I’ve decided to go ahead and say something about how I navigated (and am still navigating) the challenge of trying to have an academic career and a family as well. This is not a topic I can adequately address in a single post, so bear with me. And, since my main motivation for doing this is the hope that knowing about my experiences may be useful, somehow, to other people contemplating these waters, ask me if there’s something I’m leaving out that you want me to talk about. (If it’s too personal, I’ll say so.)
I think Rob Knop’s comment is dead-on. Many of us in academia have been trained to exude such dedication to our field (through whatever combination of scholarship, teaching, and service our institution values) that we worry it will get us in trouble to admit we have other interests as well. Especially for those on the job market or trying to get tenure, demonstrating too great an interest in something out of the academic sphere — like having kids — is something you fear might bring critical attention upon you. My sense this is even more true for women in fields that are still largely male-dominated; you want people to notice your great research or teaching, not to think to themselves, “See, she’s not sufficiently committed to the field, or she wouln’t even be thinking of taking time away from it for something as mundane as childrearing! We were better off before we started wasting our program on these women.”
In order to blend in, there are lots of things we don’t talk about. But if more people talked about them, talking about them wouldn’t make us stand out quite as much. So at least in this little corner of cyberspace, let’s talk.
This post is the “set up”: the situation I found myself in when I started contemplating whether it would be feasible (or insane) to have an academic career and a family.
Category Archives: Personal
The burden of addressing institutional problems.
I’ve been having a great email exchange with another blogger about the current flare-up of the battle over women in academic science, and he brought to my attention a bothersome feature of this New York Times interview with Dr. Ben A. Barres:
Q. How does this bias [that men have an innate advantage in science over women] manifest itself?
A. It is very much harder for women to be successful, to get jobs, to get grants, especially big grants. And then, and this is a huge part of the problem, they don’t get the resources they need to be successful. Right now, what’s fundamentally missing and absolutely vital is that women get better child care support. This is such an obvious no-brainer. If you just do this with a small amount of resources, you could explode the number of women scientists.
Q. Why isn’t there more support for scientists who have children?
A. The male leadership is not doing it, but women are not demanding it. I think if women would just start demanding fairness, they might get it. But they might buy in a little bit to all this brainwashing. They are less self-confident. And when women speak out, men just see them as asking for undeserved benefits.
(Bold emphasis added.)
Who’s grilling today?
It’s been warm in these parts lately. In weather like this, by evening the indoors is stiflingly hot, while the outdoors is just staring to cool down. So, it makes sense that we’d be driven outdoors. Perhaps it makes less sense that, after escaping the heat indoors, I’d build a blazing hot fire over which to cook.
Life is full of mysteries.
Anyway, while I’m working on the promised post about what non-scientists can do to improve commuications with scientists, I’m curious to find out who else runs to the grill, and how you do it. If you want to consider this a meme, you should also consider yourself tagged!
Sometimes my half-baked planning works out.
Because I was in Sweden for my younger offspring’s birthday, and because my older offspring’s birthday is nowhere near the school year, we gave them a joint un-birthday party today. Each was allowed to invite eight friends. Of these, a total of five attended (plus a younger sib), but there was some suspense about what the actual turnout would be due to low RSVP rates. Summer vacation can be like that.
Food is pretty straightforward for the age-range involved (4 to 7): raw veggies and dip, chips and salsa, Smart Dogs in blankets. Younger offspring and I squeezed a bunch of lemons from our tree and made a gallon of lemonade. For dessert, cupcakes, brownies, fruit, and ice cream.
The challenge, however, was figuring out activities that would entertain kids in two different age groups (which, for the purposes of playing, they are) for the entire three hours. We did not want these kids making their own unsupervised fun around the house or yard, but the standard party games didn’t really seem like what we were looking for. Pin the Tail on the Donkey can get awfully competitive, and a Piñata was out, because I think dizzy blindfolded kids waving bats around is asking for trouble.
Also, it’s been very hot here lately.
A smear against the braniacs.
Sad to report, the Sb/DonorsChoose anti-biology attack ad seems not to have been an isolated incident. My anonymous source discovered another such ad, this one targeted at the brain sciences crowd.
What has become of our sense of scientific unity? Can we pull together despite attacks like the one reproduced below the fold? Does this mean that Karl Rove is actually taking an interest in the sciences?
Philanthropy gets ugly, as the script for a Sb/DonorsChoose attack ad is discovered.
I should have known it would come to this.
A week into our ScienceBlogs/DonorsChoose drive to raise money for schools, the warm spirit of pan-science-harmony has started to erode.
An anonymous source has come into possession of the text of an attack ad targeting our biological brethren and sistern. I hate to even give a story like this oxygen, but in the interests of full disclosure, I reproduce the ad below the fold.
The rewards of coaching.
Elder offspring’s Spring soccer season ended today. At the start of the season, I nervously volunteered to be the assistant coach for the team, because an assistant coach was needed and I was going to be at all the games and practices anyway. It’s not like I had mad coaching skillz; really, I was more of a sous-coach.
Anyway, at the end of the season party tonight, the players surprised us with some awesome gifts to thank us for coaching. They gave me a membership to the Tech Museum.
Awesome kids that they are, they really didn’t have to — but I’m glad they did!
Experience, common sense, and a guy who probably shouldn’t be answering the phone.
I must report the following, although the protagonist wants to be left out of it. (I will allow as how the protagonist has a credit card, lives in my house, and isn’t me, but I won’t divulge any further identifying details.)
Anyway, it starts out as one of those FedEx horror stories — far too common to merit a blog post — but then turns into some sort of parable about common sense. I may, however, need your help in teasing out just what the moral of the story is.
Get-rich-quick ideas for hungry inventors (end-of-semester edition).
Dear inventors,
My personal experience (and what I have heard from the many other academics with whom I communicate) suggests a number of inventions that would sell a bazillion units at colleges and universities world-wide. For your convenience, I list the items that would have the biggest demand first. However, it’s worth noting that even the items at the bottom of the list would make professorial lives significantly better, and that we would gladly dip into the funds currently allocated for recreational reading and hooch to purchase them.
What a night in a Stockholm club has to do with good science.
Yesterday, I returned home after an excellent five days in Stockholm, discussing philosophy of chemistry with philosophers of chemistry, eating as many lingonberries as I could manage, and trying not to wake up instantly when light started pouring through the curtains at 4 AM.
It was a good time.
My last night there, we decided to go to Stampen, a club in Gamla Stan (the old part of Stockholm), to hear the Stockholm Swing Allstars. They were fabulous. If they are playing anywhere near where you are, you should see them without fail. They have no CD (yet), but they have some MP3 demos on their website.
And, watching them perform put me in mind of some of the things that can make good science, like good jazz, really good.