In 2004 Absinthe posted a survey on an online women-in-physics bulletin board to ask women who had left physics academia why they had left, and how happy they were before and after making that career change. The collected narrative responses can be found here. The narratives are absolutely fascinating to read.
Note that some of the women claim they had not experienced gender discrimination, then went on in their narratives to describe situations that stink of discrimination.
Also, when Absinthe did a statistical study of the responses, she found that the longer a woman stayed in physics academia before leaving, the more unhappy she was upon leaving. There was a very strong linear relationship between unhappiness and length of time in academia.
Also, note that many of the women who left right after their PhD mention that they left because they noticed how unhappy the senior women in the field were. It is the responses to this survey that have led Absinthe to firmly believe that getting more women into physics is not as simple as shovelling more females into the pipeline at the undergraduate level. First we have to fix what is screwed up with the field, then encourage more females to give it a try. Otherwise, just shovelling females into the pipeline will create a huge personal toll as many of them later drop out because they see that all the senior females are still unhappy with the physics academia status quo.
Also, Absinthe should point out that this study is biased in that the only women who saw the survey posting were still connected with physics enough to subscribe to the online women-in-physics bulletin board. The survey never reached all the women who either completely changed fields in disgust, or were so thoroughly booted from the field as to lose all connection with it. Thus Absinthe suspects that the "happiness scale" data are biased to being much more happy-with-physics-academia-upon-leaving than a unbiased sampling of all women who had left physics academia would likely indicate.
The biases inherent in this survey led Absinthe to design a new survey of people (both men and women) who are still in the academic pipeline to determine if the women were more unhappy than the men, and if so, why. In 2004, with help from people in high places, she posted this survey to the 3000 physicists at Fermilab as part of a conference registration procedure and got a good response rate. In a future post, she will describe the results of that survey.
In the meantime, enjoy reading the results of this survey.
