So the recent issue of the Berkeley graduate had this interview on the cover with a Mary Ann Mason, Dean of the graduate division at Berkeley, about the difficulty of raising children while pursuing an academic career. While this is an issue that deserves discussion Ms. Mason’s attempt to link child friendly policies to gender equity and the deep incoherence of the views she is pushing is an affront to the sort of broad spectrum critical thinking universities supposedly promote.

Before I begin I want to stress the fact that I fully support the elimination of unnecessary requirements for academics and increased job flexibility. I think academia is being irrational in it’s level of resistance to part-time¹ and reentering researchers. I even agree that we should pay academics with children more (subsidized child care) if it offers a good marginal value for research. None of these things is the point at issue. My thesis is that the widely accepted views voiced by Ms. Mason are incoherent and what other arguments and unknown facts might support the same policies is totally incoherent.

My first point of contention with this article is the unanalyzed assumption that more women in academia is fundamentally a good thing. The number of women in academia is an indicator of our success in eliminating discrimination and the pressure on girls to conform to stereotypes and I think we can all agree that increases resulting from this are a good thing. However, I think we’d all also agree that tricking (or forcing) women who don’t want to be (and won’t like being) academics into the profession would be a bad idea. Thus it simply isn’t enough to observe that having children is one of the biggest leaks of women in the academic pipeline to conclude that it’s an area of concern².

If Ms. Mason had said no more than this I might, in a fit of holiday charity, accept that it was merely a confused way of saying that we should eliminate unnecessary barriers to academia. However, where she clearly steps out beyond where reasonable argument could take her is with the following accusation.

Having no babies at all was the dominant success mode for women. Among tenured professors, we found a much larger percentage of single women without children. There was a higher divorce rate, too, among women faculty at the top tier. So we saw a dramatic shift in family demographics those who continue on are far less likely to have — not only do women with children drop out of the academy, but those who continue on are far less likely to have children or to be married. This presents a double standard in terms of gender and equality.

Does it present a double standard? Does the fact that we see a much larger percentage of men who have never (or rarely) had sex in mathematics graduate school also constitute a double standard? Obviously not (unless we can get a subsidized brothel). Even leaving aside the possibility of pure common cause (which I doubt) this effect proves nothing other than the fact that raising kids takes time. Though to be fair Ms. Mason’s point is really not complete without her other observation.

Overall, only 55 percent of women with early babies — babies born any time up to 5 years post-Ph.D. — became tenured professors. By comparison, 78 percent of men with early babies got tenure. Women dropped out of the track not because they were denied tenure — but because of family issues and wanting to have babies, to start their families.

Alright now it’s starting to look like Ms. Mason might actually have a point. Maybe this drop out rate is the result of some special form of discrimination against women with babies. Indeed Ms. Mason makes a point of observing that men who have children are still regarded as serious while women who have children are more likely to be thought of as less dedicated to their jobs. Finally we have what looks to be like a real issue of gender inequity…except Ms. Mason admits that this is because they really are devoting more time to their children.

Yes. Across the board, men can have children at any time and still be considered serious in their research. Women in academia who do the same are considered less serious, because women have a very significant second shift as caregivers.

So it’s not that women are unfairly treated worse than men in the same situation it’s just that women really are choosing to devote more time to child care. How is the university’s treatment of this women inequitable? Because it holds them to the same gender neutral standard as the men? Unless Ms. Mason is arguing that men simply aren’t able to be caregivers this is just a roundabout way of saying that statistically speaking women place a higher priority on childcare relative to academia than men.

The various data printed along the side of the article do nothing to challenge this interpretation. Sure women with kids might spend more time i childcare than men with kids but at best this shows that the men female academics marry are perpetuating a gender inequity. So why is it the school’s policies that are being blamed? In fact it doesn’t even show that. Their are two very plausible interpretations of such data. First, that male academics are more willing to ‘marry down’ than women or that statistically speaking women are more attracted to childcare than men. Neither of which suggest any inequality. I mean no one would conclude that a study demonstrating that men in bars spend more money on women than vice versa as a prima facia case for unfairness so how is this different?

Ultimately I don’t see any plausible argument here at all. I’ll examine some of the reasons for this fallacious line of thinking and give a conceptual overview in the next post.