It is no secret that working parents in the United States face hardship. Paid family leave is still rare, the cost of childcare is soaring, school hours don’t line up with the workday, and dual-income households are more required than ever as wages stagnate and the cost of living surges. Working parents are often trapped in what feels like a catch-22: To afford to be a parent, you’ve got to work, but most work requires you to act like you’re not a parent.

Parents with careers in science, technology, engineering, and medicine are by no means immune from feeling these pressures. Their jobs are often defined by long hours and an “all or nothing” work ethos. Add on top of that the documented challenges for women in these male-dominated fields, and it may come as no shock that being a mom who works in STEM is difficult. But new research suggests that the industry poses outsize challenges for parents, period. A recent study of STEM workers over an eight-year period shows that 43 percent of women will leave their full-time position after having their first child. That figure jibes with a wealth of data on the gender gap in STEM, but the authors were surprised to find that nearly a quarter of men (23 percent) also leave their full-time STEM jobs after their first child is born.

“Men also are encountering these kinds of challenges when they have caregiving responsibilities. So this suggests that the difficulty of childcare responsibilities in a STEM career is not a motherhood problem but is a STEM workforce problem,” says Erin Cech, a sociologist at the University of Michigan and the lead author of the study, which published in this week’s issue of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science.

For parents working in science, tech, engineering, and medicine, Cech says part of what drives them out of full time work or toward other fields is the cultural expectation that they treat their careers as the only thing that matters in their lives. Leaving work promptly at 6 pm to pick up your child from daycare doesn’t align with those cultural expectations.

“This suggests that the difficulty of childcare responsibilities in a STEM career is not a motherhood problem but is a STEM workforce problem.” Erin Cech, University of Michigan

Cech has been studying STEM’s problem retaining women for years. She and her coauthor set out to quantify how big a role motherhood played, so they analyzed nationally representative survey data of workers in STEM from 2003 through 2010, comparing the career outcomes of those who had their first child during that time with those who remained childless. They found that across genders, new parents are far more likely to leave their full-time jobs than their similarly experienced childless peers.

Those who leave go in a few different directions, and the destinations differ between mothers and fathers. Fifteen percent of new moms wound up leaving the workforce altogether, for at least a period of time, while 11 percent switched to part-time work within STEM, and 4 percent switched to full-time jobs in a different field. Only 2 percent of men who became fathers transitioned to part-time work, and only 3 percent left the workforce entirely. Most fathers who left chose to pursue full-time work outside of STEM.

The results of this exodus are disastrous. “Obviously it’s a loss of people who are trained and experienced, so we’re losing their knowledge, but from a bottom-line perspective it’s terrible,” says Cech. “For professionals like these it typically costs the company between 1 to 1.5 times their annual salary to be able to replace that person and train a new person.”

At that point, she argues it is far more cost-effective for companies to pay for policies that would support these families, things like paid family leave, flexible work hours, and subsidized child care.

Parenthood and Modern Work Are Anathema

For me this problem is personal. When my son was born, my spouse was working for Harvard University as a postdoctoral research scientist. The university offered new fathers like him only two weeks of paid leave. I was in the hospital nearly a week after the birth, so that amount of time was hardly enough for him to provide meaningful support. He ended up working out an informal leave with his boss, who allowed him to work fewer hours and take many weeks off, so long as when he returned he got his work done. We were incredibly grateful for this as a family.