart enough to learn physics." He got his PhD in physics, so it wasn't just him giving up. Everything I look at seems to add up to that statement across multiple disciplines. We place such an emphasis on academia which really teaches almost nothing useful to a career, etc. to the majority of people. I don't use my degree at all.
- keiferski 3y ago
  That’s one view. Another view is that getting paid (or even having a career) to study philosophy or art history or a similar topic is better than just about any job out there, no matter how little the pay or how many hoops you have to jump through. For reference, I have a degree in philosophy but ultimately decided not to go for a PhD.
- jasonhong 3y ago
  I'm a professor in computer science, so things are probably quite different than in other academic fields. There are some clear downsides to academia (lower salary, always looking for funding, limited geography, lots and lots of meetings), but there are also many positive aspects too. These include: (a) teaching can be really fun, in terms of inspiring the next generation and opening their minds to new topics, (b) no one tells us what to do, we can work on what we personally think is important (though funding that is a separate question), (c) we're considered experts that can be called on by journalists, government agencies, patent lawyers, and immigration lawyers to help out, (d) we can do consulting to help with tech transfer and to learn more about industry problems, (e) thanks to Bayh-Dole act in USA we can also commercialize the technologies we develop. Again, computer science is quite different, in that there are a lot more industry jobs available, a lot more money sloshing around compared to other fields, and less of a need to do multiple postdocs. Also, don't underestimate the value of teaching. Not only is it a great value to society as a whole, but it can be highly intrinsically rewarding. I have a large stack of thank you cards and small gifts from students over the many years, and still occasionally get fun emails from students sending me new examples to use in class or stories of how they're applying what they learned. So yes, there are a lot of tradeoffs involved with academia. But for me personally, I feel that I've made a positive difference in many people's lives, through my teaching, my research, and my advocacy, in ways that I wouldn't have been able to elsewhere.
pyrale 3y ago
Academia also has a lot of work to do to reconcile the idea of an expanding research sector, and environmental responsibility. It's kind of hard to reconcile exotic conference destinations and increased travel to visit your family with a future with less planes, and academia being a very small ivory tower with few people is a thing of the past, so this can't be pushed under the rug anymore.
AnimalMuppet 3y ago
In the United States, there are medical programs that average more than one divorce per resident.
- flerchin 3y ago
  I don't doubt it. Do you have a link for this?
  - AnimalMuppet 3y ago
    https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/divorce-because-of-medicine.1054600/ https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/divorce-because-of-... Second-hand, but the best I could find on short notice. The money quote: 'I remember someone saying that their residency program advertised a "110%" divorce rate: every one of their residents divorced, and of the ones who remarried, 10% of those divorced as well.'
cge 3y ago
Academia in a certain era, at least in the US, used to acknowledge that it posed several specific difficulties for relationships and families, and addressed them through policies and programs, for example, spousal hiring policies, family housing, university-run childcare, child-friendly working policies, preferential admission and tuition for children of university staff, etc. I was born and raised in academia; for a while, it worked reasonably well. There was the sense that universities often saw themselves as being a bit like villages in that respect. It has been depressing to see how much of that is now gone, seemingly often ostensibly for reasons of fairness. Of course, before that time, there were also problems, like the embarrassment of refusing to hire Goeppert-Mayer, that may have led to the relationship accommodations in the first place.
- dfxm12 3y ago
  seemingly often ostensibly for reasons of fairness. Nah, university presidents are just greedy and wanted to play with that money themselves.
  - cge 3y ago
    Of course. It's just that fairness is often given as a reason, especially since the accommodations often might be unfair in other professions, but were meant to counteract specific unfair problems. For example, spousal hiring could be seen as nepotism; in the case of Goeppert-Mayer, it famously wasn't allowed because of that. Yet outside of a handful of major cities, the local university is often the only place in the area someone can have a strong academic career, and academic careers often involve moving, so for a couple to both have academic careers, they often need to find a university willing to hire them both, and to search for positions together, something that is very difficult, especially when in different fields, unless the university has procedures to handle it. Add to this that academics often have social lives within academia, and this can become a very common difficulty.

sgt 3y ago

So people will inevitably postpone having children due to this (in addition to all the other reasons that may exist for you).

mnky9800n 3y ago
Or just not have them at all. Children are expensive and postdoc salaries suck.
- vt85 3y ago
  [dead]
BenoitP 3y ago
Indeed. This coupled to the fact that female fertility is easier when younger (easier to become pregnant, fewer complications, better physical shape, not menopaused, etc.), is IMHO the number one factor in a lot of male/female statistical discrepancies. My wife studied law, and we saw every single one of her female friends abandon or pause a successful career in order to have children. Just like academia, careers in law often tend to invade nights and weekends; and that's just not compatible with having children.
- escapedmoose 3y ago
  Fertility doesn’t have much to do with it after the kid is already born, and that’s when parental leave becomes relevant. The fact that women are still seen as the de facto parent responsible for childcare for all those nights and weekends is more a cultural thing than biological.
  - lotsofpulp 3y ago
    In my experience, for at least the first year, there is no replacing women as the de facto parent responsible for childcare due to breastfeeding, and the child’s emotional needs. Well into the post breastfeeding toddler years, no one but my wife would have been able to satisfy the needs of my kids, and I feel like that is probably nature more than nurture. Mothers should be given at least a year of bonding leave, and fathers too just so the market does not reward men over women.
  - rtkwe 3y ago
    Well there's one massive factor, at least until the kid is weaned, the mom is the easiest food supply for the kid. It's vastly easier than pump and bottle or even formula and bottle. Beyond that phase though it's true it's mostly societal, once the kid is eating real food there's little reason for a particular parent to be the primary care giver.
  - michaelt 3y ago
    True, but fertility will still matter if they decide to have another. Decide you want four kids at age 20? No problem. Start at age 33, though? I hope you weren't planning to drink beer for the next decade.
  - sgt 3y ago
    I can't explain it, but there's definitely a biological aspect too that matters a lot. The mother understands deeper things about the bond with the baby that us dads don't have a clue about.
- cge 3y ago
  Academia often involves a lot of time, but often in informal and flexible ways, with relatively little inflexible time (eg, lectures), and campuses that are not necessarily child-unfriendly. Unlike law, most likely, it isn't necessarily incompatible with having children if the university accommodates it. In some ways universities can even have particular advantages in accommodating children: they may well have entire departments of students being taught to educate and care for children (this can also include both educators and medical students), and spaces and resources that can be useful, especially for older children, like libraries. They might already manage things like housing, and can help with some worries, like trying to look forward to college tuition. Neither my parents nor most of the academic parents I knew growing up paused or abandoned their academic careers. We just spent a lot of time on university campuses. Departments were often fine with even infants being brought to offices, and classes their parents were teaching, as long as they weren't too disruptive. Quite a bit of work could be done at home, and home was often quite close to campus. While I was usually was with my mother, I think there was also easily accessible childcare. By the time I was an undergraduate, I knew the campus and library very well, and many faculty and staff knew me.
fsflover 3y ago
Sounds like a good thing to me in terms of the climate emergency.
- vt85 3y ago
  [dead]
- Cthulhu_ 3y ago
  I don't like this line of thinking. Climate change isn't caused by population, but by industry, corporations and capitalism. Individuals and their choices are the least impactful pieces when it comes to reducing emissions and the like.
  - greedo 3y ago
    The world's population has more grown by 4.5B since I was born. The idea that this hasn't impacted climate change is naive at best.
    - hnbad 3y ago
      If those 4.5B lived like Americans, yeah, that'd be the cause of all of our problems. Luckily they don't. But if you want to cull population based on carbon footprint, you should start with the billionaire class, then work your way down the income brackets of the US and then the rest of the West. The Earth's resources could comfortably sustain the current population. In terms of resources we could also feed and provide shelter to every single person alive today, which would reduce population growth as child mortality, lack of access to reproductive care (including safe and legal abortions) and parental socio-economic distress are the biggest contributors to high birth rates. But we can't do all of that AND run the Global North's economy the way we do AND afford a billionaire class. Alas that seems to be what we are currently doing.
      - gruez 3y ago
        >If those 4.5B lived like Americans, yeah, that'd be the cause of all of our problems Good luck convincing everyone on earth to downgrade their lifestyles. The amount of people who are committed to living a ascetic lifestyle to save the planet is negligible. >The Earth's resources could comfortably sustain the current population Without lifestyle downgrades? Given how much environmental problems we're running into already I find this to be unlikely. >But we can't do all of that AND run the Global North's economy the way we do AND afford a billionaire class. Alas that seems to be what we are currently doing. How much is the "billionaire class"'s contribution to global warming?

DiabloD3 3y ago

Academia has always seemed like a colossal joke to me. You pay a lot of money, give up a lot of opportunities to advance in life that are offered to everyone else, have no skills relevant to working in any industry related to your field of study, forced to give up family and community, will probably end up marrying someone who is also from Academia, all so you can have three little letters next to your name. Ain't worth it, man.

chongli 3y ago
That’s how status and externalities work. People choose academia for the non-monetary compensation. They want to work in a field that feels deeply meaningful to them. And they want the status that comes with being a professor.
kemiller2002 3y ago
I read an article a little while ago where someone recounted their academic career in Physics. What really hit home was his retelling of a class in undergrad where his professor (paraphrased here), "What you learn here really isn't physics, and most of you in this class aren't smart enough to learn physics." He got his PhD in physics, so it wasn't just him giving up. Everything I look at seems to add up to that statement across multiple disciplines. We place such an emphasis on academia which really teaches almost nothing useful to a career, etc. to the majority of people. I don't use my degree at all.
keiferski 3y ago
That’s one view. Another view is that getting paid (or even having a career) to study philosophy or art history or a similar topic is better than just about any job out there, no matter how little the pay or how many hoops you have to jump through. For reference, I have a degree in philosophy but ultimately decided not to go for a PhD.
jasonhong 3y ago
I'm a professor in computer science, so things are probably quite different than in other academic fields. There are some clear downsides to academia (lower salary, always looking for funding, limited geography, lots and lots of meetings), but there are also many positive aspects too. These include: (a) teaching can be really fun, in terms of inspiring the next generation and opening their minds to new topics, (b) no one tells us what to do, we can work on what we personally think is important (though funding that is a separate question), (c) we're considered experts that can be called on by journalists, government agencies, patent lawyers, and immigration lawyers to help out, (d) we can do consulting to help with tech transfer and to learn more about industry problems, (e) thanks to Bayh-Dole act in USA we can also commercialize the technologies we develop. Again, computer science is quite different, in that there are a lot more industry jobs available, a lot more money sloshing around compared to other fields, and less of a need to do multiple postdocs. Also, don't underestimate the value of teaching. Not only is it a great value to society as a whole, but it can be highly intrinsically rewarding. I have a large stack of thank you cards and small gifts from students over the many years, and still occasionally get fun emails from students sending me new examples to use in class or stories of how they're applying what they learned. So yes, there are a lot of tradeoffs involved with academia. But for me personally, I feel that I've made a positive difference in many people's lives, through my teaching, my research, and my advocacy, in ways that I wouldn't have been able to elsewhere.

pyrale 3y ago

Academia also has a lot of work to do to reconcile the idea of an expanding research sector, and environmental responsibility. It's kind of hard to reconcile exotic conference destinations and increased travel to visit your family with a future with less planes, and academia being a very small ivory tower with few people is a thing of the past, so this can't be pushed under the rug anymore.

AnimalMuppet 3y ago

In the United States, there are medical programs that average more than one divorce per resident.

flerchin 3y ago
I don't doubt it. Do you have a link for this?
- AnimalMuppet 3y ago
  https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/divorce-because-of-medicine.1054600/ https://forums.studentdoctor.net/threads/divorce-because-of-... Second-hand, but the best I could find on short notice. The money quote: 'I remember someone saying that their residency program advertised a "110%" divorce rate: every one of their residents divorced, and of the ones who remarried, 10% of those divorced as well.'

cge 3y ago

Academia in a certain era, at least in the US, used to acknowledge that it posed several specific difficulties for relationships and families, and addressed them through policies and programs, for example, spousal hiring policies, family housing, university-run childcare, child-friendly working policies, preferential admission and tuition for children of university staff, etc. I was born and raised in academia; for a while, it worked reasonably well. There was the sense that universities often saw themselves as being a bit like villages in that respect. It has been depressing to see how much of that is now gone, seemingly often ostensibly for reasons of fairness. Of course, before that time, there were also problems, like the embarrassment of refusing to hire Goeppert-Mayer, that may have led to the relationship accommodations in the first place.

dfxm12 3y ago
seemingly often ostensibly for reasons of fairness. Nah, university presidents are just greedy and wanted to play with that money themselves.
- cge 3y ago
  Of course. It's just that fairness is often given as a reason, especially since the accommodations often might be unfair in other professions, but were meant to counteract specific unfair problems. For example, spousal hiring could be seen as nepotism; in the case of Goeppert-Mayer, it famously wasn't allowed because of that. Yet outside of a handful of major cities, the local university is often the only place in the area someone can have a strong academic career, and academic careers often involve moving, so for a couple to both have academic careers, they often need to find a university willing to hire them both, and to search for positions together, something that is very difficult, especially when in different fields, unless the university has procedures to handle it. Add to this that academics often have social lives within academia, and this can become a very common difficulty.