Having a support spouse, usually a wife, is a boon for anyone but especially for pre-tenure professors, for whom it is not unheard of to work hundred-hour weeks. Since women rarely have a spouse willing to tend house for them, while male professors and graduate students sometimes do, the women are often at a relative disadvantage. Additionally, wives are often more willing to relocate for their husbands than vice versa [Ferry et al 1982, page 29,]. As one computer scientist said:
There was an article in Chronicles of Higher Education about 3 years ago by a male professor who wrote about how he and his wife (also a professor) needed to have a third party --- a wife... The gist of his argument is that faculty workload is based on antiquated notions of unquestioning, full-time support from a spouse, and that universities need to revise their expectations of professors [Frenkel 1990, page 41,].Women in academia have the additional problem that the years in which they must work to get tenure are a significant portion of their child-bearing years. In [Frenkel 1990, page 41,], one woman gives this as a reason for choosing industry over academia. Additionally, some women ``prefer to take a less demanding job than their qualifications fit them for, because they feel that the time and attention they can afford on top of their responsibilities at home is limited'' [Ferry et al 1982, page 30,]. This might be one reason that female computer science PhDs are less likely than their male peers to enter academia, more often choosing industry instead.
Not only are some women unwilling to sacrifice family for work, a choice that men rarely have to make, but when women do decide to put their career first, it is still assumed that they do not take their career seriously. According to a survey of (English) female engineers and scientists:
The most trying moments in almost every woman's life seem to have been spent in interviews. The women in our survey have nearly all taken the trouble to equip themselves with a qualification that might suggest they had ambitions beyond boiling nappies [diapers] and making their husbands' tea. Yet time and again they have found themselves being pulled apart on the subject of whether or not they are likely to leave soon in order to marry or have children [Ferry et al 1982, page 28,].Similarly, a study of the hiring of scientists and technical staff at the National Health Service found that employers often assume
that all women will leave to have babies and that wastage due to pregnancy is greater than for any other reason. The pervasiveness of [this myth] was shown by the way in which they influenced practices at selection (for instance, only women were asked questions about marital status and dependent children). They also influenced notions of who can be a manager [Homans 1987, page 90,].So even if a woman chooses not to have children or not to take time out to raise them, employers will often assume otherwise and treat her accordingly. Furthermore, pregnancy does not always cause women to miss much work. An army study found that ``even when pregnancy leave is included, [enlisted women] take less time off than men, who lose it to sports and auto injuries and drug, alcohol and discipline problems'' [McNeil 1991].
Power can be another factor in why women choose not to be professors. The following was written by a woman who had been a professor but had switched to an industrial research position:
Of course, there are also men that dislike power and women who revel in it. Nonetheless, the tendency of women to be less comfortable with power than men may hold in our current society.A year ago I would probably have agreed with the popular conclusion that academia is difficult for women because of the time demands, coincidence of tenure with child-rearing, etc. After a little more than a year in industry, I've discovered another reason that academia can be difficult for women. I now believe that to be highly successful in academic research, one has to be very interested (invested?) in having power. Power over grants, over students, over committees, etc. I often heard professors referred to as empire-builders, something that I see very little of where I am now. Often the most successful researchers in my current environment are the ones who actively avoid politics and power-struggles and just `do their work'. As a woman I don't think that I am especially comfortable or adept at the power-games that I witnessed in the university.
Some hacker subcultures have the property that the hackers spend nearly all of their waking hours, and miss sleep, to use the computers. In his discussion of the absence of female hackers, Levy writes: ``There were women programmers and some of them were good, but none seemed to take hacking as a holy calling the way Greenblatt, Gosper, and the others did'' [Levy 1984, page 72,].
Another hacker classic, Tracy Kidder's Soul of a New Machine describes the intensity of the designers of a new computer:
Going to work for the Eclipse Group could be a rough way to start out in your profession.... [Y]ou don't have any time to meet women, to help your wife buy furniture for your apartment, or to explore the unfamiliar countryside. You work.... You're working at a place that looks like something psychologists build for testing the fortitude of small animals, and your boss won't even say hello to you.I have been told that, after this book came out, MIT students lined up to interview with Data General, so the described work environment does appeal to some computer science students. In our society, however, women are often less willing or able to devote all of their life to a job, particularly because working full force is often difficult without a support spouse to take care of other parts of one's life.New and old hands told the same story. Chuck Holland: `I can hardly say I do anything else now. It takes about three days to get Eagle out of my mind, so if you have a three-day weekend, you're just sorry to see Monday come.' Microkid Betty Shanahan, the group's lone female engineer: `You can end up staying all night. You can forget to go home and eat dinner. My husband complained that the last three times he's had to do the laundry.' Jon Blau: `I've had difficulty forming sentences lately. In the middle of a story my mind'll go blank. Pieces of your life get dribbled away. I'm growing up, having all those experiences, and I don't want to shut them out for the sake of Data General or this big project' [Kidder 1982, pages 60--61,].
When reading how intensely and single-mindedly the hackers work with computers, it is hard not to question the people who love the computer to the exclusion of all else, an opinion expressed by the writer of the following letter, written in response to [Markoff 1989], but equally applicable to the environment described in Hackers and The Soul of a New Machine:
To the Editor:It is important to remember that women who do not throw themselves into the computer world might not be inferior to men but that sacrificing everything to computers might not be something that a psychologically healthy human being does. Perhaps men and women alike would be better off if some jobs and hacker cultures did not require giving up the rest of their lives.You regretfully wonder why women have not done as well at computers as men. You define the issue inside out. The problem is not women's experience with computers but men's. If a `passionate romance' with the machine is the key to excelling, we should pity the men who do rather than the women who don't.
I am not a feminist crank at either end of that interesting spectrum, but no girl or woman I know is so alienated from her fellows that she `spurns the real world to master a universe locked inside a computer.'
Machines do seem better suited for use than for passionate romances. So why regret women's attitude toward them? Why not worry about yet another generation of men who are sealing themselves off from human contact [Harrigan 1989]?