揭秘女数学教授少的真正原因

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。

康奈尔大学的研究人员发现，女性很少在数学相关领域从事学术研究工作是因为女数学教授的生活方式和母亲的身份相冲突。这一研究将于下个月在《美国科学家杂志》上发表。

长期以来，大学一直因为歧视女性的聘用和考评政策而受到抨击，然而这一新研究的发现指出，女性生物钟是女性很少在数学、工程学、物理学和计算机科学等专业担任教授的主要原因。

当一个渴望拥有家庭的女性看到通往终身教授职位的道路是如此严苛，想到自己成为教授后再生育时年纪已经很大，抚养小孩的时间也很少，于是许多女性就选择了更有弹性的职业。

康奈尔大学的人类发展学教授温迪•威廉姆斯和她的丈夫斯蒂芬•赛西共同撰写了这一研究报告。她说：“大学除了课程设置比较灵活外，其他很多方面都很僵化，也就是说，你要熬很多年才能得到稳定职位，才能考虑怀孕生子。”

威廉姆斯和赛西分析了男性和女性(有孩子和没孩子)的学术生涯相关资料。在女性成为母亲之前，她们的职业和同行业的男性一样成功，甚至更成功。但是一旦有了孩子，这一态势就发生了变化。

在人文学科和社会科学等其他学术领域里，女性面临着同样的障碍，她们也往往因此离开学术界。但由于攻读人文社科类博士学位的女性很多，所以才有足够的女性最终留下来成为女教授，使这些领域的女教授数量达到一定规模。

不过，在数学相关领域里，女性只占据研究生的很小一部分。因此，研究指出，当极少数获得博士学位的女性又因为大学对自己生儿育女的需要漠不关心而离开，其最终结果就是，没有几位女性能跻身理科教授行列。