ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2019
The changing career trajectories of new parents in STEM.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2019. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 82 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
82 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Exploring Gender Bias in Six Key Domains of Academic Science: An Adversarial Collaboration.Psychological science in the public interest : a journal of the American Psychological Society · 2023Pooled it
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- How contemporary academic structures constrain scientific creativity and hold back early-career researchers.Nature human behaviour · 2026Review
- Ten simple rules for postdoctoral mums to stay competitive in academia.PLoS computational biology · 2026Article
- Gender shapes the relationship between productivity and journal prestige in science.Scientific reports · 2026Article
- Where the pipeline leaks and delays: gendered academic dynamics in anatomy in Türkiye.BMC medical education · 2026Article
- Girls just wanna have funds: a new Transparent Reporting Scale for evaluating grant data reporting from funding agencies.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Article
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- The illusion of inclusion: structural and methodological gaps in biology education research.Journal of microbiology & biology education · 2025Article
- Forward steps, lingering gaps: gender representation among distinguished speakers at professional conferences.Bioscience · 2025Article
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- Retention in the Early STEM Career: The Role of Gendered Intentions and First STEM Employment.Social science research · 2025Article
- Shifting landscapes of gender equity in oncology journals: a decade of authorship trends.Molecular cancer · 2025Article
- The costs of competition in distributing scarce research funds.Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America · 2024Article
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- Mind the Gap! Working Toward Gender Equity in Pediatric and Congenital Heart Disease: Present and Future.Journal of the American Heart Association · 2024Review
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- The urgency of restructuring the landscape of behavioral medicine: Commentary from early-career diversity institute scholars.Translational behavioral medicine · 2024Article
- Realizing the price of academic freedom.American journal of physiology. Heart and circulatory physiology · 2024Article
22 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
2 authors.
Funding
Abstract
The gender imbalance in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) fields has remained constant for decades and increases the farther up the STEM career pipeline one looks. Why does the underrepresentation of women endure? This study investigated the role of parenthood as a mechanism of gender-differentiated attrition from STEM employment. Using a nationally representative 8-year longitudinal sample of US STEM professionals, we examined the career trajectories of new parents after the birth or adoption of their first child. We found substantial attrition of new mothers: 43% of women leave full-time STEM employment after their first child. New mothers are more likely than new fathers to leave STEM, to switch to part-time work, and to exit the labor force. These gender differences hold irrespective of variation by discipline, race, and other demographic factors. However, parenthood is not just a "mother's problem"; 23% of new fathers also leave STEM after their first child. Suggesting the difficulty of combining STEM work with caregiving responsibilities generally, new parents are more likely to leave full-time STEM jobs than otherwise similar childless peers and even new parents who remain employed full time are more likely than their childless peers to exit STEM for work elsewhere. These results have implications for policymakers and STEM workforce scholars; whereas parenthood is an important mechanism of women's attrition, both women and men leave at surprisingly high rates after having children. Given that most people become parents during their working lives, STEM fields must do more to retain professionals with children.
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Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.