Blue Lab Coats

I knew I had to write an entry today- but it appears that a commenter, ‘Does Family Friendliness help anything?’ (DFFHA), on my last post did all the work for me. I have reprinted DFFHA’s comment in its entirety-

If you compare the proportion of women scientists at the PI level across the developed world, there appears to be a roughly *inverse* correlation between the representation of women in such positions and the length of the allowed maternity leave. In the Scandinavian countries, which we consider more committed to gender equality (they also consider themselves to be this way) than the US, the proportion of women full professors in the sciences is much lower than in the US. Continue reading ‘Comment to the P word… Family Friendliness..’

P for Productivity.

I’m thinking a lot about this right now… and I want to put this in the context of tenure clocks. Many places allow their women faculty to ’stop’ the tenure clock when they have a child (or adopt one, I presume). Ok, we don’t have very modern maternity leave policies in this country- you can take 3 UNPAID months by law without losing your job- outside of this things vary from institution to institution, but that’s a whole different soapbox. But it’s the tenure clock stoppage and whether or not Continue reading ‘The P word.’

I’ve had several of conversations lately with faculty senior to me about their young female graduate students. The conversations go something like this. They begin with the advisor raving about a particular female graduate student, usually including how bright said student is, what a hard worker, and how much they have or had accomplished in the lab. Then, bright female graduate student drops out of graduate school to get married (in one case she had a first author C/N/S paper) OR she graduates but leaves science to follow her spouse where ever he goes. The conversation ends with A LOT of hand wringing on the part of the advisor about how Continue reading ‘Don’t just cry about it, DO SOMETHING!(updated)’

Sciencewoman and Dr. Free-ride both have excellent posts on a topic close to my heart and experience…female academics and children…

I’m too exhausted after a day of kindergarten graduation and fourth grade graduation, all while preparing myself and my student to leave town for a meeting… to even write my own post about this.

Lame, I know. Go on over there and read their posts..great stuff.

The end of the week is within reach. I am overwhelmed with work at the moment… so this will be only a brief celebratory post.

DrMrA found out this morning that he was awarded a federal grant that he applied for. After submitting in the neighborhood of 20 federal grant proposals and struggling with funding quite a bit in the last 5 years (despite excellent productivity and good journals) Continue reading ‘Celebrate…’

It has been a week of craziness so far. My children’s school year is rapidly coming to a close, and this week and the schedule of the next couple of weeks will be absolute madness. My faculty meeting conflicts with the 4th grade science fair in which my older daughter has a project on Wednesday. Then on Friday- I am reading at lunchtime to my kindergartener’s class… and we are having cupcakes for her 6th birthday. These are both commitments that I don’t want to say no to, although I know that missing faculty meeting is generally not a good idea. There is a whole list Continue reading ‘Unscheduled Events’

I received the following poem from my 10 year old daughter today….

Dear Mom:

I love you a lot,
I’ll love you till the world rots,
I know that I whine,
I know it’s not pleasant,
But instead of saying sorry,
Here’s a little present. (a present was attached)

You take care of me when I don’t feel good,
You do all the laundry, you cook all the food.
You clean up the house when it’s a really big mess,
But I don’t get why I can’t have a Nintendo DS? (a running discussion between us)

This poem’s about to come to an end,
But before it is finished I have one thing to say-
I love you a lot Mom,

Happy Mother’s Day!

Ah, I think the exciting data has been displaced from my pocket for now- while my 10 year old reminds me of the distinction between my job and my life. And no honey, you can’t have a Nintendo DS or a Wii…but I’ll get ya your own blog…

I have a student. She’s a marvelous student (by every objective measure) who I have written about here before. She came to me as a third year student in another lab, steered to me by her thesis committee, …but ready to quit graduate school because she has a family. SERIOUSLY. This idea did not come out of thin air, it was TAUGHT to her. I have been trying to undo it.

But that’s not the reason for this post. I was struck by something that was said over at Mother of all Scientists- by a (no doubt) well meaning advisor(s) to a postdoc Continue reading ‘OK, you were nodding your head but were you LISTENING?’

Since I wrote the post about interviewing where I discussed whether one should talk about one’s family or not during an interview… I’ve been thinking a lot about this… and about role models, about how having career and family differs for men and women, about my own experience. It feels so odd to talk about this publicly- but people who know me well know that my family is extremely important to me.

If you have read the ‘about me’ tab- you probably realize that I have quite a complicated academic and personal history. That short paragraph looks so tidy on the page- but believe me, it wasn’t like that in real life. I always tried to go forward with the idea of keeping my options open- not closing any doors Continue reading ‘academic career NOT’

Well, my soccermom-dom has reached a critical point. Most of the members of my older daughter’s soccer team, including the coach, are going to go competitive next season (i.e. no longer ‘recreational’ now ‘club’). This transition involves try-outs, and if she makes the team there will be lots of traveling to games out of town, two tournaments per semester, and a much longer soccer season. The traveling will involve at least 3 hours of driving for 1/2 of the season’s games, in addition to two practices per week and the regular schedule of home games that we currently have.

I am honestly conflicted about whether or not we should let her play up to club soccer. Continue reading ‘Now what?’