Maybe some of the women were also not trackable anymore because they changed their surname, in contrast to them not publishing anymore. Didn’t read all of it, did they account for that?
Shocked face… No surprise to anyone who has actually worked in that environment.
Absolutely. It’s a shit show.
And interestingly, making the general public more aware of this is likely quite important. Because 1, they have very idealistic views of what research is like, and 2, just about everyone is entering research blind to the realities. It’s a situation that needs some sunlight and rethinking.
IMO, a root cause is that the heroic genius researcher ideal at the base of the system’s design basically doesn’t really exist any more. Things are just too big and complex now for a single person to be that important. Dismantle that ideal and redesign from scratch.
I kind of suspect things were always too big and complex for one person to address but the rampant individualism of our society obscures that history.
Possibly, but when scientific knowledge and problems were smaller, one person could actually make a mark alone IMO. And if they happened upon a new discovery or insight then they’d appear to be geniuses, all alone.
At some point, when the work to make a discovery requires more than one person and the amount of theory involved in understanding its significance is too much for one person to be authoritative on all of it, then it’s a team sport.
Oh look, an article about me.
Got a PhD, hated it. Started working academia, hated it. Tried a corporate lab, hated it even more. Realized I was extremely burned out on the whole world of research and got into something far more tangible.
Very happily doing hazardous materials safety and handling now.
Based on what I hear from my colleagues’ experiences, most of them still want to continue doing research, but there aren’t enough research jobs and funding available for all of them.
Yep. There’s a whole world of people happy to work very hard on research for the rest of their lives … and instead we have them writing emails wrangling spreadsheets for … ??
Sometimes “shitty” work needs to be done, obviously … but I think it’s far less obvious that the pool of things that need to be done lies entirely in the random inefficient shit the business world just accepts. Instead, that’s just where the money flows.
Other 40% must quit in the eleventh year.