(TIME.com) — For years, researchers have struggled to understand why so many women leave careers in science and engineering. Theories run the gamut, from family-unfriendly work schedules to innate differences between the genders. A new paper by McGill University economist Jennifer Hunt offers another explanation: women leave such jobs when they feel disgruntled about pay and the chance for promotion. In other words, they leave for the same reasons men do.
To reach that conclusion, Hunt combed through data on some 200,000 college graduates collected by the National Science Foundation in 1993 and 2003. Her first finding was that women actually don’t leave jobs in science at an above-average rate. The difference, Hunt found, comes from the engineering side of the equation.
