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Comment by chriskanan | Hacker News Reader

While the title focuses on female scientists, males are also affected. From the article: "...23% of men and 43% of women who had become parents had left full-time STEM employment. ... This compared to 16% of child-free men and 24% of child-free women."

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That’s even more stark when you put it that way. Men leave at a rate of 9% more than their background rate when they have children, women leave 19% more with kids, over a base rate that even without children exceeds the male rate by 8%.

Women left at a higher rate than men.

People who had children left at a higher rate than people who did not.

Women who had children left at a rate with a greater (additional or multiplier) increase over the rate of women without children than did men with children over men without children.

So basically, post-doctoral STEM employment punishes taking the hours to parent, like so many other professional positions these days.

I think that is not clear. Many people want to leave their jobs, men rarely have the option to do so because everyone (usually first and foremost their wives) frowns upon it.

Looks like offering childcare onsite could alleviate some of this at least in the early years —but may only postpone the inevitable departure.

As far as I understand it even at these high perk Santa Clara/Silicon Valley companies childcare isn’t a given. There are waiting lists and other limits. They want to attract women, but they fall short on this aspect.

Theres also plenty of evidence that children flourish way more under the guardianship of parents* rather than at least traditional day care. Having kids should push you out of full time work because raising kids is its own nigh-full time job.

The real problems are A. the number of people who can actually do that is way below replacement rates on the current population and B. women are still dropping their workforce participation much moreso than men are.

[*] I don't think it needs to be biological parents, more that many-to-one day care, especially with rotating or inconsistent caretakers and especially the younger you get, is harmful to development, Theres a lot of research on "models" of parenting and child rearing and how effective they are at producing the "best" children by varing definitions of best, but classical day care is usually considered by most metrics one of the worst.

I don’t doubt that, but at least marginally some parents will be swayed by convenient childcare, rather than going part time or abandoning the fields.

I wonder how much of this is people leaving science to pursue far more lucrative opportunities like running mathematically intricate financial scams for Wall Street banks in order to assure a good financial future for their children.

I know STEM PhDs who have left their field to get a bog standard devops job on account of it pays twice as well.

Yes, all of the women scientists are rushing to Wall Street where the old boys club is welcoming them with open arms.

In my time on Wall Street I've had many colleagues with STEM PhDs. I can't think of a single one who is female.

Parent was explicitly referring to how this also affects male participation rates and I was speaking to that. That said, you should be more inclusive of mothers with STEM degrees when running your financial scams.

You cut the part that explained that some of them merely cut back on their hours rather than "leaving STEM," a point that is repeated at least twice in the article:

They either went part time, switched to non-STEM careers or left the workforce altogether.

Indeed, if you stare at the bar chart for a moment, you'll realize that a sufficient explanation is that women more often have the option to reduce their hours or stop working entirely. In our culture, men generally don't have the privilege of doing so.

I've lived this myself and also watched many instances of it in friends and colleagues. Is anyone really shocked by the idea that new mothers might decide they'd like to stay home and raise their kids?

As a man, I'd almost have killed to stay home and have my wife keep working, but that's just not how it is.

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