I always tell students in my field (molecular biology) to at the very least learn to code at a reasonable level and pick up some data science skills. Something transferable.
At any given time in my department, there'd be five times the amount of post-grad students to full-time staff. Maybe more. It has to be obvious that there likely isn't a job at any level at the end of it. Not just high-flying jobs on the path to professorship, but even low skill technical stuff.
As in other fields, women are at a significant disadvantage if they want to have kids (presuming they've made it though the initial cull). The key time for scoring a good number of first author papers in the very best journals is late 20s and early 30s in their post-doc positions. Given every higher position is so competitive, they simple lose out due to the time taken off. Makes me quite to sad to see very very talented scientist friends passed over for this reason.
> The key time for scoring a good number of first author papers in the very best journals is late 20s and early 30s in their post-doc positions.
I think it's really a black mark on the system that it should be OK for researchers to still not have a permanent position in their early 30s ten years after completing their undergraduate degree.
But understandable considering the incentives. Grad students and postdocs cost so little but accomplish so much, the whole system relies on them. Just need to keep selling them the promise of opportunity. Unless something changes I can't see this getting better anytime soon. The cult aspect of many top PIs strongly condemning people leaving or considering non-academic positions also doesn't help.
They simply decided what they valued more between later academic career and current family life (as you can have kids later). That's their choice, there's nothing to be saddened about.
The 20s to early 30s is the healthiest time to have a child, for both the child and the mother. Now, you can have children in your late thirties and beyond, but that can get more difficult depending on the specific health situation of the parents.
Also, there is a problem in parity for how having a child affects men vs women. It is easier for a man to become a parent and maintain a career than it is for the mother.
I don't think it's much of a problem, let alone a solvable one.
Some women manage to have top careers while bearing children. It's just that most prefer to focus on their family. I'm female, in a field which recently swapped from male to female dominance. The market is flooded with part time jobs (saturdays, or wednesday when school's off) and it's definitely causing some recruitment problems in the field (and on a deeper level, female are less likely to become partners because of responsibilities and work involved, many stay salaried and thus have lower revenues, etc). There has been numerous studies on this topic in my field and family is the biggest factor holding people back (although men also value their off time more than they used to so its partly a generational thing). At least there's work for motivated people, so I don't complain.
To me it's rather obvious that most women don't value their careers that much. Which is not a problem in itself, just stop pretending otherwise, no one's holding anyone back from careers but people themselves. (I guess most men don't either actually, but it doesn't show as much.) I also really don't get why it is such a punishable offense to assume in recruitment that a childless woman in her thirties will be on maternity leave soon as it's indeed a really strong probability. It's not like waiting for the end of probatory periodto get pregnant is a rare thing...
So what's the solution? Hold a position for a woman and then kick out whoever fills it when the woman returns? Everyone has to make choices and this is one of them. If there's a way round this conundrum, a very very talented woman will find it.
No doubt it's difficult, but what would help is to take something more than a person's Scopus index into account when picking applicants for interviews. The initial culling of hundreds of CVs to just a few is almost based solely on this (among the people who are actually qualified for the job and work in the advertised field).
Hiring the best person for the job is the solution IMO, but the system doesn't work that way. Does it really matter if person X has 3 Nature papers and person Y has 2? The real issue (in Australia, at least) is that publication is everything. It really shouldn't be, for a myriad of reasons.
At any given time in my department, there'd be five times the amount of post-grad students to full-time staff. Maybe more. It has to be obvious that there likely isn't a job at any level at the end of it. Not just high-flying jobs on the path to professorship, but even low skill technical stuff.
As in other fields, women are at a significant disadvantage if they want to have kids (presuming they've made it though the initial cull). The key time for scoring a good number of first author papers in the very best journals is late 20s and early 30s in their post-doc positions. Given every higher position is so competitive, they simple lose out due to the time taken off. Makes me quite to sad to see very very talented scientist friends passed over for this reason.