Collaborative Research: TLS: Where are all the Female Engineers?

对于美国的科学政策来说，也许没有什么问题比理解为什么合格的女性（和男性）会选择或不选择科学和工程职业更重要了。一个国家科学工作者的素质在很大程度上决定了其科学的质量。如果合格的女性不从事科学和工程领域的工作，科学和国家都会受到影响。自第二次世界大战以来，女性越来越多地被技术领域所吸引。最近，女性在大学生和大学毕业生中占多数，她们在医学院的申请者中占多数，在会计和审计专业中占多数，她们申请法律专业的人数与男性相当。此外，妇女在定量技能测试中的表现也有所提高。1979年，在全国青年纵向调查的数学能力测试中，女性相对于男性有2个百分点的差距；但在1997年的同组中，他们有4个百分点的优势。然而，女性在物理科学学位持有者中所占比例不到三分之一，在最近获得的工程学位中，女性只占10%。这个项目试图理解为什么女性涌入一些传统上由男性主导的领域，而不是进入其他领域，尽管她们的技术能力越来越强。研究小组通过分析从事科学和工程职业对结婚率、离婚率和生育率的影响来解决这个问题。他们还将考虑劳动力市场中断如何影响妇女在各个领域的收入生命周期路径。这些分析直接解决了文献中的问题，即科学和工程对家庭形成施加了相对（与其他领域相比）较大的成本。研究人员将把美国数据的结果与英国合作者对英国数据进行的平行分析的结果进行比较。

Perhaps no issue is more important for US science policy than understanding why qualified women (and men) do or do not choose careers in science and engineering. The quality of a nation's scientific workforce determines, in large part, the quality of its science. If qualified women avoid careers in science and engineering, science and the nation suffer. Since World War Two, women have been increasingly attracted to technical fields. Women have recently become a majority of college students and college graduates, they represent a majority of applicants to medical school, a majority in accounting and auditing, and they apply to law programs in numbers equivalent to men. In addition, women have been gaining in performance on quantitative skills tests. In 1979, women had a 2 percentile point deficit relative to men on the mathematical ability test on the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth; but in the 1997 cohort they had a 4 percentile point advantage. Yet women constitute less than a third of degree holders in the physical sciences and hold only ten percent of recent degrees in engineering.This project seeks to understand why women have flooded into some traditionally male fields, but not into others, despite their increasingly strong technical qualifications. The research team addresses this question via analyses of the effects of starting careers in science and engineering on marriage rates, divorce rates and fertility rates. They will also consider how labor market interruptions affect the lifecycle path of women's earnings in various fields. These analyses directly address concerns in the literature that science and engineering impose relatively (compared to other fields) large costs on family formation. The researchers will compare the results from US data with results from parallel analyses of British data conducted by collaborators in the UK.