Mastodawn

Half of all science publishers quit within 10 years. Women quit more than men. Bunch of quitters!

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-03222-7

🤔Quit? Or were driven out?

My favorite* part is that women in CompSci, Engineering, Math, and Physics, are less likely to stop publishing than women in less sexist academic fields. Possibly because we run young girls in Math/CS/Eng/Physics through a sexism gauntlet from day 1, so by the time they're grown women the survivors cope with gendered hostility better.😮

(*Least)

Nearly 50% of researchers quit science within a decade, huge study reveals

Twenty years of publishing data across many countries and disciplines show women are more likely than men to leave research.

This is EU data, but speaking of math: US people, don't do the math on being a poor Black girl with straight As, who takes out loans for 4 years of undergraduate tuition + 5 years of grad school tuition to get a PhD, and then only being able to use it for under 9 years. 🤡

Brilliant Black girls tend to have much poorer parents than the average American, and so need to borrow more for college. They're also more likely to excel in school and complete more levels than Black boys.

1/N

20 years after the first year of college, the typical white student has paid down 94% of their borrowed amount.👍🏻

20 years after the first year of college, the typical Black student still owes 95% of their initial borrowed amount.😮

So US college education and loans *increase* the racial wealth gap, not reduce it🙂🙃

https://dfpi.ca.gov/2023/02/13/student-loan-debt-a-disproportionate-burden-on-black-and-latino-borrowers/

Which is the real reason that some US folk are so against student loan forgiveness: much of that *$2 trillion* in debt, is held by educated Black women.

2/N

And for my European friends that are struggling to understand the economics of this:

Most of the Black women that still owe 95% of the original loan amount, have been making the required payment amounts, every month, for 20 years.

Imagine I clone you 3 times, making clone1, clone2, and clone3 of you.

Clone1 I lend €1,000.00

Clone2 I lend €100,000.00

Clone3 I lend €1,000,000,000.00

All at 6% interest.

Based on income, I set the monthly repayment amount to be €200.00. I am so kind!🤡

3/N

craignicol Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke is the root problem the salary gap (and likely the mortgage gap, in that black workers are far less likely to have the inherited wealth required to get a mortgage) which means lower payments and therefore more interest, or is there extra racism built in to student loans on top of that?

1. Lots of stuff. In the 80s, a Reagan advisor said that if college was affordable, that we would create an "educated proletariat." So they made college more expensive for most Black people.

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/110794448767679670

2. Black families have less wealth (because racism), so need to borrow more just to attend college. Then, they can't earn enough to pay it back, because they're paid less for doing the same job (more racism).

mekka okereke :verified: (@[email protected])

@[email protected] Not just "seem to exist" College used to be cheap. Then Roger Freeman (worked for Nixon and Reagan) said “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].” Reagan agreed. So they changed state college tuition structure to what it is today. And now here we are. 🤷🏿‍♂️ https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/

Hachyderm.io

craignicol Oct 5, 2024

@mekkaokereke thanks. 2 was what I expected, but 1 is new to me. It took until Blair for college to be paid for over here, which is still shit, bit a lot less baggage coming from the socialist side of the aisle. Far more of a betrayal though.

craignicol Oct 5, 2024

@mekkaokereke but that's before Blair was busy running defence for Bush and everyone saw who he really was.

Pete Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke Holy crap, 95% after 20 years! That statistic really deserves the 😮

isotope239 🥸💻🇺🇦😣Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke I might add that "some US folk" (cough cough, REPUBLICANS) specifically don't like educated Black women because people like Jasmine Crockett, Fani Willis, and Letitia James are extremely competent and never hesitate to speak truth to power.

Venita Oct 4, 2024

@isotope239 @mekkaokereke It's not only Republicans. The biggest pushback I received during my work life was from women White and Black. There were the benevolent White women benefactors who let you know your place, and the Black women fighting for ever shrinking slice of promotion pie.

mattg Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke I imagine there was a brief time when Sallie Mae actually made college more affordable, but at this point, it's just rocket fuel for university greedflation.

Sheeb Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke always loved this graph demonstrating how wealthy, 'bad' students are for more likely to graduate from college than non-wealthy, 'good' students.

Ben Ramsey Oct 4, 2024

@Shebeencounter @mekkaokereke Do you have a link to the source for this graph? I’d like to share the source.

Sheeb Oct 4, 2024

@ramsey @mekkaokereke I'm actually looking for it... I'll let you know

Sheeb Oct 4, 2024

@ramsey @mekkaokereke I think this is it...

https://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/18/magazine/who-gets-to-graduate.html?_r=0

Who Gets to Graduate?

Rich students complete their college degrees; working-class students like Vanessa Brewer usually don’t. Can the University of Texas change her chances of success?

The New York Times

Darrin West Oct 4, 2024

@Shebeencounter @mekkaokereke This makes a great case for free education (even give it to the rich, I don’t care). Look at all those lost opportunities for our society in the lower line. They could have been helped (by normalizing the income gap), then we would all have been better off (by having more smart citizens with degrees). Instead, the arrogance of the bootstraps view is hurting us all.

Sheeb Oct 4, 2024

@obviousdwest 100%. We don't need means testing. We just need services.

Jürgen Hubert Oct 4, 2024

@obviousdwest @Shebeencounter @mekkaokereke

Speaking as a German from a working class family, American-style tuition fees certainly would have scared me away from studying.

In fact, during my studies of physics, I did contemplate going to the USA as an exchange student. But then I took a look at the tuition fees they charged(*) at the American university that my own was partnered with, thought: "Are these guys NUTS?", and decided to go to Scotland instead.

And I am very glad that public German universities _still_ don't charge any tuition fees.

(*) That was $8000 per term, back in the late 1990s. I gather that tuition fees at American universities have increased a tad since then.

Jürgen Hubert Oct 4, 2024

@obviousdwest @Shebeencounter @mekkaokereke

Mind you, there's of course still racism and sexism in the German education system. Just not in _this_ part.

@juergen_hubert @obviousdwest @Shebeencounter

But why is US education so expensive? By now, y'all already know.

Why is everything that's weird and self-destructive in the US that way? The answer is of course racism.

Eg, in the 80s, an advisor to Ronald Reagan warned that cheap college tuition leads to "an educated proletariat," which he didn't want. So to prevent this, they intentionally made college education unaffordable for most. Seriously.

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/110794448767679670

1/N

mekka okereke :verified: (@[email protected])

@[email protected] Not just "seem to exist" College used to be cheap. Then Roger Freeman (worked for Nixon and Reagan) said “We are in danger of producing an educated proletariat. … That’s dynamite! We have to be selective on who we allow [to go to college].” Reagan agreed. So they changed state college tuition structure to what it is today. And now here we are. 🤷🏿‍♂️ https://theintercept.com/2022/08/25/student-loans-debt-reagan/

Hachyderm.io

@juergen_hubert @obviousdwest @Shebeencounter

And again, Black folk are *disproportionally* impacted, because we are *more likely* to be poor. But there are many times more white folk than Black folk in the US. There are so many of you!

👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻🧔🏿‍♂️👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻👴🏻

What this means, is that there are a lot of poor white people. And a system designed like this *hurts white people the most*.

Let me say it again more directly: poor white kids get hurt most by the anti-Black racism of US college financing.🙂🙃

Grassroots Joe Oct 5, 2024

@mekkaokereke @juergen_hubert @obviousdwest @Shebeencounter

If you don't believe Mekka, go read Heather McGhee's great book on the subject, The Sum of Us.

In fact go read it even if you do believe him. It's a great book.

BenCgva Oct 5, 2024

@joeinwynnewood @mekkaokereke @juergen_hubert @obviousdwest @Shebeencounter
The Sum of Us really is a great book.

I'm an American living in Europe for the last 7 years. There is plenty of racism over here, but it has never distorted society like it has in the USA. Indeed, America is so racist, when you criticize racism they think you're criticizing America.

Jürgen Hubert Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke @obviousdwest @Shebeencounter

In #Germany, the proletariat is kept away from universities in a different manner.

While this varies by region, many of the German states channel kids into three different school types after fourth grade (around the age of 10 or so):

- Gymnasium (grammar school): Students who complete the Gymnasium get the "Abitur", which is the primary entrance requirement for universities. (Some particularly popular fields of study such as Law or Medicine require high grade averages, but less popular ones like Physics do not)

- Realschule: Children who go there tend to go to trade schools after finishing Realschule. This doesn't have as much negative status in Germany in the USA - the German trade school system is top notch. Still, university degrees have a higher social status.

- Hauptschule: Students who finish Hauptschule might be able to get some trade apprenticeship, but this school type has increasingly become the dumping ground for children the German education system has given up on.

So how do children get into one of these three school types? Well, their grades in 4th grade matter - but so do the recommendations of their primary teachers. Who might have a whole bunch of prejudices about children from nonwhite, working class, or immigrant backgrounds.

Parents who have an academic degree of their own tend to know what matters and how to ensure that their children get into the Gymnasium, but parents from poorer backgrounds often do not. It _is_ possible to get the Abitur later on, but that requires extra effort and more years of study, and many do not bother.

I came from a working class background and was lucky enough to get into the Gymnasium, study, and even get a PhD. But many other children in Germany from disadvantaged backgrounds aren't so lucky.

Alexandre Morin Oct 6, 2024

@obviousdwest @juergen_hubert @mekkaokereke @Shebeencounter educated working class is bad for rich people. The lack of empathy is eye-watering.
Nowadays, the owner class is trying to lock out the white collar upper-middle class from the means to join them. AI to the rescue of the billionaires, those struggling saps…

Veronika Cheplygina Oct 5, 2024

@juergen_hubert @obviousdwest @Shebeencounter @mekkaokereke I wanted to go the UK in the zeroes but the tuition fee without an EU passport was astronomical

And glad that the Netherlands based its tuition on citizenship status, rather than nationality

PJ "Vote Green" Coffey Oct 5, 2024

@Shebeencounter

Even a dumbass rich kid is more likely to graduate by about 8% points than the smartest poor kid?

That is quite a thing to see.

Brian Marick Oct 17, 2024

@Shebeencounter @mekkaokereke Thanks for the graph. For no good reason at all, I’m writing an essay on the various rhetorical tricks Dinesh D’Souza uses to put across his lies in /Illiberal Education/. Your graph helped illustrate a point.

mhoye Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke This is what makes "we'll fix this by recruiting underrepresented minorities into STEM" such a terrible idea.

If I went to an engineer and said "half of these widgets are silently and unaccountably falling out the side of this process", and their solution was "we just need to shove more widgets in the front", they'd be laughed out of their job.

But we said that about underrepresentation in STEM/FOSS for _years_. And all it did was let a bunch of awful people avoid accountability.

ShadSterling Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke when I first learned what grad school was I also learned the adage that if they won’t pay you to do it you’re probably not good enough. I guess grad student stipends were enough to live on for my parents’ generation; I think we should go back to that and then some, in addition to being more inclusive both in school and out

Elizabeth Sudduth Oct 4, 2024

@ShadSterling @mekkaokereke Grad school stipends now are not terrible. Our alumni who go to grad school, who mostly grow up scraping by and then work throughout college, no loans, find their grad stipends adequate to live on.

Assuming the Black woman did her 5 years of PhD in a funded research position in a reasonable cost-of-living area with a general knowledge of how to get by with a lower income, she should be okay and not need loans. She definitely should have tuition waived.

@hydropsyche @ShadSterling

GA is the least bad state to go to college / grad school for Black woman.♥️ Which is part of why the *city* of Atlanta has more Black doctors than many other *entire states* in the US. Not kidding.

But it's still not great. By the time we even get to grad stipends, many Black women (~82%) are already an average of $35K in debt. And the amount that those women owe, goes up 4 years after graduation, not down.

https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/student-loan-debt-by-race/

2024 Student Loan Debt by Race | BestColleges

Student loan debt varies drastically by race. Find student loan demographics, Black student loan debt statistics, and debt by race and gender.

BestColleges.com

Michael Busch Oct 4, 2024

@ShadSterling @mekkaokereke In California as of 2022; graduate students were not getting paid much more than I got paid in Pasadena 15 years before that, while the cost of living was far higher.

It took unionization and strikes to get the current students the 50% raise they needed.

And, per earlier comments, there is systemic exclusion at the undergraduate level before that.

Mishell Baker gladly Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke Just want you to know - due to my health I have pretty much winnowed my social media feeds down to pictures of flowers and birds and stars - and you. Because no matter how brutal the truths you give us, you always know just how to make the reasons and the solutions clear, and I learn so much. I never feel like you're just "Doomscroll"; it feels like you're out to change the world one post at a time, and I love that. So thanks for being you.

♥️ Yes! We can change this stuff!

(🤔Flowers and birds and stars is a much better feed though! Honestly that sounds so great! BRB... going to go look at that!)

Mishell Baker gladly Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke Ha, yes, sometimes even the bravest of us just need a bit of respite. Enjoy. :)

Robotistry Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke I definitely wouldn't have made it through my PhD in Electrical Engineering in the 90s without learning how to cope in an extremely male-dominated environment.

As an undergraduate, it was an unusual event to have another woman in my science and engineering classes. In grad school, out of over 240 grad students in my program, I was one of 12 women, 8 of whom were at my campus.

I made a conscious choice to never learn how to make coffee.

Kevin Archie Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke PhD students in STEM are usually funded, so they're often carrying less debt than, say, humanities majors and so can keep going in low-pay academic positions for longer

True. But by the time they reach PhD programs, much of the damage is already done:

https://hachyderm.io/@mekkaokereke/113249888038781726

mekka okereke :verified: (@[email protected])

Attached: 3 images @[email protected] @[email protected] GA is the least bad state to go to college / grad school for Black woman.♥️ Which is part of why the *city* of Atlanta has more Black doctors than many other *entire states* in the US. Not kidding. But it's still not great. By the time we even get to grad stipends, many Black women (~82%) are already an average of $35K in debt. And the amount that those women owe, goes up 4 years after graduation, not down. https://www.bestcolleges.com/research/student-loan-debt-by-race/

Hachyderm.io

Emmie (me)Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke From my experience it's way worse than just racism/sexism... (which sounds like a terrible thing to say out of context but)

As in: there is kind-of an insider knowledge in academia that you won't make it unless you received training from one of the top labs...

The "top labs" are, for better or worse, overwhelmingly led by European/white male PIs at elite institutions (that don't get many students who are not white anyway). There are exceptions but I think the NIH systematically tends to under-fund black PIs a lot, due to mismatches in interests

Add on top of that of being a minority I don't think things look well

There's also this funny news article from Nature News on the statistics of Nobel Prize winners (https://www.nature.com/immersive/d41586-024-02897-2/index.html). I highly suspect they are trying their best not to say the quiet part out loud on this report so... yeah

How to win a Nobel prize: what kind of scientist scoops medals?

What subjects have past winners studied? What age were they when they won? Where do they live? Nature crunched the data on every science prizewinner to find out.

Colm Ó Donnchadha Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke I think there's a lot of extrapolation going on, lots of students publish and then move to industry post graduation, where they won't publish ?

Cool cool.

And why did they move to industry? What is the top reason that women leave academia?

https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-023-03251-8

I bring this up, because many graduate students, especially women, choose to go into industry rather than stay in academia where they might keep publishing, to avoid the toxic environment. Others make the industry choice for financial reasons.

Toxic workplaces are the main reason women leave academic jobs

Women feel driven out by problems with workplace culture more often than by lack of work–life balance.

Dawn Ahukanna Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke @ColmDonoghue

Whenever women and academia comes up as a topic, I’m reminded of Katalin Karikó, 2023 Nobel prize winner and demoted professor whose MRNA research enabled Covid and other vaccine delivery
- https://www.nobelprize.org/prizes/medicine/2023/press-release/
- https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Katalin_Karik%C3%B3

Press release: The Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine 2023 - NobelPrize.org

NobelPrize.org

your auntifa liza 🇵🇷 🦛 🦦Oct 4, 2024

THIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIIS!!!

🗣️ AM STILL MAD ABOUT IT!!!
https://mastodon.social/@blogdiva/111165989366187891

and yes, i am one of those women who were harassed, overworked and traumatized out of academia. and am still mad about it.

@dahukanna @mekkaokereke @ColmDonoghue

Dawn Ahukanna Oct 6, 2024

Related - https://discuss.systems/@irene/113257105381384792

Irene Zhang (@[email protected])

Attention to my faculty friends: The University of Washington Allen School of CSE is an unsafe environment for women, so as grad application season starts, please tell your students not to apply. There are at least 3 men in the systems lab that have sexually harassed numerous women and they continue to do so. More details below: It has been 3 months since the women of the UW systems lab sent a letter detailing three incidents of sexual harassment and bullying. The university has bounced them from the Title IX office to HR with no resolution. There is an ongoing HR investigation with the women handing over dozens of incidents and pages of documentation (emails, text messages). At least one of the men has been documented to be physically violent, and he has sexually harassed women across the department, not just in the lab. Despite this, the women of the lab have been forced to leave their coworking space, leaving them in a precarious position where they must risk interacting with violent men. The systems lab is still holding lab events with the men actively under investigation. The Allen School has become a place where women are AFRAID to go to work and at least three women have been driven out due to harassment. If you know women who are thinking of attending grad school, tell them to avoid UW, especially in systems. I’m happy to put them in touch with the women of the UW systems lab or discuss alternate options with them.

discuss.systems

Jürgen Hubert Oct 5, 2024

@mekkaokereke @ColmDonoghue And academia in general is a toxic work environment to start with - how much worse must it be for those who are actively discriminated against.

Michael Busch Oct 4, 2024

@ColmDonoghue I personally have seen far too many cases where students might want to stay in research positions or go into teaching; but have to take higher-paying industry jobs because they need to pay down student loans.

One student took a job with McKinsey - knowing just how evil that company has been - because they needed the money.

They quit as soon as they could afford to.

This operates at the same time as systemic sexism & racism in academia, as @mekkaokereke rightly pointed out.

Colm Ó Donnchadha Oct 4, 2024

@michael_w_busch @mekkaokereke in Europe? Where these data are from? Where tuition is of the order of a grand a year?

Michael Busch Oct 4, 2024

@ColmDonoghue @mekkaokereke These data are not just from Europe.

Kwiek & Szymula 2024 considers all 38 OECD countries: https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10734-024-01284-0

Covering the United States, Canada, Mexico, Australia, Japan, South Korea, and a few other countries as well as the EU.

The supplementary material details how the USA has the second-highest overall rate of people leaving their cohort out of those 38; with a higher than average difference between men and women.

Quantifying attrition in science: a cohort-based, longitudinal study of scientists in 38 OECD countries - Higher Education

In this paper, we explore how members of the scientific community leave academic science and how attrition (defined as ceasing to publish) differs across genders, academic disciplines, and over time. Our approach is cohort-based and longitudinal: We track individual male and female scientists over time and quantify the phenomenon traditionally referred to as “leaving science.” Using publication metadata from Scopus—a global bibliometric database of publications and citations—we follow the details of the publishing careers of scientists from 38 OECD countries who started publishing in 2000 (N = 142,776) and 2010 (N = 232,843). Our study is restricted to 16 STEMM disciplines (science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine), and we track the individual scholarly output of the two cohorts until 2022. We use survival analysis to compare attrition of men and women scientists. With more women in science and more women within cohorts, attrition is becoming ever less gendered. In addition to the combined aggregated changes at the level of all STEMM disciplines, widely nuanced changes were found to occur at the discipline level and over time. Attrition in science means different things for men versus women depending on the discipline; moreover, it means different things for scientists from different cohorts entering the scientific workforce. Finally, global bibliometric datasets were tested in the current study, opening new opportunities to explore gender and disciplinary differences in attrition.

SpringerLink

Jürgen Hubert Oct 5, 2024

@michael_w_busch @ColmDonoghue @mekkaokereke

...why am I not surprised that Germany ranks worst in Europe?

Maybe it's because the state education ministries have "maintaining a decent churn rate" among junior academics as an explicit policy goal. #IchBinHanna

Jenny Fx Oct 5, 2024

@michael_w_busch @ColmDonoghue @mekkaokereke my senior was really interested in majoring in physics in college. He wanted to be a researcher- until he looked at the potential salaries.

Michael Busch Oct 5, 2024

@urbanfoxe @ColmDonoghue @mekkaokereke Researcher salaries for physics majors are often quite high, but not necessarily for research in physics.

Unless one is willing to work on weapons projects; which I as a physics major was not but which some of my classmates in undergrad were - or were pressured into for financial reasons.

Franchesca Oct 4, 2024

@mekkaokereke I got kicked out of my first engineering class for “disrupting the class”. It was an extracurricular class full of boys from other schools (I went to an all girls grammar school). The boys would not settle down with a girl in their class. The lecturer running the course took the easy way out by punishing me instead of the boys. I did engineering at university, and I’m still in the industry after 20+ years trying to incubate diversity in software engineering. #SpiteDrivenDevelopment

Brecht Savelkoul Oct 5, 2024

@mekkaokereke Alternatively, maybr both fields are equally sexist, but misogynists in STEM are less subtle about it, making it easier for women to steer clear of them.

Cat Hicks Oct 5, 2024

@brecht @mekkaokereke but doesn't "less subtle about it" mean more sexist as a field, rather than "equally sexist"? We are interested in characterizing not just the interiority of those involved but the shape of the behaviors, in such definitions of "sexism in the field"

Cat Hicks Oct 5, 2024

@brecht @mekkaokereke additionally "less subtle" sexism being present in a field implies a normative endorsement of it which can make it LESS difficult to steer clear of it in order to operate in professional contexts. In other words, overt sexism makes sexism more routine, and you are expected therefore to have to navigate it more routinely than in cultures where it is more hidden. This is part of the way misogynistic cultures and such biases are self-reinforcing. So idk, very complex stuff.

@grimalkina @brecht @mekkaokereke I can feel some kind of truth in this idea.

Being that when you're primed for it, you just roll your eyes and sigh and carry on or fight when needed - but in a supposedly non-/less-sexist field you might first take things personally or seriously before questioning and realising what's going on.

Cat Hicks Oct 5, 2024

@sarajw @brecht it's important to note we're implicitly wondering about "how would the same woman act in two different fields," which is a valid important question to model, but is NOT the situation in the world because these fields do not admit women in the same way -- as noted in the screenshot @mekkaokereke shared above! So there is an achievement*gender interaction already selected for by the field entry paths themselves. This is a classic issue in studying STEM disparities

@grimalkina @brecht @mekkaokereke yes that makes sense too. Like you say it's complex.

I've come up through the stem pathway myself, and I don't feel I've suffered much sexism (aside from the occasional ass that everyone agrees is an ass) - though it's probably also true that there may be some underlying systemic stuff that I've not been aware of.