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[jackofallchem]

acrimone,

My point was that an expected workload that high will and does discourage women to choose such a career.  If you want to do research, you can go to an industry or government lab and work shorter hours for more pay.  Despite what tenured_feminist thinks, the work week I described is fairly typical for chemistry faculty at R1 schools.  I have been at 3 and I know people from several dozen others.

If someone wants to work that hard, they will be rewarded.  The more and better results you have, the more funding you get.  The more funding you get, the bigger your group is (and the more results you can generate).  There is a big difference between having a lab with 4 grad students and $250,000/year in funding and having 20 grad students, 5 post docs, and $4 million/year in funding.  When they decide on the selection for an endowed chair, there is no doubt who will get it.  When it comes down to who will make full professor, there is not doubt who will get it. 

So yes, it does boil down to "what should the minimum expectations be to get tenure?"  I guess it depends how badly you want gender parity on the faculty.

[tolerantly]

MIT's been over this repeatedly.  See http://web.mit.edu/gep/res.html for reports on status of women faculty there.  I believe the School of Engineering's report includes the recognition that they're losing serious talent thanks to the current expectation, and a decision to institute part-time tenure-track positions. The last reports are from 2002, though, and I don't know how far they've gotten with any of that.  Anyone there who can speak to it? 

[tenured_feminist]

Why should chem be different from other disciplines? This is a normative question. I have extensive experience with R1s in the social sciences and interdisciplinary programs.  I don't know very many people who work an 80 hour week.  If the discipline is structured so that minimal competence at a R1 requires 80 hours a week, there is something wrong with the discipline OR people are paying much more attention to hours logged at the office than Actual Work being done, which is itself wrong.

Among the people I know and have mentored at the graduate and junior professor level, I think an 80 hour week would put off most of 'em, regardless of gender, especially given the pay scale.  Those who are willing to work an 80-90 hour week tend to go into the professions, especially law.  (And get burned out and quit ten years later, but that's another story . . . .)

[dark_globe]

My graduate advisor (and the male junior faculty, too) spent from 7 AM-5 PM at work.  They then came back from 7 PM and worked until sometime between 10 PM and midnight.  This was Monday through Saturday. 

Those are exactly the hours the prisoners work in Alexander Solzhenitsyn's novel The First Circle.

[scienceprof]

to tenured_feminist,

I believe that is exactly jackofallchem's point: why should tenure in the sciences have to be so all consuming, when other in other fields you don't have to work 80+hours a week doing research to be an acceptable, perhaps even outstanding, tenure candiate?

[scienceprof]

sorry, I accidentally posted before I was done: continuing response

And it should be mentioned that no-one is logging hours, it is just that those are the number of hours required in the lab to get the expected amount of research produced. So yes only "Actual Work" counts, it is just insane that that much Actual Work is considered minimal in the physical (and biological?) sciences.

[tenured_feminist]

Scienceprof: yes, it is insane.

[acrimone]

But that's my point: what are you going to do with the person who does more Actual Work than someone else... just ignore it?  "Minimums" get set by the willingness of people to bust their asses.  That's why it's so hard, say, to get into UCLA as an undergrad.  (Harder than Harvard, actually.)  Everyone has 4.0's and 1590's and has worked their fingers raw to get in.  If we're both equally talented, and you work 80 hours a week and I only work 50, you're going to produce more Actual Work of the same quality, all other things being equal.

It's not an easy puzzle to solve.  You can mandate vacations, and put limits on the number of hours people can work, but that has problems all its own.

[tolerantly]

tenured_feminist, you also have to take into account the industrial nature of the sci work (by humanities standards, say) and the sense of being in a race at common frontiers.  There are problems to solve & multiple teams working on the same problem.  The winners get more prestige, more credibility, more money, better facilities, better students/proteges.  As in news, if you get there second, you need a hell of a second-day story.  I have never felt the same sort of industrial time pressure, that sense of being in a race, in humanities.  The closest thing seems to be the sensibility around hiring season. 

[tenured_feminist]

Expectations and standards are community constructions.  That doesn't make them easy to change, but still I object to the idea that there is something essentially different about chemistry.  I could be wrong, but I think there are other scientific disciplines that do not have a 70 hour work week as a norm at an R1 institution.  So to get the essentialism argument off the ground, you have to be able to claim that chemistry as a discipline differs essentially from, say, biology.

Of course there are people who work insane hours and are well rewarded by their disciplines for it, even in the lazy realm of the social sciences and humanities.  And Acrimone, I don't have any objection to those people having a lot of visibility and cultural capital within their disciplines.  My beef is with the claim that this should be the norm.  There is a correlation between hours worked and really good work produced, but it is by no means perfect.   We're not producing widgets here. 

I'm also not convinced by the "things just move faster in the sciences" argument.  I've been slower than I'd like to have been in finishing up a book, and as a result, have had to refine and rethink the overall argument to deal with work that came out while I was still digesting and writing.  I'm sure plenty of people in the social sciences or humanities have had that experience as well, or worse, have had to abandon a project because someone else got there first.  The only real difference might be that non-positivist arguments are a bit easier to rework on a global scale so that there's still enough payoff to make them worth publishing even if someone else got there first.  But pre-emption is an issue for anyone who is working on something that is of active interest to others.

[malvais]

Here is the latest research from Babcock who notes that women are discriminated against for asking for equal pay; another researcher has found that while men are validated for expressing anger, women are penalized.

http://money.guardian.co.uk/pay/story/0,,2153123,00.html

[beacon1]

The only way to change this is to change the tenure track for BOTH men and women. The tenure requirements need to be changed so that they can be accomplished in a 50 hour week (at most).  Academia needs to stop this hazing ritual if it wants to have a lot of female faculty. 

That's all well and good, but how do you respond to the situation where someone WANTS to work that much because they want to excel?  Do you tell them, "Thanks for the effort, but we're going to ignore it because it's not fair to women" or do you say "Gee, you've busted your ass and you get hired"?

I've spent way too many paragraphs on these fora talking about how we have to make choices and set our own priorities to rehash them all here, but you must bear in mind that's it's not always "hazing" or even unfair -- some people simply want to get ahead more than others.

I think all those working on tenure should only be allowed to write one scholarly work to achieve tenure. This would produce two outcomes: 1) all the pseudo intellectual half-baked articles would diminish, and 2) someone would actually read what their colleagues wrote rather than just looking at another line on a vitae. Today's intellectualism is more about journalism than science. JMO