How I fell out of love with academia
backreaction.blogspot.comI'm a bit sad that this post hasn't gained more traction. I'm a big fan of Sabine's work and I found her video to be good in terms of the content provided.
Perhaps there is no traction because most people on HN already know that this is reality.
Nothing has changed in 30 years, and it is not a female issue. I Left Academia in about 1993
When you look an an elite school, a huge fraction of professors have parents as professors. If the system was going to be made fair maybe 70% of the people who are getting those jobs today would have to be told, starting grad school, that they were automatically disqualified from getting a job in academia to give somebody else a chance.
Women do have real problems but it's also a fact that doubling the applicant pool doubles the number of professor's kids that the system wants to hire and makes it harder for outsiders to get in.
Don't think they're becoming professors because of like.. nepotism. More like their family is culturally academic and heavily prioritizes/assumes that.
I am not saying it is nepotism, but that people coming from the outside find it to be an alien culture and find it hard to fit in.
I am from Portugal and in my experience this is the reason.