At the end of part 2, I had just dropped the baby-bomb on my unsuspecting advisor. Happily, he did not have a cow about it. Now, as we move into the stage of this story that is A.P. (after pregnancy), we lose the coherent narrative structure for awhile.
Given what the first several weeks with a newborn are like, that’s entirely appropriate.
This, also, is the part of the story where particulars start making a huge difference. The decisions we made were contingent on the range of options that were open to us at any given moment; with different circumstances, we might have been on a completely different trajectory. In a number of instances, we were lucky things worked out as well as they did.
Category Archives: Women and science
Having a family and an academic career: one blogger’s experience (part 2).
Where we left off in part 1: In my fifth (and last) year of funding in my philosophy Ph.D. program, staring down 30, trying to finish a dissertation, and bracing myself for the rigors of the academic job market, I said to myself, “How could having a baby make things noticably more difficult?”
Then I remembered: I’d have to tell my advisor.
Having a family and an academic career: one blogger’s experience (part 1).
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.
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.)
Women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine — get interviewed.
Yami at Green Gabbro puts out a call for interviewees for a book project on women in science, technology, engineering, mathematics, and medicine (STEMM).
While the status of women in STEMM has improved in the past few decades, it has been a slow process with many ups and downs. Programs aimed at girls interested in science and Title IX, which prohibits discrimination in universities, have helped increase the number of STEMM degrees awarded to women. But the number of women is still shockingly low in some disciplines, such as physics and computer science, and at the highest ranks in all fields. Where the Girls Aren’t explores the many factors contributing to this, including subtle and not-so-subtle gender bias that begins in childhood and continues throughout a STEMM career; the isolation of women in fields full of men; and the challenges of balancing marriage and a family with a career in STEMM. The book also looks at what the studies of gender and intelligence really say about possible genetic influences on scientific and mathematical ability.
Go check out the post at Green Gabbro to read more about the project and see if you fit into one of the categories of interviewees sought. If you do and you’re interested in being interviewed, Yami will put you in touch with the author.
The consequences of a chilly climate in the academic workplace.
After my post yesterday suggesting that women scientists may still have a harder time being accepted in academic research settings than their male counterparts, Greensmile brought my attention to a story in today’s Boston Globe. It seems that almost a dozen professors at MIT believe they lost a prospective hire due to intimidation of the job candidate by another professor who happens also to be a Nobel laureate. Possibly it matters that the professor alleged to have intimidated the job candidate is male, and that the job candidate and the 11 professors who have written the letter of complaint are female; I’m happy enough to start with a discussion of the alleged behavior itself before paddling to the deep waters of gender politics.
But first, the story:
MIT star accused by 11 colleagues
Prospective hire was intimidated, they say
By Marcella Bombardieri and Gareth Cook, Globe Staff | July 15, 2006
Eleven MIT professors have accused a powerful colleague, a Nobel laureate, of interfering with the university’s efforts to hire a rising female star in neuroscience.
The professors, in a letter to MIT’s president, Susan Hockfield , accuse professor Susumu Tonegawa of intimidating Alla Karpova , “a brilliant young scientist,” saying that he would not mentor, interact, or collaborate with her if she took the job and that members of his research group would not work with her.
The Massachusetts Institute of Technology, they wrote in their June 30 letter, “allowed a senior faculty member with great power and financial resources to behave in an uncivil, uncollegial, and possibly unethical manner toward a talented young scientist who deserves to be welcomed at MIT.” They also wrote that because of Tonegawa’s opposition, several other senior faculty members cautioned Karpova not to come to MIT.
She has since declined the job offer.
Are we going to keep pretending women who want to do science and math aren’t treated differently?
Here is the U.S., especially, we love to think the ivory tower is a meritocracy, and that the tribe of science is objective in all things — including how it treats its members. A nice little pile of data runs counter to this picture, however. A quick roundup:
Using “Angels” to patch leaks in the pipeline.
Interesting news from Japan: Tohoku University has decided to launch an outreach effort to encourage more girls to pursue science. Rather than relying on secondary school science classes to whip up enthusiam for science, the university is recruiting its own women graduate students in the sciences to serve as role models and mentors.
From the Yomiuri Shimbun:
Nerds and the dating game.
Given that I’ve weighed in on “nerd culture” and some of the social pressures that influence women’s relationships to this culture, I had to pass this on:
The New York Daily News ran an article extolling the advantages of nerds as lovers. It’s pretty much the dreck you’d expect. Of course, the nerds in question are all male (because, female nerds?!). Also, it’s not obvious to me that real nerd culture would embrace the nerd exemplars discussed in the story as bona fide nerds. Tiger Woods? Adam Brody? David Arquette? We’re not really talking the pocket-protector set (nor even the, “Quick, what’s the one true programming language?” set).
But, Amanda at Pandagon has fed the article to the Regender engine with delightful results. Some of my favorite regendered passages:
Slashdot: News for nerds, or merely sexist?
Maybe this is a bad idea, but I’m unable to resist poking this particular hornets’ nest. (I’ve poked it before, after all.)
There’s a post on Slashdot reporting that GNOME got 181 applications for Google’s Summer of Code from men and zero applications from women. As a result, Google has seen fit to mount a Women’s Summer Outreach Program 2006.
But here’s the “value added” to this information by Slashdot:
Most any science department will tell you that the amount of interest and involvement of women pales next to men of similar age and background. Is this sponsorship a creative way to get women interested in GNOME, or is it merely sexist?