> The importance of cross pollinating you postdoc and grad degree is to prove the worth of your degree

Regardless of the intent, it's a fairly arbitrary way to weed out candidates without actually evaluating their strength, and the actual outcome is hurting women or people from a lower socioeconomic background. The schools you went to should be a lot less important than your publications.

> and the actual outcome is hurting women or people from a lower socioeconomic background.

Can we get a source on this claim?

My dodo brain remembers something like women earn more college degrees than men[0], especially at the postgraduate/terminal level.

[0] https://nces.ed.gov/FastFacts/display.asp?id=72

An overall difference still means it is possible for this factor to be working against them.

How do you expect to weed out candidates without hurting low-SES? Everything disproportionately hurts low-SES.

There is no reason for this to hurt single, childless women disproportionately. We should not be coddling women for their choices in homelife. Nobody is forcing them to start families.

I don't really see how that makes sense unless your PhD research was a dead end. With a topic that isn't a dead end, continuing on as a postdoc at the same place would indicate that you were doing well enough with your topic and it had enough value that the lab considered it to be worth keeping you on.

In my field there's such a shortage of talent that people practically fight to convince upcoming PhD grads to continue on as postdocs. The PhDs are already mostly trained, have shown their worth during their PhDs, and already are familiar with the facility.

Plus, so much research these days involves collaboration between institutions that focusing specifically on differing your postdoc and grad as a sign of the "worth" of your degree seems a bit ridiculous. I don't think I've had a single research task that didn't involve working with people from another institution.

What field are you in?

It's related to synchrotron light sources. Since there are already very few such facilities, there is not a lot of available talent to pull from. Especially with people starting to age out and retire faster than new people can be trained (or so I was told, I have no hard numbers).

The facility I'm at is very interested in bringing me on as a postdoc for a project which would be a much larger version of my thesis work implemented at several large facilities (certain key aspects of which my advisor does not have a background in and is expecting to rely on me for), so it feels a bit weird to find out that it'd be a mark against me despite the obvious value.

I'd expect the bigger mark against me to be skipping out on the next significant step in my specific field of research to start from scratch in something different just for the sake of being different.

It'd be like being an early career researcher at OpenAI playing a meaningful role in the early research for GPT-5, having the opportunity to keep working on actually building GPT-5, but passing that over to go work at Meta to train a less capable LLM. The latter isn't bad on its own, but it obviously wouldn't be as notable on a CV as being someone who worked on GPT-5 from start to finish.

Fascinating, I'd never heard of synchrotron light sources before and had to pull myself out of a rabbit hole to write this. Thanks for taking the time to write a nuanced response.

I wonder if particle and laser physicists tend to be excepted from this trend, since these depend on specialized equipment.

Would you be working with different faculty, besides your advisor? Would your postdoc research feel like a distinct research project, or would it feel like malingering continuation of PhD research?

I think the preference for moving institutions is to avoid seeming "stuck." Some PhD students malinger on postdoc work at their home institution, making it seem like they don't know how to finish a project or know when it's time to scope/start a new project.

So, it might prove beneficial to ensure your projects do not fit the stuck/malingering narrative.

I think this bias is unfair, because there are plenty of reasons someone might want to stay in one place: house, family, etc. But like any bias, you can meet it head-on by controlling the narrative instead of letting the biased narrative play out.

It really isn’t that hard to get a PhD…well you put in the hard work, you’ll get the degree. You don’t need to be a genius, and the training/experience you get from a PhD program is useful.

Someone using their phd to brag about their superiority is dumb, the best researcher I know only has a masters (I have a phd and I’m not as good as he is). On the other hand, I don’t think their are many PhDs out there that don’t deserve their degree, just that there are misunderstandings about what the degree means.