Advocating for Increased Retention of Women Physician-Scientists in Academia: Tearing Down the Glass Ceiling Once and For All

I think the article placed too little emphasis on the smaller amount of family support for female physician scientist which is in my opinion one of the major factors explaining why women are less successful in the research field. One just needs to look at the proportion of male MD/PhDs who have a stay-at-home spouse to take care of their kids, grandparents, and housework, and the proportion of female MD/PhDs who enjoy the same type of support. If males continue to have less household and child care responsibilities, then they will continue to have more time to spend on thinking, developing research plans, writing grants, and networking with other scientists. Now about the disparity in promotion. Promotion does not only depend on how many articles were published, how many successful grants were written per year. It also depends on how much the faculty member is being involved in non-research related activities, such as administrative committees and boards. Through such additional involvements faculty get to "show off" themselves, take leadership positions, network with and get close to the people who will be making the promotion decisions. And the time that a faculty spends on such involvements depends on the amount of time they have left after they have allocated enough hours to their research and family duties. And if the female faculty's total time is less due to disproportionate family duties (think about which parent usually does the pick up after school/kindergarten or when a child is sick and which parent usually gets dinner ready, as a few examples), then she can't become as involved in administrative activities as much, she cannot network as much, etc. She simply becomes less-qualified for promotion. Time availability seems to be the determining factor that causes disparity in female-male achievement comparisons. If two people possess the same intelligence, the same training background, the same time-management abilities, and if one of these otherwise "identical" people has 10-20 hours per week less time, then that person will always lose if she/he competes with the person who has 10-20 hours per week more time. This is such a logical explanation and it must be taken very seriously. If women are ever to become equal to men in terms career achievements and career satisfaction, then they have to strive to have complete equality on the family responsibilities with their spouses. And this initiative needs to come from the women themselves. We as human beings are all inherently egoistic in nature--if somebody else agrees to do our part of a given job, then we'll let them do it. Even professional women seem to still partially adhere to the "traditional roles of husband and wife" where the female takes greater responsibility in house duties and child care and the male has a higher responisibility for career development and financial success. Such a traditional view can only hurt a female professional. It is foolish for the female professional to believe that she can be both the traditional Mom and be also able to compete with the traditional Dad--this is simply not working as all the data referenced in the article above has demonstrated.