The more I think about this the more I think it must be PI related. With a good PI a lot of the downsides of being a postdoc are basically negligible, but with a bad PI they become a total trap and I can think of at least one strong researcher who left academia entirely because of a PI who appeared to consider themselves to be in competition with their own postdocs.
My mother and I were discussing only this weekend the importance of patronage in both academia (and in medicine where she worked) and noting, in particular, how most of the successful women in both areas were lucky to have had a good patron/mentor at a critical moment. It almost certainly applies to men too, but since the statistics show that women are less likely to get mentoring than men the effect is probably amplified in their cases.
(no subject)
Date: 2014-05-05 10:05 am (UTC)My mother and I were discussing only this weekend the importance of patronage in both academia (and in medicine where she worked) and noting, in particular, how most of the successful women in both areas were lucky to have had a good patron/mentor at a critical moment. It almost certainly applies to men too, but since the statistics show that women are less likely to get mentoring than men the effect is probably amplified in their cases.