揭祕女數學教授少的真正原因
Women are shunning academic careers in math-intensive fields because the lifestyle is incompatible with motherhood, researchers at Cornell University found in a study to be published next month in American Scientist Magazine。
Universities have long been criticized for hiring and evaluation policies that discriminate against women, but the findings of this new study point to the female biological clock as a main reason why so few women end up as professors in fields such as math, engineering, physics and computer science。
A woman who wants a family looks at the rigorous path to a tenured position and considers how old she will be before she can start a family and how little time she will have to raise her children. Many of those women opt for a more flexible career。
"Universities have been largely inflexible about anything other than the standard time table, which is you kill yourself for years and only then would you consider getting pregnant," said Wendy Williams, a human development professor at Cornell who co-authored the study with her husband, Stephen Ceci。
Williams and Ceci analyzed data about the academic careers of men and women with and without children. Before women became mothers, they had careers equivalent to or more successful than their male peers. But once children entered the equation, the dynamic changed。
Women in other academic fields such as the humanities and social sciences face similar hurdles and often leave academia as well. But because there are so many women in those Ph.D. programs, enough ultimately stay to amount to a critical mass of female professors。
In math-heavy fields, however, women make up a tiny minority of the graduate students. So when the rare few who make it through a Ph.D. program leave because universities are insensitive to their needs as mothers, the net result is virtually no women represented on faculty rosters, the study said。康奈爾大學的研究人員發現，女性很少在數學相關領域從事學術研究工作是因爲女數學教授的生活方式和母親的身份相沖突。這一研究將於下個月在《美國科學家雜誌》上發表。
長期以來，大學一直因爲歧視女性的聘用和考評政策而受到抨擊，然而這一新研究的發現指出，女性生物鐘是女性很少在數學、工程學、物理學和計算機科學等專業擔任教授的主要原因。
當一個渴望擁有家庭的女性看到通往終身教授職位的道路是如此嚴苛，想到自己成爲教授後再生育時年紀已經很大，撫養小孩的時間也很少，於是許多女性就選擇了更有彈性的職業。
康奈爾大學的人類發展學教授溫迪•威廉姆斯和她的丈夫斯蒂芬•賽西共同撰寫了這一研究報告。她說：“大學除了課程設置比較靈活外，其他很多方面都很僵化，也就是說，你要熬很多年才能得到穩定職位，才能考慮懷孕生子。”
威廉姆斯和賽西分析了男性和女性(有孩子和沒孩子)的學術生涯相關資料。在女性成爲母親之前，她們的職業和同行業的男性一樣成功，甚至更成功。但是一旦有了孩子，這一態勢就發生了變化。
在人文學科和社會科學等其他學術領域裏，女性面臨着同樣的障礙，她們也往往因此離開學術界。但由於攻讀人文社科類博士學位的女性很多，所以纔有足夠的女性最終留下來成爲女教授，使這些領域的女教授數量達到一定規模。
不過，在數學相關領域裏，女性只佔據研究生的很小一部分。因此，研究指出，當極少數獲得博士學位的女性又因爲大學對自己生兒育女的需要漠不關心而離開，其最終結果就是，沒有幾位女性能躋身理科教授行列。
