"The productivity of male scientists tends to drop right after marriage... Scientists tend to 'desist' from scientific research upon marriage, just like criminals desist from crime upon marriage.... Men conduct scientific research (or do anything else) in order to attract women and get married (albeit unconsciously)...What’s the point of doing science (or anything else) if one is already married?"Other studies -- cited in the linked article -- show the effect of marriage on female scientists to be even more severe.
This makes me wonder whether married people encourage others to marry because they want to level the playing field. You don't want your competitors to have the no-marriage advantage. Shun that unmarried co-worker. You know, he/she is going to make it look like you're not working hard enough.
Hey sister, you're just movin too fast/You're screwin up the quota...
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That of course explains all the scientists in history who made many discoveries while married. What a stupid story. Obviously written by someone who is not married but wants to be.
Actually, I've always heard that married law students do better. I was one myself. A spouse can distract you with demands for attention, but can also save you from other, more damaging distractions.
Maybe the unmarried, high-achieving scientists have personality problems that are the cause of both unmarriagability and other qualities that result in high scientific achievement (like workaholism or Asperger's syndrome). If so, it might not be the lack of a spouse that helps, but being the kind of person who can't get or doesn't want a spouse. And why doesn't the article even consider that a lot of these unmarrieds are gay? Maybe homosexuality is linked to science aptitude.
I finished my Ph.D. work 3 years after getting married and 1 year after we had our daughter. I frankly don't know if I would have been sufficiently focused to finish at all had I not been married.
I think Ann has a good point with Aspergers, or just an excess of geekiness.
But the article is more balanced than her post suggests. It also considers the positive effects of marriage on some scientific careers, and the strains of such careers on other marriages.
Marriages That Enhance Careers
Is marriage truly and inevitably a scourge for male and female scientists? Or can it help advance scientific careers? To hear some real-world viewpoints on the impact of marriage on a science career, I raised the issue on the ScienceCareers Forum.
Several forum contributors saw marriage as a source of emotional and financial stability rather than a dangerous undertow. . . .
How do we know this isn't an age thing? Not sure if the study took age into account. People get less creative with age. That's not a stereotype, that's a fact. Mathematicians pretty much do their best work by their 30's.
Of course, with age comes experience, so people can still be effective in their jobs even if our minds are not as sharp as they were when we were 25 years-old.
It seems self-evident to me that bringing along a spouse and kids on your quest for scientific enlightenment is just as silly as bringing along a travel companion to China if you really want to learn the culture and language. Of course, you may clearly be served by a spouse who is in a special position to help, as one who is rich, childless, sterile and absent or, in the case of the traveler, native Chinese.
Einstein made the mistake of marrying too early, but soon rectified it by dismissing his wife and kids to a distant land and later by divorcing her and then marrying a relative who would cook and clean house for him, without asking any questions about how his day went. Lise Meitner was well served by not being married and, had she had spouse and kids, might never have escaped the Nazis, as she did, at the very last minute.
All the talk of the emotional comfort provided by spouse and kids is a mere rationalization for having messed up. The real tragedy is that confirmed bachelors, gays, and the childfree will live their lives paying, if indirectly, for their less productive married with children scientific brethren.
Steven Machos,
Animals instinctively live their lives and sacrifice for future generations. Ayn Rand and the others of intelligence among us humans can choose not to. As Einstein said, "Let a woman in your life and the first thing she wants to do is rearrange the furniture."
And come to think of it, involvement with a woman impedes the development not only of a scientist. I think of folks like the Wright Brothers and Santos Dumont, Bobby Fisher, Charles Darwin and Ernest Shackleton.
Consider Shakleton: a great hero of mine, he took along no women on his epic voyage. He did take dogs, which could serve to pull a sled and later be eaten. Of course he took no children, and I wonder how many of the men of his crew were married with children. He returned after some 18 months of extreme duress without having lost a single human crew member. Had he had a crew with even one woman, especially a fertile or pregnant one, or a child, or a guy preoccupied with his "loved ones" back home, the outcome would surely have been different.
Ayn Rand was rather conflicted--sometimes confused, even--regarding matters between the sexes, and about women generally. (Remember the rape scene in The Fountainhead? Of course, Rand herself didn't really define that the way others would; I think she said something about it being "rape with an engraved invitation.)
Just curious, Jim: Have you also read "We The Living"? Interesting, the main relationship in that book, and it contradicts some of what you're saying (but then, it also contradicts some of what Rand said over time).
7M: LOL.
Is it too obvious to say that without the "uncreative," there would be no "creatives"?
Or that by definition, at least so far, everyone born has been "involved with a woman."
Only sayin'.
Onelmom,
Maybe it's because the Law, the way we Amerikans know it, regularly filters out thinking folks like mathematicians, scientists, those who can't respond positively to arbitrary rules or authoritarian rules (like certification), and those who prefer a trade that can be practiced freely in the next state, maybe even on a moon of Jupiter, without having to be re-certified.
As a physicist (also law school graduate), I have participated in the design of WMDs, bombers, fighters and medical equipment without ever once having been certified by anyone! Was Einstein, Bohr or Feynmann ever certified in anything? Would you ever trust a person who has been certified or who eagerly raises his hand and utters, "...so help me god."?
Seven Machos,
I consider the Bar and the annual Bar certification fees more like what the hookers in Nevada go through. No, I, like Jesus and Galileo before me, never had to defend any thesis, and most of the WMD users I have heard of lately (McVeigh, Kozinski, Bin Laden, Mohammed Atta, etc.) were not certified either. Certification is apparently for folks unsure of their abilities to influence the world in any way.
Yeah, right. What if (unlicensed immigrant) Enrico Fermi hadn't turned down that dial when he saw the exponential rise at 57th and Ellis in Chicago?
Here's why all the fuss Marghlar: People are forced at great expense to put up with lawyers, physicians, nurses, plumbers and A/C installers, who hide their incompetence behind their certification. It is uncertified scientists and engineers who have improved our lives immesurably in the past decades and the licensed quacks who have made it worse. The most likely place to get a deadly disease is still the licensed hospital.
Does it seem that strange to you to see all licensing and certification as the enemy of progress?
If licensing actually served to protect the poor unwashed public, we'd have licensing of health food purveyors, preachers, prospective brides and grooms and, most of all, parents.
Whether or not a country exists that provides decent health care without a licensing requirement is no proof of anything; I will say, however, that I just bought a treatment course of mebendazole in Brazil, over the counter, for about $1. In the USSA, I would have had to pay $90 to see the physician to get a prescription and godknows how much to get the prescription filled. Brazil is the world leader in cosmetic surgery, in case you ever need any.
You think that licensing guarantees quality? I would like to see some comparisons made among states that do/don't license real estate, financial advice, medical, legal, and sex practitioners. Rumor has it that sex is just fine and real cheap in states where it isn't licensed and I know the pope himself doesn't think much of China's licensing priests.
Law school is weird about marriages. It seems to help men, but not always women. One prof I knew had a roaring business of handling the divorces of his 2nd and 3rd year female students.
I attribute that to the fact of sex role differences in many marriages. For example, the woman who graduated first in my class had a couple of small kids. Instead of her husband helping out around the house while she was in law school, he still expected his dinner on the table every night, etc. Not surprising to me, after seeing her in class and then with him, she dumped him before graduation.
I was married through law school, and, yes, it probably helped.
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