If you thought that career opportunities for women in science were unappealing, you’ll love the prospects for folks with humanities PhDs (described in this article from the Chronicle of Higher Education).
The writer’s thesis is a bit similar to my explanation for why so many men stick with an academic career in science:
Some professors tell students to go to graduate school “only if you can’t imagine doing anything else.” But they usually are saying that to students who have been inside an educational institution for their entire lives. They simply do not know what else is out there. They know how to navigate school, and they think they know what it is like to be a professor.
Prospects for humanities PhDs are pretty damn bleak, and reveal that women may actually be every bit as irrational as men where it comes to academic careers. There are some major differences, though. Lit PhD’s don’t tend to have good math/science skills, so we shouldn’t scratch our heads about why they aren’t pursuing careers in medicine like their more level-headed sisters, but I’d reckon they could pursue a law degree instead. A bigger difference is that there isn’t a well funded industry complaining about a shortage of shakespeare scholars. The academies themselves may be misleading young people about prospects in the humanities, but there isn’t an army of lobbyists out there trying to convince congress that America will fail unless we convince more young people to publish the 37,842nd essay about Milton’s Paradise Lost.
Reading your article on “”Women in science” sent a chill down my spine. Especially the following:
5. age 44: with (if lucky) young children at home, fired by the university (“denied tenure” is the more polite term for the folks that universities discard), begins searching for a job in a market where employers primarily wish to hire folks in their early 30s
This is how things are likely to go for the smartest kid you sat next to in college. She got into Harvard for graduate school. Her experiment worked out and she was therefore fortunate to land a job at University of Alabama, Huntsville. But at the end of the day, her research wasn’t quite interesting or topical enough that the university wanted to commit to paying her a salary for the rest of her life. She is now 44 years old, with a family to feed, and looking for job with a “second rate has-been” label on her forehead.