Does an academic job in math really suck?
My cousin recently sent me a link to this article about women in science. Actually it’s really about jobs in science, and how much they suck, and how women are too practical to want them. It’s definitely interesting- and pretty widely read, as well, although I’d never seen it. It makes a few excellent points, especially about the crappy amount of money and feedback one gets as an academic, two issues which were definitely part of my personal decision to leave my academic career.
I think his overall argument, though, is simultaneously too practical-minded and not practical-minded enough. And although his essay is about science, I’ll concentrate on how it relates to math.
It’s too practical in that it doesn’t really understand the attraction- the nearly carnal desire- people have to math. It essentially assumes that after some amount of time, maybe 20 years, people will lose interest in their subject, perhaps because they are getting poorly paid.
Is this really true? Maybe for some people this is true, but the nerds I know are nerds for life – they don’t wake up one day thinking math isn’t cool after all. And from what I know about people, they acclimate pretty thoroughly to their standard of living by the time they are 40.
It’s not practical enough, though, because it doesn’t get at one of the most important reasons women leave math, namely because they are married and maybe have kids and they simply can’t be that person who moves across the country for a visiting semester in Berkeley because their husband has a job already and it’s not in Berkeley.
[As a side note, if someone wants to actually encourage women in math, and they are loaded, I would encourage them to set up a fund that would pay costs for quality childcare and airplane tickets for kids when woman go to math conferences. You don’t even need to help organize the babysitting, just pay for it. It would help out a lot of young women and free them up to go to way more conferences, evening the playing field with young men.]
In fact there are plenty of women who are super nerdy and would love to go do math across the country, but when it comes to choosing between that lifestyle and having a family life, they will choose the family life more times than not. Really it’s the “nomadic monk” system itself that is crappy for women at that moment, even if they are theoretically happy to be a poor nerd for the rest of their lives.
I have another complaint (which will make it sound like I don’t like the essay but actually I do). It says that people in science don’t have the ability to switch careers, essentially because they don’t have the money. But that’s really not true, at least in math, and I’m a testament to the possibility of switching careers. One thing a nerd is really good at is learning new things quickly.
I also thought that there was something missing about the alternative jobs he mentions, in industry or otherwise, which is that, yes you do get paid better outside of academics, but on the other hand pretty much any nonacademic job requires you to have a boss, which can be really fine or really horrible, and restricts your vacation time to 3 or 4 weeks. By contrast the quality of life as an academic is, if not luxurious, at least much more under one’s control.
mathbabe 
I would love to wind up in academia, which means having the freedom to bounce around like this. It’s one of the reasons I took issue with an ex-significant other (not in the academy), who would prefer that I become a trailing spouse — as I see it, if it’s in your blood, there’s nothing you can do about it until you decide otherwise. Ideally, of course, your husband could go on sabbatical while you’re on your appointment in Berkeley…
LikeLike
Nice essay!
LikeLike
“[As a side note, if someone wants to actually encourage women in math, and they are loaded, I would encourage them to set up a fund that would pay costs for quality childcare and airplane tickets for kids when woman go to math conferences. You don’t even need to help organize the babysitting, just pay for it. It would help out a lot of young women and free them up to go to way more conferences, evening the playing field with young men.]”
Cathy, I was just talking to a colleague about this today! First of all, I DO think the conference center needs to organize the babysitting somewhat, even if only to the extent of “here’s a daycare / short-term nanny service that people who come to conferences here often use, and here are the names of ten mathematicians you know who’ve used the service in the past.” Park City does this and I don’t understand why the other conference centers (as far as I know) don’t.
Second, I learned that the London Math Society does offer financial support for local childcare for parents of young kids who go to conferences, but it only partially covers the costs and the researcher has to either get matching funds from their home institution or pay the rest out-of-pocket.
I don’t see why NSF couldn’t do the same. Childcare is expensive, but hotels are expensive too, and they pay for that. For instance, a night at a hotel in Urbana + a day of childcare in Urbana probably costs the same as a night at a hotel in Manhattan — if NSF pays for the latter without complaint, why not the former? If you don’t have a place to sleep, you can’t go to the conference, and if you don’t have a way to ensure that somebody’s taking care of your kids, you also can’t travel.
LikeLike
There are some other funding sources for women in math and science that will pay for childcare. UMass has
http://stemfamilytravel.org/
and the startup funds for Clare Boothe Luce professors can be used for childcare
http://www.hluce.org/cblprogram.aspx
LikeLike
I’m continually surprised how closed a lot of jobs are to people with a mathematics education. I recently went to a job fair (this year at my undergraduate school, Cal Poly SLO), and many of the recruiters simply said flat out, “We don’t hire math majors.” Even in jobs that seem very mathematical (some defense contractors, and of course every company does statistical work).
But then, the majority of our undergrad education is to take systems that are difficult to understand and learn reason about them within ten weeks. With that in mind, one could argue a mathematician could be trained quickly to do any job!
And to think that we wouldn’t have job mobility either…
LikeLike
“especially about the crappy amount of money”
I almost stopped reading when I got to this ridiculous statement. Someone like this blogger could have a professor positions at a university – they pay is well above average – and completely adequate to live on. Only if the money is the object and one’s frame of reference is skewed is the pay “crappy”. But I suppose if one works in finance, one’s frame of reference is skewed.
I kept reading anyway. There are plenty of academics who have children and simply stop or reduce their travel. It’s easy if one reconciles oneself to a crappy job in a third rate university. If one feels a failure for not working at Harvard or Columbia, or for not giving invited lectures at MSRI, then the children and the lifestyle aren’t the problem.
Finally – the premise about childcare is wrong. When my wife goes to a conference, I take care of the kids for three or four days. We don’t need more childcare than usual – I take them to school and pick them up from school – my day is short so I work a bit after they go to bed.
Everything you say about how the difficulties of being a young academic are incompatible with having children applies just as well to men, provided the man in question is also doing his share taking care of the children (and some are). My academic career has suffered because I’ve had children. I don’t care. I still have a job and I enjoy having kids.
LikeLike
“it doesn’t really understand the attraction- the nearly carnal desire- people have to math.”
OMG, well said (as only you could say it!)
LikeLike
One of the basic premises of finance is to skew the frame of reference of its participants about money, to normalize the obscene both in terms of the compensation delivered to its employees and to the trades done between the banking community and the non-banking community. This process even has a term: the “golden handcuffs”.
LikeLike
Thanks for the hat-tip, cuz! I just want to point something out: when you say “the attraction people have to math”, I think you mean “the attraction SOME people have to math.” Remember he talks about the selection effect: if you talk to people who have just gotten off the plane, most of them will have gotten off large flights. That doesn’t mean most flights are large. And if you just talk to people who stay in the profession through grad school and after, you will find (surprise, surprise) a lot of people who are totally in love with math. You can be good at math and not be in love with it: take, for example, my younger brother who was in the super-duper math track his freshman year at Harvard and decided fairly quickly that math was not his thing, even though he could do it. He majored in economics instead, went to grad school in economics, but ultimately decided not to pursue an academic job because he and his fiancee basically just wanted to live in one place (the Bay Area). Now he makes a decent amount of money working in Silicon Valley and they have a lifestyle that they’re quite happy with.
LikeLike
The reason people don’t understand why others want to do math is usually because they don’t know what math is. They thing mathematicians sit around trying to come up with formulas by shifting symbols from one side of an equation to the other. The reason for this misunderstanding is largely cultural, and probably the largest blame should be placed on primary and secondary school mathematics education. To get a better idea about why people love mathematics, and for an accurate evaluation of the current state of mathematics education, I highly suggest you read the essay “A Mathematician’s Lament,” which a quick Google search will bring up first.
LikeLike