You’re right, it isn’t fair. I’m not at that point in my life yet, but I’ve seen how rough it can be, and I probably don’t know the half of it.
From what I can see, on the outside, the difficulty is that academia is a very “career-tracked” world—you absolutely must do A before you do B, and what’s more, it’s assumed that you’ll do it at a specific age, too. That would have to change to make it less crazy for women.
I’d like to point out that this craziness is not specific to academia or to women. If you look carefully, you’ll realize that society in general strongly expects people (of both sexes) to be at certain stages of accomplishment by certain ages, with those who fall off this “track” being penalized by means of a permanent status ceiling.
The problem is that society can’t make up its mind about whether it wants to award status based on age or accomplishment. If age, then people should be allowed to start a new career at any age without status penalty. If accomplishment, then most people of any age won’t have much status anyway, so switching fields wouldn’t be any more unusual or a problem than it is for today’s college students.
(There’s no need for anyone to reply with the economic, historical, etc. reasons why things are the way they are. I’m just pointing out that I don’t like it this way.)
In fact, now that I think about it, this is probably what is really going on with all that mythos about youth in mathematics: the real story isn’t that people can only do great work in their 20s, but that youthful accomplishment = status, to such an extent that the kind of people who could make great contributions in middle age if they were given 20 years to study the subject before publishing (or permitted to switch in from another subject) aren’t allowed into the field at all.
Actually, I’m starting to suspect it is. (Well, not literally “just”, of course.)
My current theory is that people who do great work in their 20s don’t do so later mainly because: (1) their status is already secure, and they don’t have to work as hard to maintain it; and (2) continuing to work on the highest level would require them to study the ideas of (and thereby subordinate themselves to) lower-status younger folk.
This theory came to me when I observed that some older academics appeared to have lost their intellectual curiosity, not just their physical stamina (or whatever variable people think it is that causes the [alleged] phenomenon).
That said, my comment was actually about why we don’t see people do great work later after failing to do so in their 20s, not why we do see people who do great work in their 20s fail to do so later. The point was that, after some had done great work early, having-done-great-work-early became a coveted, even necessary, status signal.
When looking at the people who started scientific revolutions, it is the middle-aged, not young, who are overrepresented.
It also needs to be noted that during the last couple of hundred years, the amount of scientists in the world has been constantly increasing. The net result has been that there have always been more young researchers than old researchers, since more members of the younger generations have chosen to become scientists than happened in the previous generations. This has led to an illusion of youth being a requisite for scientific discovery, since there have been more young scientists and therefore also more young scientist geniuses than old scientist geniuses.
Scientific performance, as measured by the number of publications and the frequency of citations for those publications, increases steadily over time and reaches its high point around age 40 at least in chemistry, geology, mathematics, physics, psychology and sociology.
References:
Cole, S. (1979) Age and Scientific Performance. The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 84, no. 4, 985-977.
Wray, K.B. (2003) Is Science Really a Young Man’s Game? Social Studies of Science, vol. 33, no. 1, 137-149.
Also, I seem to have lost the reference, but I recall seeing studies claiming that at least in academia, your creativity does drop as you age—but this is a function of career age, not chronological age. In other words, once you’ve been in a field for a long time, you stop having new insights. If you switch to a new field, you can start innovating again.
and (2) continuing to work on the highest level would require them to study the ideas of (and thereby subordinate themselves to) lower-status younger folk.
It’s not necessarily the low status, but the fact that spending effort to study an idea is an investment, and an old person will get to enjoy that investment for a shorter time. It’s apparently a relatively standard idea in economics that as people get older and their expected remaining lifespan shortens, they will stop investing as much in learning new things, since they’ll have a smaller payoff from them. Richard Posner writes in Aging and Old Age:
One way to distinguish empirically between aging effects and proximity-to-death effects would be to compare, with respect to choice of occupation, investment, education, leisure activities, and other activities, elderly people on the one hand with young or middle-aged people who have truncated life expectancies but are in apparent good health, on the other. For example, a person newly infected with the AIDS virus (HIV) has roughly the same life expectancy as a 65-year-old and is unlikely to have, as yet, significant symptoms. The conventional human-capital model implies that, after correction for differences in income and for other differences between such persons and elderly persons who have the same life expectancy (a big difference is that the former will not have pension entitlements to fall back upon), the behavior of the two groups will be similar. It does appear to be similar, so far as investing in human capital is concerned; the truncation of the payback period causes disinvestment. And there is a high suicide rate among HIV-infected persons (even before they have reached the point in the progression of the disease at which they are classified as persons with AIDS), just as there is, as we shall see in chapter 6, among elderly persons.
Later on, he also notes that various careers vary in when they reach their peak:
The first thing to note is that the very concept of a peak age of productivity is misleading in suggesting that all careers have a sharp peak. There are careers with early peaks and careers with late ones, but also careers in which the peak, whenever attained, is sustained without a significant decline virtually till death. Let us call these “sustained peek” careers, as distinct from “early peak” careers and “late peak careers”. Sustained-peak careers can in turn be divided into “early peak, sustained” and “late peak, sustained”, this giving us a four-fold division: early peak, not sustained; early peak, sustained; late peak, not sustained; late peak, sustained. Examples of the first category (early peak, not sustained) are most fields of professional athletics, along with mathematics, theoretical physics, chess, heavy manual labor and—the analysis in chapter 6 implied—most criminal “careers”. In the case of physically demanding activities, risk of injury plays a role; it is more difficult to sustain peak performance in football than in dance.
Examples of the second category (early peak, sustained) are literature, economics (other than the severely mathematical), musical composition (including choreography), painting and sculpture (consider Michelangelo, Titian, Picasso, and O’Keefe, among others), and musical performance. An example of the third category (late peak, not sustained) is the senior management of large firms, where the peak age will often be in the late fifties, followed by retirement in the early sixties; perhaps most leadership is in this category. The fourth category (late peak, sustained) is illustrated by judging, discussed in the next chapter. History, theology, literary criticism and scholarship, and philosophy appear to straddle the second (early peak, sustained) and fourth (late peak, sustained) categories.
I think you can explain almost all of this by the fact that within the rules of academia, middle-aged professors do MUCH more administration, grant-writing, editorial work, and “management” in general than people in their 20′s and early 30′s. The scientific world appears to need management, and we’ve decided to allocate the management work by age/seniority. My experience with senior professors is not that they’ve gotten too dim or lazy to do research (ha!) but that they wish they had more time to devote to research.
That’s the standard explanation (at least among people who don’t buy the traditional magical theory of youth), and was my previous theory.
Actually, really, they’re theories of different phenomena. People who don’t do as much research simply because they’re busy administrating aren’t really “declining with age”; they just literally aren’t spending as much time. The hypothesis I presented above was an attempt to explain the nature of specifically-age-related (but non-medical) intellectual decline, such as it exists.
The two cases can be distinguished by observing whether the senior professors return to pre-administration levels of productivity after they become emeriti.
Am Julia Ferguson from Canada Life can be very displeasing especially when we loose the ones we love and cherish so much. in this kind of situation where one loses his/her soul mate there are several dangers engage in it. one may no longer be able to do the things he was doing before then success will be very scarce and happiness will be rare. that person was created to be with you for without him things may fall apart. That was my experience late last year. but thank god today i am happy with him again. all thanks to DR Paloma, i was nearly loosing hope until i saw an article on how DR Paloma could cast a love spell to make lovers come back. There is no harm in trying, i said to my self. i contacted him via email: palomaspelltemple@yahoo.com. words will not be enough to appreciate what he has done for me. i have promised to share the good news as long as i live
You’re right, it isn’t fair. I’m not at that point in my life yet, but I’ve seen how rough it can be, and I probably don’t know the half of it.
From what I can see, on the outside, the difficulty is that academia is a very “career-tracked” world—you absolutely must do A before you do B, and what’s more, it’s assumed that you’ll do it at a specific age, too. That would have to change to make it less crazy for women.
I’d like to point out that this craziness is not specific to academia or to women. If you look carefully, you’ll realize that society in general strongly expects people (of both sexes) to be at certain stages of accomplishment by certain ages, with those who fall off this “track” being penalized by means of a permanent status ceiling.
The problem is that society can’t make up its mind about whether it wants to award status based on age or accomplishment. If age, then people should be allowed to start a new career at any age without status penalty. If accomplishment, then most people of any age won’t have much status anyway, so switching fields wouldn’t be any more unusual or a problem than it is for today’s college students.
(There’s no need for anyone to reply with the economic, historical, etc. reasons why things are the way they are. I’m just pointing out that I don’t like it this way.)
In fact, now that I think about it, this is probably what is really going on with all that mythos about youth in mathematics: the real story isn’t that people can only do great work in their 20s, but that youthful accomplishment = status, to such an extent that the kind of people who could make great contributions in middle age if they were given 20 years to study the subject before publishing (or permitted to switch in from another subject) aren’t allowed into the field at all.
Erm, I strongly suspect that doing great work in your 20s is not just about status.
Actually, I’m starting to suspect it is. (Well, not literally “just”, of course.)
My current theory is that people who do great work in their 20s don’t do so later mainly because: (1) their status is already secure, and they don’t have to work as hard to maintain it; and (2) continuing to work on the highest level would require them to study the ideas of (and thereby subordinate themselves to) lower-status younger folk.
This theory came to me when I observed that some older academics appeared to have lost their intellectual curiosity, not just their physical stamina (or whatever variable people think it is that causes the [alleged] phenomenon).
That said, my comment was actually about why we don’t see people do great work later after failing to do so in their 20s, not why we do see people who do great work in their 20s fail to do so later. The point was that, after some had done great work early, having-done-great-work-early became a coveted, even necessary, status signal.
This sounds right.
When looking at the people who started scientific revolutions, it is the middle-aged, not young, who are overrepresented.
It also needs to be noted that during the last couple of hundred years, the amount of scientists in the world has been constantly increasing. The net result has been that there have always been more young researchers than old researchers, since more members of the younger generations have chosen to become scientists than happened in the previous generations. This has led to an illusion of youth being a requisite for scientific discovery, since there have been more young scientists and therefore also more young scientist geniuses than old scientist geniuses.
Scientific performance, as measured by the number of publications and the frequency of citations for those publications, increases steadily over time and reaches its high point around age 40 at least in chemistry, geology, mathematics, physics, psychology and sociology.
References:
Cole, S. (1979) Age and Scientific Performance. The American Journal of Sociology, vol. 84, no. 4, 985-977.
Wray, K.B. (2003) Is Science Really a Young Man’s Game? Social Studies of Science, vol. 33, no. 1, 137-149.
Also, I seem to have lost the reference, but I recall seeing studies claiming that at least in academia, your creativity does drop as you age—but this is a function of career age, not chronological age. In other words, once you’ve been in a field for a long time, you stop having new insights. If you switch to a new field, you can start innovating again.
It’s not necessarily the low status, but the fact that spending effort to study an idea is an investment, and an old person will get to enjoy that investment for a shorter time. It’s apparently a relatively standard idea in economics that as people get older and their expected remaining lifespan shortens, they will stop investing as much in learning new things, since they’ll have a smaller payoff from them. Richard Posner writes in Aging and Old Age:
Later on, he also notes that various careers vary in when they reach their peak:
I think you can explain almost all of this by the fact that within the rules of academia, middle-aged professors do MUCH more administration, grant-writing, editorial work, and “management” in general than people in their 20′s and early 30′s. The scientific world appears to need management, and we’ve decided to allocate the management work by age/seniority. My experience with senior professors is not that they’ve gotten too dim or lazy to do research (ha!) but that they wish they had more time to devote to research.
That’s the standard explanation (at least among people who don’t buy the traditional magical theory of youth), and was my previous theory.
Actually, really, they’re theories of different phenomena. People who don’t do as much research simply because they’re busy administrating aren’t really “declining with age”; they just literally aren’t spending as much time. The hypothesis I presented above was an attempt to explain the nature of specifically-age-related (but non-medical) intellectual decline, such as it exists.
The two cases can be distinguished by observing whether the senior professors return to pre-administration levels of productivity after they become emeriti.
Am Julia Ferguson from Canada Life can be very displeasing especially when we loose the ones we love and cherish so much. in this kind of situation where one loses his/her soul mate there are several dangers engage in it. one may no longer be able to do the things he was doing before then success will be very scarce and happiness will be rare. that person was created to be with you for without him things may fall apart. That was my experience late last year. but thank god today i am happy with him again. all thanks to DR Paloma, i was nearly loosing hope until i saw an article on how DR Paloma could cast a love spell to make lovers come back. There is no harm in trying, i said to my self. i contacted him via email: palomaspelltemple@yahoo.com. words will not be enough to appreciate what he has done for me. i have promised to share the good news as long as i live
You’re on the wrong site to sell that voodoo shit.