mekka okereke Oct 4, 2024

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.

Show threadmekka okereke Oct 4, 2024

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

Show threadShadSterlingOct 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
Show threadElizabeth Sudduth

@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.

Oct 4, 2024 at 3:03pmWeb
Show threadmekka okereke Oct 4, 2024

@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