From the press release:

Good qualifications, a career with good prospects, a full-time job in a mainly male environment and irregular hours are all factors that cause women to postpone having their first child. These are some of the findings from research carried out by Katia Begall in four separate studies into the relationship between working conditions and fertility. She discovered that highly qualified women working in sectors that employ relatively few women are much more likely to postpone having their first child. Women working in sectors with a relatively large female workforce, such as healthcare and education, are less likely to postpone the birth of their first child. Begall has come up with two explanations: ‘Having children appears to be “catching” in sectors employing mainly women. What’s more, it is easier to have children in these sectors as employees often qualify for paid parental leave.’ The partner’s qualifications and type of work appear to have little impact on the timing of the first child. ‘The woman’s job is the deciding factor, although we did note a delay among highly qualified men, which we put down to the fact that many of them are in relationships with highly qualified women.’

The press release is to be found here, and the complete dissertation can be found online as well.

It’s the 8th of March, so today is International Women’s Day. To celebrate this day, our university organises lectures and a debate on women’s careers in the academic world. The meeting is called Stop the leaking pipeline: the future of female academics. In the Dutch debate, the hypothesis of the Leaking Pipeline is often encountered, and I’m sure this is also the case elsewhere. But, what exactly is this leaking pipeline?

The Hypothesis of the Leaking Pipeline

Female academics are a minority, compared to male academics. This overrepresentation of men is even stronger in higher ranking positions. The Leaking Pipeline hypothesis explains this discrepancy by focusing on the strongly selective nature of an academic career. In every step (let’s say: each step from Bsc to Msc, Ph.D. to Assistant Professor, to Associate Professor, and finally to Full Professor) a strong selection in the number of candidates takes place. The Leaking Pipeline hypothesis argues that in each of these steps relatively more men are selected, and more women leave academia. As a result, the overrepresentation of men increases with each ‘juncture in the pipeline’ of an academic career (Alper, 1993).

The Leaking Pipeline is a very general hypothesis, without an explication of the exact mechanisms that are at work. Indeed, many causes can lead to the described outcome. Pell (1996) acknowledges that much of the selection between men and women takes place even before academia is entered, and goes on to argue that critical phases in the selection towards an academic career include early childhood, adolescence, sophomore year of college, and the later part of graduate school and the job entry period. Reasons include (but surely are not limited to): development of self-esteem in early life-course, girls receiving a smaller amount of training in science-related subjects during adolescence – partly due to the non-applied way science is taught (Travis, 1993), student-teacher interaction in classrooms leading to lower aspirations and performance amongst girls, female graduate student receiving less financial support, fewer female role models, and conflicts with family responsibilities.

Leaking Pipeline in the Netherlands

So, how ‘leaky’ is the ‘pipeline’ of Dutch universities exactly? At each distinct step in the academic career (from Master to Full Professor), the percentages men and women were calculated. In most discussions on the Leaking Pipeline these percentages are plotted in a scatterplot. However, this implies that each step in the academic career takes equally long (both for every individual, and on average). Therefore, a bar chart seems more applicable and is shown below. Data apply to 2007 and were derived from vsnu.nl, statline, and Van Den Brink (2009).

This figure shows several interesting things. First of all, more women than men are present at the Master level. In each step after the Masters degree, however, the percentage of women decreases and consequently the percentage of men increases. In 2007, approximately 42% of the Ph.D. students were women, and this percentage decreases at every subsequent step. 10% of all Full Professors are women. So, indeed, women are clearly underrepresented in Dutch universities.

One critical remark

To conclude, I’d like to make one single critical remark on a common interpretation of the figure above. Does this figure alone really provide conclusive evidence that in present-day Dutch universities the steps in the academic career really are leaking?

I don’t think these data are conclusive, because the numbers in the figure are also influenced by cohort replacement. Each academic step takes a couple of years, and from Master to Full Professor will average on something like 20 years. Therefore, the current situation shown in the figure results both from current appointment practices, and the practices of decades ago. In technical terms, we observe the combination of both period and cohort effects. So: even if current appointment practices have changed and now give truly equal opportunities to both men and women, we still would observe a discrepancy like shown. Also, given the fact that amongst Master-level student women are overrepresented, the figure leaves (some) room for the interpretation that future generations of academics will show a much more equal number of women and men, even when appointment procedures are left unchanged.

Opportunity for Research?

I would love to get my hands on data on academic careers to really evaluate current and past appointment practices, but as far as I’m aware these are not readily available. Such an analysis would pose high demands on data quality, for ideally one would want to analyze the combination of both the academic life-courses of academics (including those who left academia), and the outcomes of appointment procedures. Also, previous studies have shown that unexpected paradoxes can arise in this line of research. Nevertheless, the statistical techniques are there, but I’m afraid getting the data will prove more difficult …

References

Alper J (1993). The pipeline is leaking women all the way along. Science (New York, N.Y.), 260 (5106), 409-11 PMID: 17838262

Van den Brink (2009). Behind the scenes of science: Gender practices in the recruitment and selection of professors in the Netherlands Ph.D Dissertation, Radboud University, Nijmegen.

Pell AN (1996). Fixing the leaky pipeline: women scientists in academia. Journal of animal science, 74 (11), 2843-8 PMID: 8923199

Travis, J. (1993). Making Room for Women in the Culture of Science Science, 260 (5106), 412-415 DOI: 10.1126/science.260.5106.412

It was often argued that it is inherent to women in general to have a stronger will and desire than men to reach the goals they set for themselves. This might very well be, but that cannot explain the relative success of Dutch women over Dutch men, unless this stronger feminine willpower is a phenomenon exclusive to the Dutch. Otherwise, the strong will-powered Dutch women just compete against other strong will-powered women from other countries, and the weakly will-powered Dutch male athletes compete with other rather weak opponents. Clearly, this did not seem to be the case …

In general, the analysts shouldn’t have argued about differences between men and women in general, but about differences between the relative strength of Dutch women over other women, compared with the relative strength of Dutch men over other men.

Unequal women empowerment?

What might be an explanation then? We might find one by looking at the position that women have in their society. Traditionally, sports in the world have been dominated by men, but due to their increasingly equal opportunities in society, their participation in sports increased as well. If indeed a relationship exists between women empowerment and their results on the sports fields, we might not only expect better results over the years, but also smaller differences between the results of men and women.

To test this, I made some plots. Below, the results needed to win the Gold Medal on Javelin throwing on the Olympics, 100 meters running on the Olympics, and 500 meters speed skating on the World Championships, are shown. The red dots show the results of the men, the blue dots those of the women. The grey lines represent the general tendency of the lines, and in all three graphs, it is clear that the two lines tend to converge. Don’t be mislead by the small decrease of the differences between men and women: the initial differences were already very small, so a small absolute decrease is rather large on a relative scale.

Golden

Does this tell us anything about why Dutch women performed so much better than Dutch men did? No, of course not, for I did not take into account the Beijing Olympics, nor nationality. Nevertheless, if we accept that the increasingly strong position of women in society (in general) indeed leads to their achieving better sports results, we might also want to compare the position of Dutch women in Dutch society with that of women in many other countries. Compared to many other countries, Dutch women have a strong position in society. Perhaps, the Dutch think more seriously about women sports than is done in other countries.

If this is the case, the sport results of Dutch women is due to their empowerment in Dutch society. Perhaps women sports will increasingly receive more attention in other countries as well. Wouldn’t that be golden?

The news article (on www.nu.nl[In Dutch]) is on a report by Mercer and ADP and the main result is the women earn 11.8 percent less than men do, doing the same job. That is clearly a serious gender inequality, isn’t it? I must admit that at first sight, I think that this number is a bit high, but I’m not an expert.

But when reading further, I gained some confidence in the fact that something is wrong. Only one year ago, according to the report, this wage difference amounted to a whopping 18 percent! I simply don’t believe that this wage difference, for the whole Dutch society, dropped with 6.2 percentage points. To achieve that would require massive changes in the labour market, with many men being demoted and women promoted, and enormous wage increase for women (compared with that of men).

Such enormous changes in wages simply haven’t happend. The interesting point is, is that the researchers know that for themselves: further down in the article, it is mentioned that according to the report, men on average gained a raise of 3.68 percent, compared with the 3.65 percent average raise for women. So, based on these number, you would expect a slightly increased difference between the wages of men and women, instead of such a whopping decrease.

How this is possible, I do not know. Perhaps I delve into the report to find the error (either in the report, or in my reasoning here). But, for now, I leave you with this paradox. Once again, it shows the importance of some common sense on how society works when reading the news, and without any clarification from the researchers, I wouldn’t spend a penny on the report.