{"id":5216,"date":"2013-01-27T12:57:09","date_gmt":"2013-01-27T10:57:09","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/?p=5216"},"modified":"2017-12-13T12:29:17","modified_gmt":"2017-12-13T10:29:17","slug":"hurries-for-humans-in-physis","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/?p=5216","title":{"rendered":"Hurries for humans in physis"},"content":{"rendered":"

I was asked to comment<\/a> on a blog post by particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder about open access, however I decided to comment first on her recent post Hurdles for women in physics.<\/a><\/p>\n


\n<\/br><\/p>\n

Bee wrote: “As I have said many times before, I don’t understand why academia basically doesn’t have the normal middle ground of average-pay permanent contracts.”<\/p>\n

A main problem in this whole discussion seems to be the question: “How do I deal with “unproductivity”*? (due to pregnancy, sickness, age, care for others etc.)”<\/p>\n

That is the tenure was sought on one hand as a mean to give “good” researchers more freedom for (in terms of possible profitable outcome: high risk) research (however if the teaching load is exorbitant high then “being tenured” doesn’t help much), on the other hand tenure is a kind of social insurance (mostly against unemployment, old age or sickness unproductivity and old age poverty). So if one focuses on the aspect of social insurance the “getting tenured” process is with respect to this aspect a big gamble on getting a good social security (or not) within a certain time slot. And if women want to have children then those women clearly have less chances to compete in this “gamble”, since they more or less need to get pregnant within this time slot. It is also clear that if people should get “unproductive” (like by being pregnant, by having to care for small children, by having long term sicknesses etc.) then it is easier to get rid of them with short term contracts.<\/p>\n

Without an exeption, all women I have talked to and who have succeeded in math\/physics academia either managed to get a permanent or social secure position (Sabine how likely is getting tenure at your place?) before getting pregnant (rather rare) or had a partner with enough social security (i.e. a good job). I think this should also be statistically visible.<\/p>\n

So clearly there is a “hurdle” (as Sabine calls it) which affects women more than men, because on average up to now there are more women getting pregnant than men :).
\nThere are of course also other aspects, but I leave these out for the moment.<\/p>\n

In my case one of my short term academic contracts ended right after the birth of my second child, so the corresponding department didn’t need to deal with a possible “unproductivity” on my side, like due to child care. Problem solved :).<\/p>\n

I would though be cautious with “the normal middle ground of average-pay permanent contracts”. These are country-wise VERY different. I have a girl-friend who was recently “fired” after many years of work on such an “average-pay permanent contract”. (The reason for the firing seems to have been a “restructuring” within the company, that is she was not the only one who was fired but a whole section of that company was “fired” including parts in Britain and Germany). She was fired in the sense that she was escorted out and wasn’t even allowed to get her lunch packet from her office. The corresponding fired people of that section in Germany however were back in their office after 3 hours due to the current german employment\/firing regulations which the mangement seemed to had somewhat forgotten about :)) .<\/p>\n

I actually also got the feeling that since the overall job market got fiercer and since the social nets are more and more eroding that there were\/are more people – who might be less suitable for the respective academic tasks – who have been trying to take part in that “tenure social insurance gamble”.<\/p>\n

* I had made the quotation marks, because “hard work” and “productivity” are quite debateable terms. <\/p>\n

remark added 13.12.2017:
\nI wrote: “Without an exeption, all women I have talked to…”
\nhere is a typo: an exception -> any exception<\/p>\n

another omittance to be corrected:
\nwho have succeeded in math\/physics academia ->
\nwho have succeeded in math\/physics academia while having (a) child(s)<\/p>\n

That is I know women, who didn’t have any childs.
\nI don’t know any women in math\/physics academia who had adopted a child.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I was asked to comment on a blog post by particle physicist Sabine Hossenfelder about open access, however I decided to comment first on her recent post Hurdles for women in physics.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[1],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5216"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5216"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5216\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":7020,"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5216\/revisions\/7020"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5216"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5216"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.randform.org\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5216"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}