Re:Why is Russia so good at encouraging women into tech?
by tashoecraft on Friday April 21, 2017 @09:37AM
(#14165436)
Anecdotal from female friends who have started down the path to PHD in stem fields, you basically have to forgo having children until you are in your 30's.
The current path of ~10 years of schooling through women's 'best' biological time to have a child is, I imagine, a reason for some of the discrepancy between male and female post undergrad.
Re:Why is Russia so good at encouraging women into tech?
by JBlue42 on Friday April 21, 2017 @10:09AM
(#14165731)
It's not even that niche though is it? A lot of the women I work with have started having kids in their mid-30s. In the US, I think overall people are marrying later and having kids later, IIRC.
Re:Why is Russia so good at encouraging women into tech?
by true_religion on Friday April 21, 2017 @11:21AM
(#14166333)
You can, but then you would have complications. My friends in their later 30s are having more trouble conceiving and bringing children to term.
On the other hand, my friends who had children in their early-20s had no issues.
Citation needed for this. From a quick look from a paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/1606.06196.pdf it seems like this statement is true at the undergraduate major level, but certainly not true at the doctoral level.
This is particularly relevant as unlike engineering/tech, where a Bachelor's (or less) suffices for the majority of work, the same is certainly not true in mathematics.
As an illustration of this, note that for many people graduate school in mathematics is spent trying to come up to speed with the current research efforts of the community, unlike engineering where one is (generally) expected to be a "producer" once one hits graduate school.