Women are shunning¹ academic careers in math-intensive fields because the lifestyle is incompatible² with motherhood, researchers at Cornell University found in a study to be published next month in American Scientist Magazine.

康奈尔大学的研究人员发现，女性很少在数学相关领域从事学术研究工作是因为女数学教授的生活方式和母亲的身份相冲突。这一研究将于下个月在《美国科学家杂志》上发表。

Universities have long been criticized for hiring and evaluation³ policies that discriminate⁴ against women, but the findings of this new study point to the female biological clock as a main reason why so few women end up as professors in fields such as math, engineering, physics and computer science.

A woman who wants a family looks at the rigorous path to a tenured（享有终身职位的） position and considers how old she will be before she can start a family and how little time she will have to raise her children. Many of those women opt⁵ for a more flexible career.

"Universities have been largely inflexible⁶ about anything other than the standard time table, which is you kill yourself for years and only then would you consider getting pregnant," said Wendy Williams, a human development professor at Cornell who co-authored the study with her husband, Stephen Ceci.

Williams and Ceci analyzed⁷ data about the academic careers of men and women with and without children. Before women became mothers, they had careers equivalent to or more successful than their male peers. But once children entered the equation（方程式，等式） , the dynamic changed.

Women in other academic fields such as the humanities and social sciences face similar hurdles⁸ and often leave academia as well. But because there are so many women in those Ph.D. programs, enough ultimately stay to amount to a critical mass of female professors.

In math-heavy fields, however, women make up a tiny minority of the graduate students. So when the rare few who make it through a Ph.D. program leave because universities are insensitive to their needs as mothers, the net result is virtually no women represented on faculty⁹ rosters¹⁰（球队阵容） , the study said.