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8 The graduate student and postdoc years are the proving ground for future academics. Many students enter with clear plans to become professors, but end up changing their minds. There are many reasons to reject an academic career, but family considerations—marriage and children—are most prominent for women and a serious concern for men as well. How concerns about family affect these young scholars’ decisions is complex. Some students lack the role models that might otherwise demonstrate that work-family balance is possible in academia. For others, encountering intense professional hostility after having a baby weakens their commitment to an academic career. Sometimes marriage presents a barrier to developing two careers. The scientific disciplines, which foster a nonstop competitive race to the top, offer a particular challenge. The academy has recently focused attention on the work-family concerns of faculty, but it has largely ignored graduate students and postdoctoral fellows. This chapter considers how these young scholars confront family issues, and how a few universities are beginning to remake the academic workplace in order to retain graduate students and postdocs in the career pipeline. The New Face of Graduate Students The new generation of doctoral students is different in many ways from that of just thirty or forty years ago. Academia was once composed largely of men in traditional single-earner families. Today, men and women fill the doctoral student ranks in nearly equal numbers, and most will experience both the benefits and the challenges of living in dual-earner households. This generation also has different expectations and values from previous ones; most notably, the desire for flexibility and balance between their careers and their other goals. But changes 1 The Graduate School Years New Demographics, Old Thinking THE GRADUATE SCHOOL YEARS 9 to the structure and culture of academia have not kept pace with this major shift in students’ priorities. The outdated notion of the “ideal worker” prevails, including in a de facto requirement for sole devotion to the academy and a linear , lockstep career trajectory that permits no interruptions. Senior faculty and administration, still largely men, are not role models for the new generation of scholars when it comes to demonstrating the work-family balance and flexibility that these students desire.1 The most significant change in the graduate student body is that women are now as numerous as men. Indeed, gender parity in graduate education is one of the remarkable accomplishments of the past forty years. In 1966, just 12 percent of all American doctorates were awarded to women.2 By 2008 that number had soared to over 50 percent.3 There have also been impressive gains for minority students, particularly minority women, but they still are by no means proportionally represented. Moreover, the gender balance remains more uneven in some disciplines than in others. In 2008, women received only 28 percent of the doctorates awarded in the traditionally male-dominated physical sciences, including computer science and math, and just 22 percent of those awarded in engineering.4 Although these are lower proportions than seen today in the more human-centric disciplines such as biology and psychology, they nonetheless represent extraordinary progress. As figure 1.1 shows, over the past four decades the proportion of women Ph.D. recipients has increased more than a hundredfold in engineering, twelvefold in the geosciences, and sevenfold in the physical sciences. Since these trends appear unabated and women are outperforming men at the baccalaureate and master’s levels, it seems reasonable to assume that further gains will occur.5 In addition to being notably more female than they were three decades ago, today’s doctoral students are a bit older: The median male Ph.D. recipient is now thirty-two and the median female doctorate recipient is now thirty-three.6 Students in the natural and physical sciences often finish their Ph.D. at a somewhat younger age but are increasingly likely to spend time as postdoctoral fellows.7 They may hold these positions for years before acquiring a tenure-track job. Most women faculty will therefore be at or near the end of their childbearing years by the time they achieve tenure. Postponing a family until tenure, the old wisdom offered to women graduate students, remains bad advice for purely biological reasons.8 But what about having children during graduate school, when women are more fertile? As we shall see, few students view this as a good option. A Bad Reputation Work-family balance weighs heavily...

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