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 threadEmmie (me)
@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.

Oct 4, 2024 at 3:50pmWeb