Sex, math, and unemployed scientists

An article in Scientific American wades into the controversy on innate sexual differences in mathematics and science, over which Larry Summers got fired from the Harvard presidency. In the course of the article, we find this:

It does not take a Ph.D. to see how making fuller use of female talent would go a long way toward increasing the number of scientific workers. In the U.S., for example, women made up 46 percent of the workforce in 2003 but rep­resented only 27 percent of those employed in science and engineering.

The problem here is that there's no good reason we'd want to work "toward increasing the number of scientific workers", because so many of them are unemployed right now. In 2004, the Washington Post reported that the rhetoric of needing more scientists was far from matching the reality of low salaries and unemployment:

Obscured by the alarmist rhetoric are the repeated false alarms, erroneous forecasts and gluts of unemployed scientists -- rather than shortages -- that have been the reality in the scientific marketplace for decades. In the mid-1980s, government forecasters warned that the "baby bust" portended a crippling "shortfall" of 675,000 scientists over the next 20 years. By 1990 the forecast was dropped down the memory hole as joblessness increased in scientific ranks.

In 1995 an article in a publication of the American Mathematical Society noting the abundance of unemployed math PhDs observed: "At current hiring levels, it would take several years to absorb this backlog, even if all Ph.D. production suddenly ceased." The plight of chemists was summarized last year in a headline in a leading chemical journal, "Slump Continues for Chemists: Unemployment is at a record high, but opportunities exist for the well prepared."

The scientific establishment is usually united on the theme of more is better. But the disparity between party line and job statistics has grown to the point where a leading figure of science has broken with the crowd. Last February Donald Kennedy, editor of Science, co-wrote an editorial that asked, "Why do we keep wishing to expand the supply of scientists, even though there is no evidence of imminent shortages?"

In reply to its own question, the editorial observed that "policies are set mainly by elders, who, like the institutions that employ them, have little incentive to downsize their operations." To which it added, "We've arranged to produce more knowledge workers than we can employ, creating a labor-excess economy that keeps labor costs down and productivity high."

Average salary scales for professors show the marketplace value of different disciplines: law, $109,478; business, $79,931; biological and biomedical sciences, $63,988; mathematics, $61,761.

The failure of more Americans to pursue science studies can in part be attributed to poor high school and college programs for nurturing scientific talent. But the much-lamented turn away from science also reflects sound economic calculation. The post-college route to a science PhD usually takes five to seven years. Postdoctoral fellowships, now a commonplace requirement for most academic and many industrial jobs, run for two to three years. Postdoctoral wages average around $35,000 a year, without benefits.

Sound economic calculation indeed; one would have to be either crazy or extremely idealistic (which might amount to the same thing) to pursue a scientific career. Anyone with the smarts to do science would be far better off going to Wall Street.