What Can Obama Do to Keep Women in Science?

NY Times: In 'Geek Chic' and Obama, New Hope for Lifting Women in Science

To be fair, the article doesn't really mention much that can be done to fix things (other than appointing a woman to the President's Council of Advisers on Science and Technology), but points out that something needs to be done. I just love that they brought Darwin into it:

From a purely Darwinian point of view, expecting a young woman to sacrifice her reproductive fitness for the sake of career advancement is simply too much, and yet the structure of academic research, in which one must spend one’s 20s and early 30s as a poorly compensated and minimally empowered graduate student and postdoctoral fellow, and the remainder of one’s 30s and into the low 40s working madly to earn tenure, can demand exactly that.

...In a new survey of 19,000 doctoral students at the University of California, Dr. Mason and her colleagues found that while two-thirds of the respondents either had or planned to have children, 84 percent of the women and 74 percent of the men expressed worry about the family-unfriendliness of their intended profession, and many had changed their plans accordingly. While 40 percent of the male science graduate students and 31 percent of the women said they had begun their Ph.D. programs intent on pursuing an academic career — still considered the premier path to science glory — a year or more into their studies, only 28 percent of the men and 20 percent of the women still hoped to become research scientists at a university.

That's approximately the same thing that happened to me, although it's not necessarily due to family concerns. I just don't want to be a "poorly compensated and minimally empowered graduate student/post-doc" until I'm 35, and then have to scramble for job security/tenure until I'm 40. It just doesn't make sense anymore.