Falling off the academic bandwagon

Abstract

Women constitute approximately 45% of the postdoctoral fellows in the biomedical sciences at universities and research institutions in the USA, but a much lower percentage of women hold faculty positions. In the US National Institutes of Health (NIH; Bethesda, MD) Intramural Research Program, for example, women make up only 29% of the tenure-track investigators and hold just 19% of the tenured senior investigator appointments. A similar disparity between the ratio of men and women in independent faculty positions exists in most academic institutions across the USA (Nelson, 2005; NSF, 2004 NSF, , 2006, and statistics from Europe show a similar trend of women disappearing from the higher echelons of academia (EC, 2006).The transition from postdoctoral fellow to faculty is a period during which a worrying number of women leave academic research. Several recent surveys have tried to identify factors that lead to the attrition of women from the life sciences and engineering (University of California, 2005; Princeton University, 2003; University of Michigan, 2004;Baltimore et al, 2005), but these have not addressed the important question: why are female postdoctoral fellows falling off the academic bandwagon in greater numbers than male postdoctoral fellows?During the past ten years, the percentage of women in tenured positions at the NIH increased slightly, from 18% to 19%, but the percentage of women in tenuretrack positions remained unchanged. These facts led to the establishment of the Second Task Force on the Status of NIH Intramural Women Scientists. As part of this task force, the Postdoctoral Fellows Subcommittee set out to identify factors that might influence the decision of female postdoctoral fellows to pursue a position as a principal or independent investigator (PI). As several studies have previously identified family demands and self-confidence as factors that generally draw women away from the workforce at large (Kaplan & Granrose, 1993; Sears, 2003;Mason & Goulden, 2004;Hoonakker & Schoepke, 2005), our survey included questions to determine how these and other factors affect young female scientists in their career choices at the postdoc to PI transition.More than 1,300 intramural postdoctoral fellows at the NIH-from a total of 2,437-took part in a web-based survey. Of these, 43% were women and 57% were men, which reflects the nationwide gender distribution of postdoctoral fellows in the biological sciences (Nelson, 2005; NSF, 2004 NSF, , 2006. Although the age distribution was the same for men and women in this sample group, there was a clear difference between the percentage of men (44%) and the percentage of women (33.6%) with children (Table 1). Women with children are underrepresented in the postdoctoral workforce.The substantially lower percentage of female PIs could simply indicate that women are less likely to consider or pursue a career as a PI; therefore, we asked NIH fellows what type of career they were considering. More than two-thirds of the men but one-half of the women answered t...

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