Is there something in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Math (STEM) fields that penalizes new parents? Perhaps. An analysis of longitudinal survey data from U.S. STEM professionals collected between 2003 and 2010 by the National Science Foundation finds that 43 percent of new mothers and 23 percent of new fathers leave STEM fields within seven years after the first baby arrives.
There are a few issues that muddy the results, though they provide an easy narrative for those who want to slam STEM as intolerant. First, the respondent numbers were really small, consisting of 841 who had their first child between the first and second survey while those who remained childless were 3,365. STEM fields are $200 billion per year just for research, when we get into technology, the T and E in STEM, it is a gigantic chunk of America. There should be far more data available. Instead, there is a difference of basically 100 people that lead to a broad conclusion.
49 percent of new parents reported that family was one of the reasons for their career change while the number of respondents without children were single digit. Family can mean a lot of things. With a family, finances become more important. Did one parent get a much better job, so the family moved and there was no STEM job available in the new home town? We have no way to know.
The timeframe was also very large.
Four to seven years is actually a long time to believe a job change is related to a baby versus career or a partner getting a new job. Since most people who have a baby don't switch jobs right away that means they were already doing the job for even longer. And the results could vary dramatically by the type of STEM. In academic STEM, for example, competition is fierce for faculty jobs because academia has become a lucrative six-figure career. As a result, there are 6X as many Ph.D.s as there are job openings, so everyone who can't get an R01 grant or equivalent funding will either do a series of low-paying post-doctoral research jobs in someone else's lab until they get a grant of their own or leave academia. Once a baby is born, if you have a Dr. title and you are making only $40,000 a year, you will be more likely consider a career change.
That isn't a hostile climate for new parents, it is competition. If daycare were the issue, job departures would happen within a few months of birth, not when a child is in elementary school
Moms and dads didn't drop out of the workforce, and most of them did not work part time in academia, they changed fields.
