last time I checked, I wasn't invisible
This is the best article on gender and life balance in science I've read in some time. The New York Times (Natalie Angier) ponders whether the healthy interest in science expressed by the new* US administration can finally influence societal and social pressures which hinder women in science.
"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."
I love that she points out that life balance is an issue for men too; a recent study at the University of California showed 74% of men (versus 84% of women) worried about the family-unfriendliness of their intended profession. As an undergraduate and a graduate student I spent years doing what I could to improve matters, participating in the Gender Issues Committee (there's a PR-challenged title) or the Canadian Association of Physicist's Women in Physics committee. Sometimes we would get flack, say for having a coffee hour just for the women - get accused of discrimination, an argument I found puerile. A lot of what we did was to try and make the community more family-friendly, which of course is a benefit to any human being with any sort of family.
Also, this is priceless: "For many female physicists, the mystery of women’s slow progress through their ranks is nearly as baffling as the research mysteries they confront in the lab. Of course, only 6 percent of physics professors are female; only 4 to 6 percent of the matter in the universe is visible. “Sound familiar?” Evalyn Gates, the assistant director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, said wryly."
*I was always bewildered by the anti-science attitude of the previous US administration; I mean, where, exactly, did they think oil came from? Yes, that's right, those pesky people who insist that the earth is roughly 4 billion years old, counter to creationist doctrine, are the ones who can tell you how to find resources.
"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."
I love that she points out that life balance is an issue for men too; a recent study at the University of California showed 74% of men (versus 84% of women) worried about the family-unfriendliness of their intended profession. As an undergraduate and a graduate student I spent years doing what I could to improve matters, participating in the Gender Issues Committee (there's a PR-challenged title) or the Canadian Association of Physicist's Women in Physics committee. Sometimes we would get flack, say for having a coffee hour just for the women - get accused of discrimination, an argument I found puerile. A lot of what we did was to try and make the community more family-friendly, which of course is a benefit to any human being with any sort of family.
Also, this is priceless: "For many female physicists, the mystery of women’s slow progress through their ranks is nearly as baffling as the research mysteries they confront in the lab. Of course, only 6 percent of physics professors are female; only 4 to 6 percent of the matter in the universe is visible. “Sound familiar?” Evalyn Gates, the assistant director of the Kavli Institute for Cosmological Physics at the University of Chicago, said wryly."
*I was always bewildered by the anti-science attitude of the previous US administration; I mean, where, exactly, did they think oil came from? Yes, that's right, those pesky people who insist that the earth is roughly 4 billion years old, counter to creationist doctrine, are the ones who can tell you how to find resources.