In STEM Careers Women Face Motherhood Penalty Long Before They Actually Become Mothers
Sarah Thebaud, University of California Santa Barbara and Catherine Taylor, University of California Santa Barbara
The Research Brief is a short take about interesting academic work.
The big idea
Unfounded assumptions about how motherhood affects worker productivity can harm women’s careers in science, technology, engineering and math long before they are – or even intend to become – mothers, we found in a new study.
It is well known that women are underrepresented in the STEM workforce, including in academia. For example, women constituted only 20% of tenured professorships in the physical sciences and 15% in engineering in 2017, despite the fact that their share of doctoral degrees in those fields has increased substantially in recent decades.
We wanted to understand what might be cau...