Science Progress: When Mary Ann Mason was graduate dean at the University of California, Berkeley, a frequent question she heard from women graduate students was "when is a good time to have a baby?"
For women in academic science careers, the conventional wisdom was that waiting until she had achieved tenure was the best approach.
In 1985, the national average age of scientists winning tenure was 36. But by 2003, it was over 39.
"So it's increasingly poor advice to wait until you get to tenure," she says.
Her belief is that women researchers should be able to have children whenever they want, and her new report, co-authored with colleagues Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch, explains the work-family policies that are driving women out of the academic pipeline.
Their data, taken from extensive surveys of graduate students and postdoctoral researchers within the University of California system, shows that work-life issues, and particularly decisions about when to get married and when to have children, account for the most significant loss of academic scientists in the pipeline between PhD and tenured positions.
"The leak is almost entirely, or least due primarily to family formation," said Mason, who is currently a professor and co-faculty director of the Berkeley Law Center on Health, Economic, and Family Security at the UC Berkeley.
Science Progress has a podcast discussing these issues with the authors of the study.
