SIO490: The "Leaky Pipeline" of Academia

Transcript

This transcript was generated automatically and may contain errors — the audio is the record.

0:00:11 Thomas: And welcome to Serious Inquiries Only. This is episode 490. I'm your host, Thomas Smith. Too long since we've talked to Dr. Brian Gillis, to the stars. I would always say that if I were an astrophysisist, although it's kind of redundant, I guess. Yeah, we're not talking about space. We are not talking about stars, as much as I love doing that. Wanted to talk about problems in academia, both why people are leaving, why certain of people might be leaving, might not be able to get ahead. Not only there's so many attacks on academia from the right, also ways that But just fundamentally, it's not doing what it needs to do. So there's legitimate criticisms of the left as well, pair that with the vicious and completely unreasonable attacks from the right. It feels like yet another thing that who's going to fix this and how. The first step is always identifying the problems. That's Brian what wants to start doing here today with us. So I excited to get to it. Let's take our first break. Avoid that break by going to patrion .com slash serious pod. Thanks so much to those who support the show. After that, I'll be on with Dr. Brian Gillis.

0:01:22 Thomas: Brian Gillis, been way too long. How are you doing today?

0:01:25 Bryan: I'm doing well today. How are you, Thomas?

0:01:27 Thomas: Pretty good. I guess I'm a little sad we're not learning any space stuff per se today. How's space doing? Is it okay?

0:01:34 Bryan: Yeah, well, the one thing I can teach you, is that we now pretty solid evidence that aliens haven't visited the U .S. if they had visited, we would certainly have learned about it in the past few months as an attempt to distract from the Epstein files.

0:01:47 Thomas: Yeah, I think they use that one once before and it's just like, it's Okay. OK, well, is space about me at all or is it has it has asked about me or is it is it OK up there?

0:01:57 Bryan: It's okay. Okay. You, Thomas,

0:01:59 Thomas: Oh, good. OK, I want seem desperate, but.

0:01:59 Bryan: But with the quality of visitors it's been getting lately. It used to be we sent the best of the best. Now Now we're sending the worst of the worst. So yeah.

0:02:11 Thomas: Well. Not learning about space. What did you want to talk about today, though?

0:02:14 Bryan: So I wanted to just talk about starting what's been going on in my life that the year or so since we spoke last, I've left academia and moved on to an academia support role. I'm working as a research software engineer, which basically means I do all the programming and stuff to support academics who maybe aren't as specialized in it. But given that I have a strong background in academia, I know how how they research, how they like to work, and have an understanding of the science they might want to do, and I'm able to develop software to support that. What wanted to talk about today is the process of leaving academia, and a lot of things I've realized in the meantime that need to be discussed about the structural problems in it that hurt both the academic outputs, inputs the people involved to get into academia and then leave, and also all of the bias this can cause in various ways.

0:03:10 Thomas: OK, but is this like from a like fire dot org perspective or of bias are we talking about? Yeah.

0:03:15 Bryan: I mean bias in that it's worse for people in minority groups, and pretty much any minority, you're going to have a worse time in academia.

0:03:23 Thomas: Ah, that makes more sense. Yeah. Believe it's been a year for one, but also it's been longer since we've done kind of an introduction to you. Remind us the broad strokes of your career, because you've been through this this whole gamut or whatever. And I've seen, and I've known a lot of people who've gone a similar route where they want to be in academia. Start off that way. And then, you one reason or another, or maybe it tends to be the same reasons, they don't end up there. And it does seem pretty concerning, especially especially, in the US when funding is going to be harder than ever to come by because of the federal government.

0:03:51 Thomas: I feel like this is only going to get worse. So remind us the broad strokes of of kind the path you took.

0:03:55 Bryan: Yeah. So after high school, I went to the University of Waterloo to study physics. It's one the best physics programs in Canada and world -renowned even. There through bachelor's, master's, and PhD. Then after that, went around applying for jobs and eventually got offered one at the University at Edinburgh in Scotland. I decided to take them up on that offer, moved to Edinburgh and got what they call in academia a postdoc position. These are contract positions, which typically lasts two or three years. And sorry, if you're catching the meow, my cats have decided right now that they want to join in on the podcast. So we'll have I have to let them have their say. Hopefully

0:04:40 Thomas: Going to talk about cat academia as well. Is there a cat version of academia they got their scratch post -doctorate I don't know I got nothing else like okay

0:04:43 Bryan: Yeah, yeah. Talk about it very much. They talk about everything else, but they refuse to talk to me about cat academia.

0:04:52 Bryan: Yeah. Oh, no. No, he adamantly refuses to talk about his scratching post document.

0:04:58 Thomas: He's like I hate puns shut up I hear you cat

0:05:02 Bryan: Okay. Yeah, hopefully they'll leave me alone. Loud. I'd close the door, but that's probably just going to make it worse.

0:05:05 Thomas: Could make it worse Yeah. Okay. That's making it worse.

0:05:14 Bryan: He's seen me. Hopefully that will be enough. Okay, so I went on to what's called a postdoc position. Are standard postdoc is about two years with an option to extend to three. My case, I got lucky in that it was renewable And it did get renewed. And then I got promoted to another position at the University of Edinburgh, which got renewed again, ultimately lasting me 10 years there, which for postdoc positions is an insanely long time. This eventually as I started to apply for further positions, like going on to tenure track faculty or find job some was an actual indefinite contract rather than just repeated contract renewals, I hit a brick wall, which is, as it turns out, this is what happens to the vast majority of people in academia. And it's actually something that I wasn't aware how bad the problem was, even you talking to others until I started looking into the numbers around it.

0:06:14 Bryan: But there is a huge brick wall in academia after postdoc positions when you try to get to some sort of permanent position that only around 15 % of people with a postdoc can go on to any sort of permanent position, which is, yeah, absolutely insane. And the thing is, you typically can't go back to just doing postdoc positions. They're often advertised at people who just get out of their PhD, and it's assumed you'll take one, maybe two postdoc position. But for various reasons, you're not going to be doing that the rest of your life. One is that they're short term and require you to move. So you're not going to spend the rest of your life moving around from place to place, maybe country to country. And even asking for people to do it that much is already quite big of an ask. I started looking into this and thinking about it and realized that this plays into a lot of the issues that we see in academia. One thing I wanted to ask is, have you heard of the leaky pipeline problem. So pipeline is one thing that's brought up when it relates to the proportion of women in academia. A lot of people have noticed as you go up the ranks in academia from PhD student to postdoc to tenure track faculty to to tenured faculty, to working your way up the university hierarchy, the fraction of women at each stage decreases dramatically.

0:07:16 Thomas: I'm not sure.

0:07:43 Bryan: From numbers I've seen, PhD students, on the area and specific expertise, it be as many as 50 % in PhD students but it down to just a trickle at the highest levels. And something so apparent, you have people thinking about this, and one thing they've noticed is that at stage of the game, a fraction of women leaks out. So they analogize this to you have a pipeline, and at every state of career advancement, there's some amount of leak and fewer women. And, you know, there's some acknowledgement that this happens to all minorities, but most of the focus has been on women. And so there's been a lot of talk about this. So I'll start off giving you the general conclusions that people have come to regarding this problem, that if you look at everything, they and think is going on. So one is that still, despite what advancements we might have had in gender equality, parenthood responsibilities still tend to fall disproportionately on women. This means that they're likely to take off more time in part of their career. And if you look at the time period in life that people are typically in a postdoc position or in a tenure track position trying to apply for tenure, a or PhD student, this is around the ages of 20 to 30, which traditionally,

0:07:43 Thomas: Right, right. Yeah

0:09:06 Bryan: Less so these days, is around when people want to have children. So a lot of women have to take off a year or so to have a child, leaving them behind the curve, so to speak, compared to men. And there have been some attempts to try to fix this in various ways. Like some universities which do tenure reviews after a fixed amount of time will put a pause in the timer whenever somebody is off for child care. But that doesn't completely fix the issue as you're still going to be disrupted from all the projects you're on. And, know, there have been improvements in various ways, but none of it is fully fixed. The issue. Reason that women are to be disadvantaged is that in the general work culture of academia, there are a lot of things that need to be done, but only a small subset of those are actually judged in promotion reviews. And the stuff that isn't judged in promotion reviews tends to be foisted upon women and seen as more as volunteer work. So these are things like serving on committees committees that need to be done, review other panels, work events such as paper discussion meetings or other support work. It's just a general expectation in society that women are going to be the ones to volunteer for these things. And so they're pressured to do so and face a social cost if they don't. Another issue is that of -perpetuating a self cycle. The fact that there are fewer women in academia means that women are going to have a harder time finding a mentor with shared life experiences that are more closer, means their values. And this is going to be the same for any minority. You're going to relate to somebody better if they've had similar life experiences to you, particularly if they have similar struggles in the workplace. Like, if you're facing sexism, you might want to talk to a mentor who has faced sexism. But if there aren't any, because the sexism has pushed them all out, it's just going to compound the problem.

0:11:06 Thomas: I also have to imagine that's the kind of thing where it's like ah you remind me of a young me you know kind not academia per se, but I know justice he takes on girls women as his So I'm sure probably that's fixed the problem. Somehow that feels worse. I don't know how that is worse, but it feels worse, something about it feels creepier and worse, But I'm the whole, I'm sure it is good.

0:11:19 Bryan: You Yeah. For is a term positive action for when people try to deliberately go against the biases and pick people from underrepresented groups, which can can help the issue. You know, that doesn't mean they're going to be the best mentor. And yeah one of various ways you can try to correct the issue um the statistics have shown that it isn't and I'm actually um the opinion that all of these patches aren't going to be enough and while society is as it is can never be enough so the I I'm saying this is because society as a whole is biased against women and minorities in various ways. We're talking about women right now, so let's just keep on that. And academia is very competitive. Has a quirk among a of fields that it doesn't typically have fixed hours. There are hours you'll have to, like if you're a faculty member, you might have to teach classes. There'll be meetings you have to attend, but you aren't held to a strict 40 -hour work week. Now, this this has a lot of advantages that you can be very flexible with your time, work when it's convenient to you. But when it gets to applying for the more competitive positions higher up in the hierarchy, this means that the people who can afford to put in more hours to work on their job are going to have a huge advantage. So, like, just take a of example cases. Have one woman and one man who both look at their life schedules and say, okay, we can budget hours to work. But if you go into academia and you compare those cases, you'll see that the woman probably has more things going on outside of work, on on average, taking up her time. Like, we've discussed single parenthood, or even if she's in

0:13:13 Thomas: Someone is a single mom trying to get a doctorate, boy, that superhero. I don't know how you would do that. That is amazing. I couldn't do one of those things.

0:13:20 Bryan: But a partner, the sexist expectations in society are going to put more work on her. And this is even aside from kids. It's a problem in relationships in general that the woman ends up doing more housework. So the people, the woman and the man, if the woman has to do more housework, she's going to have less time she can focus after the original 40 hours to try to fight for a compared to the man. Yeah. And if you think about pretty much any other minority, there's going to be some other reason that this is going to happen. Minorities are going to have a lower socioeconomic class than people in majorities. And when you have more money, you can use the money to buy time. Instead of cleaning up yourself, youcan pay someone to do it. Then you can can use that time to work on your career. If you have a disability, you might be able to push through and do a 40 -hour job, but if you to spend extra energy to get that done, you aren't likely to be ableto put in the extra work needed to go beyond that. This if everything within academia is done right, which is far from the case, there are are still a lot of huge issues. It being very competitive along with no fixed work hours is going to lead to an inherent bias. And of course, this bias is going to have impacts, not just on the individual people that don't get a job, but in the output from it. In medicine, there's been a very long -standing problem of medicine treating men as the default and women as a complication. This means that medicine is horrifically under -researched in how it affects women. Way this stands out is the typical symptoms of heart attacks, which differ quite a between men and women, but anybody who's heard of them casually will have heard of the way they manifest in and so might not recognize a heart attack

0:15:19 Bryan: Happening in a woman. All of this is without getting into some of the actively bad factors in academia. And we get into those, but those are things that do affect all jobs. So obviously any job is going to have a risk of the boss being a bully or sexually harassing employees. It actually has come out recently that that does tend to be worse in this. I was looking into some numbers for this, particularly in astrophysics. There's been talk over the past few years of a bullying crisis that people have realized that the rate of people being bullied in academia is not only worse than in the average populace, but worse. The statistics I've seen are that in the general populace the bullying is measured at around 10 to 15 percent of employees have experienced bullying. In academia for the the population at large, it's around 30 to 40%. Yeah.

0:16:25 Thomas: A bunch of assholes.

0:16:26 Bryan: Yeah. So first, before we should take those values too seriously, we have to be careful as these are numbers from different studies. There isn't any one study that looks at the whole population and then down to the subset of people working in academia that I've been able to find. So So there's a likelihood that if these studies use slightly different definitions of bullying, that can affect the results.

0:16:52 Bryan: So we want to be careful about that. We do at least, we can say, even if we don't compare to the population at large, that 30 to 40 % of people in academia, which if you narrow it down to minorities, goes goes up to 50 % having experienced bullying. I think that's within the last two years they measured it. That is far too high, however you describe bullying. Mean, the only way you'd have to imagine that all academics have a very peculiar of what bullying is, which honestly just isn't plausible. Yeah.

0:17:28 Thomas: They are probably the ones who have experienced it the most in life, so So, I don't know, just on average, like just, I would just, I think it would be a self -selected bunch a little bit.

0:17:35 Bryan: So is a very peculiar problem with bullying in academia that we need to figure out, one, why is it so bad in academia compared to other jobs? And two, what do you do it? Yeah.

0:18:01 Bryan: I make the case that the structure of jobs and academia probably has something to do with it. And it's something that will need to be investigated further to see for sure. But I wanted to bring this up so that we can start a discussion and hopefully listeners can chime in with their opinions and maybe put together some ideas of what we can do about it or how do we gather better data to confirm or deny some of the suspicions. But let's start out with what I'm thinking might be the cause here or at least part of the cause. And I think it has to do, at least in part, with the job structure of academia. So I mentioned there's this hierarchy of various career stages, and there's this huge brick wall between being a postdoc and getting a permanent position. It's at the point where you're getting faculty positions where you actually start managing people. People. So there's a pretty big divide between people who are not managing people and those who are. It's filtering out 85 or so percent of the people before you get to that point. So the first factor is that there's probably a bit of a sense of elitism among the people who who do survive that because they see so many don't, and then they get into a class of people who have similarly survived this massive culling. This, there are a lot of academics who are treated as stars in a sense. Of what people in faculty and in science do to, as part of their job, is applying for grants and bringing in money for the university. And if they're good at doing this, this can give them a very firm sense of their own self -worth, seeing, oh, I'm worth this amount of money to the university, so so that could be ego -inflating and causing to think better of themselves. That has something to do with it. I be something subtler, just, think it might actually be that bullying is more likely to get out of hand and not be handled well when it starts, because

0:20:06 Bryan: A lot almost by nature, is a pattern of behavior. It isn't your boss having a bad day and yelling at you when they're frustrated. It's a pattern of them yelling at you time after time. And so if the system is set up so that if your boss does yell at you once, you informal way to resolve it. You report it to someone. They'll with your boss saying, hey, don't do that. Maybe they apologize. Maybe they don't, but at least they don'T do it again. Things can be down and not get to the point where you have an ongoing pattern which arises to bullying. The problem with academia, at least as I see it, is that a lot of management goes across this divide between temporary employees and permanent employees. This means that the permanent employees have a much higher sense of their own value than the temporary employees. That is the PhD students and postdoc. PhD students are supervised and do a lot of work. In to just trying to learn, they're trying to do science as part of earning their PhD. So they're treated as employees in the same sense. And then another part is with With the big divide here, most of the people who get cut off are cut off in their 20s to 30s, whereas those who stay on can stay on for the rest of their life. So there's going to be a much larger age gap, and a bigger age gap could result in a bigger implicit power differential. There are a lot of factors that go in there. One thing that could be going on is that simply the fact that a lot of employees are temporary or a fixed end date to their contract means that if problems do come up, it's very easy for the solution on the side of the faculty to just be to slow walk the response to it. You if the person they're complaining about is perceived as valuable. So we've talked about how academics bring in money to the university, whereas PhD students haven't had the opportunity to apply for money. They may even be getting grants and costing the university money. Postdocs will sometimes be bringing in money, depending on exactly what they're working on, but usually nowhere near to the extent that faculty is. And so you've got a conflict between two people of very different perceived value, one on a temporary temporary contract, probably not bringing extra money, and one on a permanent contract who probably is. And so even before anybody looks at the specifics of the issue, there's a strong temptation to side with the person

0:22:47 Bryan: In greater power there. And thing I noticed when working is that there's also a socialization divide between the various levels of academia, that you tend to get PhD students socializing with each other most of the time, postdocs with each another, and then faculty members with each With a a few events that cross across boundaries. There are things like faculty lunches where postdocs aren't invited to, but all the faculty is. And the thing is, if you have a problem with a faculty member and you need to bring it up to someone else, it's going to be either another faculty member, maybe their boss. But their boss is typically going to be on a closer level to them than you are to either of them, just because there's this big age gap going across this boundary, whereas the gap between a professor and head of the institute is going to be much smaller in terms of experience. The difference there is really who wants to do the managerial work or can be forced to do it rather than who wants to advance in their career, which is a very different question. The gap between your boss and the head of the institute is going to be much smaller. So they're going to see your boss as their peer, basically, and you as a temporary annoyance, potentially. Okay, so maybe you don't take it to them. Maybe you take it HR. Well, HR are in a different category of employment. They're also on indefinite contracts. So even if they aren't peers,

0:24:21 Bryan: Yeah, well, indefinate meaning that they don't have a fixed end date to their contract. And depending on the country, they'll have job protection, but they don't typically get signed on for, okay, you're only going to work in HR for two years and then you're out. That's what I mean by indefinite.

0:24:21 Thomas: HR is? Oh, oh, oh I'm sorry, I thought you were saying the other way. So, you're saying because they're part of the structure, they're, I you, okay, I misunderstood how you're saying that.

0:24:47 Bryan: So, know, you even though they probably won't see the faculty member as a peer, they're both permanent faculty, which means that going to be interacting with them going on into the future. And do you're picking sides in a conflict and, if if you're going to resolve a conflict the best way, you do have to pick sides. You find that one of the people involved is behaving unreasonably and have a talk them about it. If you do that with a faculty member, you're making things awkward with somebody you're going to have to work with for years on end. If you do this with a PhD student or postdoc, they're going be gone in a couple of years. Sure in their minds, they try to be impartial, but these biases creep in and it's very hard to avoid them. So I suspect that this is a big factor in how bullying can become a pattern of behavior, that it's very hard, very hard for us to cross this power divide when somebody on the faculty side starts misbehaving as all the biases of everyone you might go to, to try to resolve this are going to be, okay, let's either ignore this, wait till they go away, or I'll nice with the person who's going to be around here forever. If they're misbehaviing, don't I'm, know. I'm not going to make peace. I don'm not, I, I I'm going to I'll take their, side on this. Obviously People don't think this directly, but it's It's going to be an implicit factor in how it happens. Do you kind of see what I'm getting at

0:26:09 Thomas: Well, that's interesting, I mean, because the the common, common you know, theory these days is that everybody's so sensitive in academia and And it's the idea would be that you bring up a problem like this and instantly the teacher will get fired or something. And so that might be a straw man, like, is it really so, so bad that it sounds like you're talking as though it's, it's like nothing nothing, is ever done if, if you bring up bullying problem?

0:26:30 Bryan: My experience that it's closer to the opposite. And I think you found this as well in some of your Where There's Woke episodes where you were talking about some of the complaints of faculty members that when you looked into it, they were doing some outrageous things and got very mild pushback. Against them. And then they complained that it was over the line. Obviously, you've a selection bias there, and that the ones you chose to focus on on the show are the ones who are making the biggest noise about what's being done to them. When you look at those cases and see them doing horrible things and getting only very mild consequences, consequences, you have to imagine that this is going on all the time, that there are faculty members who are misbehaving or treating students and employees very poorly, and nothing is done until it somehow blows up. Interestingly, in astrophysics, part of what's been happening is is that it's been blowing up. Around a couple of years ago, there was a story I was hearing, and while I was doing research to prepare for this episode, I was trying to remember, okay, what was that bullying scandal that came up? And I couldn't even remember the name of the person involved, so I went looking it up, and I found, oh, okay. Big bullying scandal in astrophysics. I read about it, and wait, no. no, this wasn't the one I was thinking of.

0:27:54 Bryan: I dig further. There's another big bullying scandal in astrophysics, also not the one I was thinking of. And so, basically, these things have been breaking about every other year, and astrophysics isn't a very big market. These are huge scandals breaking, and these are just the ones that have reached a boiling point. You have to try to extrapolate somehow how many of these stories are there that are going on that aren't making the news, that are just handled within a department or are suppressed in one way or another, that somebody does complain about it, but the complaint is despite being valid, or or perhaps they actually succeed at their complaint, but then the result of that is they agree to an NDA in exchange for a payoff, and then you never hear anything publicly. Unfortunately, NDAs being what they are, it's basically impossible to get any good numbers on how many of them exist. So this is kind of why I wanted to bring this up, is that particularly, I had some ideas, But once I did research, I found that this is actually a lot worse than I was expecting with, you know, among around half of minorities be experiencing bullying and multiple scandals of bullying breaking in the past few years. In case, it even resulted in the astrophysics department at a university being dissolved.

0:29:19 Bryan: It was 350 years old. The department at the University of Lund, had they a problem with two people, a married couple that had caused such a problem of bullying. And the university was refusing to remove them from their posts, eventually got resolved by each of them being transferred to a different department, which kind of reminds me of the Catholic Church in response to child abusers.

0:29:46 Bryan: You're not fixing the problem, you're just moving the problem. And okay, maybe if the two of them together were the problem and they got separated to different departments, it'll be a bit less bad. But that the best way they could think of to handle it was moving them around, even in the face of public outcry. It's just disheartening to see. And so I think we really need to talk about when we're looking at the bullying problem and the lack of minorities in academia, because let's be honest here, Bullying is affecting minorities a lot more. And if you get bullied, you're going to want to leave more likely. It's almost certainly a factor in the representation we see. We have to look at how a lot of professors are being treated with kid gloves and why that might be. Yeah.

0:30:34 Thomas: I mean it's like so many things we've looked at over the years it's just these systems reinforce themselves and it's this feedback loop you know and it sort of just almost becomes definitional where it's like well the people of the power with the are the people with the power or a little depressing you know because you'd like to think that there's something special going on but I don't really think it's much more than that you know and makes it's it really hard to fight against because it's so pervasive and it feels like at every turn as you mentioned there's so many different ways that these kind of of advantages and disadvantages kind perpetuate.

0:31:04 Bryan: Definitely.

0:31:17 Thomas: That there's definitely other problems we haven't even gotten to about, you in general, in terms of the, just the jobs and the funding and everything, and it being such a fraught place to begin with. I'm curious, this is something that you dealt with at all, or that you observed at all, or what were inspired you to want to take this on?

0:31:32 Bryan: Well yeah there's a lot of things I observed and I yeah I can't get into all of it here some of it private matters but yeah I've seen a lot of casual sexism going around you the classic thing of you know I'm sitting next to a female colleague, a professor walks by us both, looks at her and says, you should smile more and says nothing to me about that. And, you know, that's just one of the.

0:31:59 Thomas: Can only assume you're smiling the normal amount. That's why you've been smiling enough. That'S, probably that'S why. Yeah. It's must, just be that I would imagine. That''s the ultimate. I love that because that was sexism that we all should have been, or probably were aware of like 30 years ago. That like decades old sex. Like, yeah, there's probably all new levels of covert sexism, but that one, speaking it's of old and out of touch. And you talk about that age gap thing that strikes me as, as a big issue too, where you talk About like the people who stick around in our established, like the, difference the, in age gets worse and worse. And like being that level of out of touched in the year of whatever this happened, I we know it's in the last 10 years, right. Or something. That's crazy.

0:32:02 Bryan: Apparently I smile enough. Yeah. And I've that particular one a few times. And one time it wasn't even from someone that much older, maybe only a decade older. That's on the minor side. I seen instances of one where it wasn't an issue of bullying, but I did see faculty members deliberately using a wait -em -out strategy rather than handling a problem they had with an employee. And this in case, it was just that he was underperforming. And rather than, you go through the processes they're supposed to go through, they just said, well, we'll just not renew his contract and then we'll wiggle around so that we're legally covered when it ends and we can hire people in a position that's just barely different enough. Up. Things that, which on face of it, waiting an employee out, but the worst thing in the world, but that same thing can happen in cases of bullying as well. Were occasion to look into all the information about all the processes of how to handle complaints and stuff. The formal complaints, there's a strict timetable for it, which is good. It prevents the people in charge from just waiting things out. But that process also recommends you try to resolve it informally as well. And it recommends you go out to mediation. And both of those steps don't really have any time attached to them. So that leaves them a pretty big gap to try to delay things. If contract is only two years long and this comes up midway through it, they really only have to delay Things a bit before it's not really worth fighting and they can just not renew your contract. And then you have to face very a large uphill battle if you want to prove that they didn't renew because of some legally prescribed reasons. Which, depending on where you live, may be few and far between.

0:34:27 Thomas: There any more numbers we can put to the problem? I mean, we you talked about definitely like the amount of bullying, but how how skewed are the demographics? Did you look into that at all in terms of like who ends up at the top or

0:34:38 Bryan: Generally going through the pipeline, the numbers found that of the people who with a PhD, only about 15 % or so will ever get a permanent position whereas around 70 % of them want to and

0:34:53 Thomas: And I know we have a a ton ton of academics who in the ex -academics who listen it would be interesting to be able to study like okay are there fields that have it better worse does it correspond with demographics at all is it you know like it'd be interesting look at all that stuff well

0:35:05 Bryan: Okay I pulled up one of the papers I looked at here. So this one is from, let's MIT Science Policy Review, a paper called Women in Academia. Why Why and where does the pipeline leak and how can we fix it? Trying to look at all of the factors going into it. So So first, the overall issue, they show a plot here showing that as you to go from college graduate to PhD recipient to assistant professor to associate professor to professor. Been a drop -off of around five or so percent at every stage in the percentage of women in each of those positions, though it has been getting better over time. They show a time series over this, that back in 1995, where it went from about 55 % of graduates were women to only 20 % of professors, to nowadays, it's graduates stayed about the same at about 55%, but professors are up to around 38%. So the gap has been cut quite quite significantly. So the news is that some of the things people are doing have been working.

0:36:13 Thomas: What's interesting there is I know I've read that like one thing the uh and graduation rates for women girls have gone past men in terms of just undergrad and stuff and instantly there's a freak out about that like oh oh my god what about the men like then what's interesting about that is I that means when you run the numbers that really it should be even more skewed towards women in these higher up positions like the fact that it's still sure don't know what figure in particular but if taking that one like 38 women it actually should be more than 50 based on who actually attending universities and stuff yeah

0:36:44 Bryan: Because at university, we had around 55 % of women. So, So, if that lasted all the way through, you would expect 55 % of faculty to be women, but it drops off dramatically. On in this paper, they give a breakdown of the various fields. And honestly, it doesn't look good for many of them. Oddly has the highest drop off. It goes from about 80 % of graduates are women to five percent of faculty yeah it is frightening yeah let goes from 80 % to 5%. Arts and humanities is around 60 % to 40%. Not as bad. At. Psychology and social science is around 50 % to 35%. Engineering uniquely starts off extremely low at only 20%, then drops to half that at about 10%. Life science, 60 % to 40%. Computer science Science and mathematics is 30 % to 20%. Physical and earth science is 30%, 10 % again. It's Across the board, there's a drop off. Are a few that aren't quite as bad like arts and humanities and psychology and social science. And then there's education, which I don't know what's going on. That is a horrific drop off yet.

0:37:19 Thomas: That's nuts sure yeah that's interesting I if that has to do with like if they you get get into education, you want to go teach or something, or still

0:38:18 Bryan: So maybe it, that a lot of people get in and then go off to teach rather than staying to become faculty in education.

0:38:28 Thomas: Doesn't seem great. Like if if 80 % are women going into it, like you would also want women around to teach those women, right? Like you would want, you would Want some amount of shared experience there.

0:38:40 Bryan: Yeah, anyway sum things up. So one thing I want to underline here is we've talked a lot about women, but that's mostly because that's where the data is. That's what's been studied. This is an issue that goes beyond simply affecting women and affects all minorities, that you see are going to affect all of them. So like talked about a bit about disabled people. So one thing I mentioned a couple of times is I'm on the autism spectrum. And one of the ways that affects me is that I have limited energy for work. And I'm lucky enough that the way it manifests in me, I'm able to do a job, get it done and get it down well. Well. But what I can't do is overdo it in an attempt at trying to look better for the sake of a promotion. Even the subset of people with disabilities are still able to do the job well enough. When you put this competitive filter up, that's going to cut out a lot of people people who are able to do the job fine. The big issue here is that the people who get cut out are out of academia, that there isn't a way for them to stay and keep doing science. So we have this big filter that means that people who Are doing a good enough job and getting experience at that job can no longer keep doing it. And actually I did some back of the envelope calculations on this. If you look at how many people are filling various positions. So I looked at the University of Edinburgh just to get some numbers. The In Department of Physics and Astronomy, it has 194 graduate students, 168 168 postdocs, and 138 academic staff. If you do some back -of -the -envelope calculations on this account for the fact that graduate students are going to be spending roughly half their time studying and half working, and academic staff will be spending half half and half the time teaching or managing, then you end up that the way the time spent researching researching is apportioned is that well more than half of all research time is being done by graduate students and postdocs. So this means that if you want to take away, we have an issue where more than Half of Science is being Done by People Less Than Five Years Out from Graduating with Their PhD. And just think of how much better scientific output we could have if that were were expanded so that so many more people than just one in six were given the ability to stay in the job and improve their skills, get decades worth of experience under their belts rather than just the small fraction that are. So this, you you worry about the quality of output. And, you Know, we've heard like in social sciences, there's a big reproducibility crisis of a lot of studies that don't seem to be reproducible. And it makes me wonder how much of this is an issue that a lot studies are being done by relatively inexperienced researchers who, if they'd worked on it more, would have seen pitfalls earlier on and not allowed them to enter the experimental design. Yeah. I don't have a good good solution for this. A lot of this is a big structural change, but I think we need to start talking about it first before we can start changing it.

0:41:56 Thomas: For sure. I'm really interested to hear. I know we have so many people listening, like I said, who probably have experience in this. Send an email or something or, you know, contact me somewhere we and should, we how many other experiences we have with this.

0:42:08 Bryan: Thomas at seriouspod.com. Send him an email. Maybe other people have thoughts. You can come on and talk also, one other thing, a piece of advice for were talking a bit about about problems with professors. Can't overcome the power differential completely, but one thing you can do to even it out is join a union if you have that opportunity and join it before any problems start, because typically they won't support you on it if you wait until an issue has started to join. So join when things are good so that if things go bad, you'll have the force of the union and the experience of people there on your side. They can guide you through the local rules and local laws, let you know what to expect. And if you can hope for anything, or if the best you can do is a negotiated exit, which maybe they can get you a better termination terms or or whatever. But they'll be in the best position to tell you that.

0:43:04 Thomas: Sure. Any, anything else you want to leave the audience with before we get going?

0:43:08 Bryan: That if any of the meows from my cat made it into the final cut, and you want to see more of them, I've been posting pictures of them on Blue Sky. That's Bryan R. Gillis at Blue Sky Dead Social, B-R-Y-A-N-R-G-I-L-L-I-S. Plenty of pictures of my cats there if you want to see the sources of all those meows.

0:43:26 Thomas: Brian Gillis, I do. I'm going to take a look. My last question is, do I still call you astrophysicist, Dr. Bryan Gillis? Are you technically not? Are you, or once astrophysicist, always an astrophysicist? How's How's that work?

0:43:36 Bryan: Yeah, I'm not sure about that. They don't take PhD your away from you. Well, there is this ritual where you have to give them your diploma, your badge, and your gun, but they only do that to the really bad ones.

0:43:50 Thomas: How did you get a gun? What is that?

0:43:52 Bryan: You need me to explain that to you, I don't even know.

0:43:55 Thomas: Well, I'm not one of them. Yeah, I am not in your, I mean, I don't know. I'm in your elite crew.

0:43:58 Bryan: So I still have a PhD in astrophysics and the experience. Yeah, my current job is a research software engineer. And maybe another time we can talk about what that entails and the this type of job supports science and the stuff we're doing.

0:44:12 Thomas: It's not as fun to say that as astrophysicist, Dr. Bryan Gillis. Sorry, but for thanks joining us. Us a lot to think about. Appreciate it.

0:44:18 Bryan: Thanks for having me on.

0:44:40 Thomas: Scratching post-doctorate I don't know I got nothing else like