CIRGE charts Work/Family paths of female PhDs.(IN THEIR OWN WORDS)

By Dr. Elizabeth Rudd, research associate, and Dr. Lori Homer, survey director at the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education (CIRGE) at the University of Washington, Seattle

Forty years ago Helen Astin undertook a ground-breaking study of all 1,979 U.S. women who had earned a PhD degree in 1957 and 1958, which she reported in her 1969 book, The Woman Doctorate in America.

One of the main hindrances to the women's careers, Astin found, was the challenge of combining work and family. Women doctorates, Astin concluded, "often face problems in their career development that their male counterparts generally do not experience because they have chosen an unconventional path [and] many of them are wives and mothers who are trying to combine two very important and demanding roles successfully."

[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]

In the intervening years, women's representation among doctorate recipients has increased dramatically. In 2002 a 30-year upward trend in women's graduate education culminated in the first ever cohort of U.S. doctoral recipients with a majority of women.

But does the gender equality of earning PhDs translate into equality in careers? Women accounted for 42.1% of faculty in degree-granting institutions in 2001, according to the U.S. Department of Education.

Evidence from the survey, PhD's--Ten Years Later, housed at the Center for Innovation and Research in Graduate Education (CIRGE) at the University of Washington, suggests that gender equality in the career paths of PhD recipients is still hampered by conflicts between family lives and career structures Astin identified.