mom and baby

short answer: men do, but women don't. "Married with children" is the success formula
for men, but the opposite is true for women, for whom there is a serious "baby gap."1
For this study and our previous one, we used the incredibly rich Survey of Doctorate
Recipients (SDR).2 It is perhaps the best life-course employment database in the United
States. A biennial weighted, longitudinal study, it follows more than 160,000 PhD
recipients across all disciplines until they reach age seventy-six. The scope of the SDR is
similar to famous longitudinal clinical trials such as the Nurses' Health Study and the
Framingham Heart Study. Tracking a huge population for years allows researchers to
isolate specific factors and, with a great deal of certainty, to determine their importance.
Using the SDR data set, we analyzed the life courses of PhD recipients, including their
decisions about marriage and fertility, to determine whether an academic career affects
family formation. We found that careers matter: the life trajectories of tenured women
differ from those of tenured men (see figure 2).%
Only one in three women who takes a fast-track university job before having a child ever
becomes a mother. Women who achieve tenure are more than twice as likely as their
male counterparts to be single twelve years after earning the PhD (see figure 3). And, as
figure 4 indicates, women who are married when they begin their faculty careers are
much more likely than men in the same position to divorce or separate from their
spouses. Women, it seems, cannot have it all—tenure and a family—while men can.