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. Almost all women there have children, and almost all of them take the year or more off per child that they are entitled to– there are enough stable, relatively undemanding jobs in science for them below the PI level that they simply have no incentive to work like dogs. The government (women make up 40%+ of the parliaments) and society encourages this– it encourages the men to do the same, and a lot of them do, but enough don’t that there are *still* more than enough people competinng for full professorships.

In the US on the other hand, women in science risk their careers and often even livelihoods when they have kids. Some respond by not having kids (at least before tenure), other permanently leave science to stay at home, but a sizable minority go back to work 70+ hour weeks with a few-weeks-old baby, even if only because they are afraid to lose their jobs, do brilliant science, get tenure, get elected to the NAS, etc (I’m at Caltech right now, and know quite a few (at least 6) of the younger tenured women faculty here had children on the tenure track or as postdocs-google will provide you with a few hundred examples of women at R1s having pre-tenure children (many on the tenure-track) and getting tenure, despite the odds). In American academia doing this is socially acceptable, even accepted- in family-friendly, feminist egalitarian Scandinavia, a woman who did this would be immediately labeled a terrible mother.

Childlessness for academic women in America is also socially acceptable- while in Scandinavian countries childbearing is considered almost as much a civic duty for women as military service is for men. The result: in America, where having children is seen as a choice and minimally accomadated, and where many mothers don’t work at all- there are many more prominent women scientists, whether with or without children, than in Sweden, where *every* woman is expected to have a child, take year off, go back to 35 hr/week job, repeat twice more. And-oh yeah, the Scandinavians aren’t exactly out-performing Americans in science. Maybe in a field with many more applicants than job *incentivizing* women and men to take time off isn’t that useful…
Forcing a female assistant professor to come back to work the day she gives birth or quit her job will probably compromise the quality of the scientific workforce- so will allowing her to take two years off with absolutely no penalty.

OK, so there is a lot in this comment. Where to start. First, I suggest that the US and Scandinavian system as described here are two extreme situations which are difficult to directly compare. I am going to admit right up front that I don’t know how the academic system is structured in Scandinavia- but I do know that in other European countries (such as Germany which I do know about) the structure of academia, the way you move up the academic ladder, and how you fund your research program are totally different than in the United States. This is slowly changing- the funding part at least- to be more US like.

Now to my specific comments on DFFHA’s thoughts-

1. Ok - so women in Scandinavia have great maternity policies but STILL don’t move up the ranks- is this because they have no ambition, or because the ’system’ of academic science doesn’t allow them to progress. Just having great, government mandated maternity policies- doesn’t mean that the old boys at the top of the academic system are progressive, not gender biased etc- in their decisions about whether or not to promote women up the ranks.

2. Here in the USA we DO NOT have a plethora of ’stable relatively undemanding jobs’ in the academic sciences- these jobs just do not exist in any significant quantity. After your postdoc you generally move up in academic science or out to an alternative career. There is no job description for a stable job in academia that are ‘undemanding’ unless you are a technician- these jobs do exist, but I don’t see a lot of women postdocs after their Ph.D. and additional training is completed falling back to be lifelong technicians. Non-tenure track academic positions do not fit this ’stable and undemanding’ description because you are totally reliant on the federal funding of the PI, or on your own ability to supply YOUR OWN salary from grants.- to me this doesn’t qualify as ’stable and undemanding’. Sure, some of these positions probably do exist, but it is not really a viable alternative for many US women scientists.

3. Going back to work with a ‘few weeks old baby’ and working 70 hour weeks. For myself, I think this is an inhumane expectation- and something that is wrong with American society- not just academia. Furthermore, we DO NOT HAVE UNIFORMLY REASONABLE QUALITY/ AFFORDABLE CHILD CARE in the United States.

I myself could never have left my daughters when they were just a few weeks old, to return to my job. I was not ready- after the first one it took me TWO weeks to be able to stand up/sit down and roll over in bed by myself!

So- does it matter that we don’t force women to go back to work the day after they give birth- I propose that there is very little difference in making them go back to work a couple of weeks after the baby is born vs. the day after.

4. Ah- well, the US probably has more prominent women scientists BUT- I don’t even have to look this up to say that the US has a vastly larger scientific enterprise (and I imagine way more tenure track positions) than Sweden, for example. So I suppose one would really have to do a proper comparison of how many women are in which positions at all levels across the Swedish and American systems as it relates to the size of the total scientific enterprise. You can’t compare the total ## of women in top positions from a country where there is more opportunity just by virtue of the fact that the system is vastly larger- to the total ## of women in top positions from a country with a tiny scientific enterprise- and expect these numbers to mean anything.

Furthermore, as I say up there in #2, even if you have a strong government mandate for long maternity leave, if you don’t have an equivalent ‘mandate’ for taking into account this time in academic promotion, or if you have gender biased people making the promotion decisions- then you WILL NOT have women rise to the top at the same rate as men. ( you can read Virgina Valian’s excellent book ‘Why so slow’ which is a tour de force on unconscious gender schemas and how they affect promotion of women…)

5. Finally- ‘Scandiavia isn’t out performing the US in science’- I’m sure this has to do with many, many factors, including the way the whole US system of distribution of scientific funding is structured, and the larger amounts of money that we spend on the scientific enterprise than do smaller countries like Sweden (summary_medicalresearchsituation). I venture to say that Sweden’s failure to outperform the US scientific enterprise has almost NOTHING to do with their maternity policies or with their ‘family friendly’ attitude.

Whew. Now I got that off my chest.

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 that really helps anything, that is my particular sore point right now. These tenure clock stoppages are supposed to be a good idea because generally, when a baby is born, it takes a big chunk out of the mother’s life- pretty much full time for the first 12 weeks, and at least 6 months of sleeplessness to immediately follow (in my own experience w littleDrA#2 this took a good year out of my life- can you say 8 ear infections in one year?). The idea is to keep women moving up the ranks by allowing for this lapse in productivity. Presumably, it is not inappropriate to let your chair (or whoever) know that you are expecting… and do whatever protocol is necessary in order to achieve said tenure clock stoppage, right? That would mean that whoever is in charge would have to know your own particular ‘family’ circumstances- and I wouldn’t think that is inappropriate information.

But here is the thing- I don’t really think it makes a bit of difference if the tenure clock is stopped… if you are in a must-get-grant type faculty position. NIH has got a clock too- and it is a productivity clock… run by good-old-boys (and some good-younger-boys, and some good-old-girls that didn’t have kids… and yes there are exceptions to everything), that doesn’t take into account lapses in productivity due to childbearing (or any other kind of family obligation… like elder care etc). I suppose this bugs me because this will always be a problem for young women who have children either during their postdoctoral years or early in their faculty positions. These are times when productivity can just cease completely when the birth of a child happens- many postdocs and many young faculty may not have staff/students etc. working for them immediately. Just depends on the circumstances.

And, although it is considered perfectly appropriate to talk about this within the institution- where tenure-clock extensions are granted…my sense is that there isn’t a place for this consideration where federal grants are concerned. Just doesn’t seem like stopping the tenure clock makes that much difference without stopping the NIH clock,…. What do y’all think?

I’m busy right now… I’m sorry… but… for your enjoyment Mad Hatter has started a lovely new blog on the subject of alternative career options for scientists… which can be found here. I’m looking forward to reading… go over and take a look!

…of the more unpleasant aspects of the job.

Did I mention that I am going to another meeting next month? In my current state of paper and grant rejection, going to a meeting doesn’t sound very appealing to me at exactly this moment. Plus, it just sounds like kind of a detour from all the paper-writing I could be hiding in my office doing during this time. This I-wanna-stay-home attitude is very unlike me- I usually really enjoy meetings, they are science camp (without the crafts but with nifty live demos)- and for me they play on everything that is best about science. Talking about new ideas with a bunch of smart people, seeing colleagues and collaborators from all over the world, thinking about my own projects in new ways and seeing what new cool technology people have developed since last time- I totally dig this. I relish sending daily meeting reports to my close collaborators who didn’t attend- and the discussion continues from yet another aspect…. and I’ve learned to ignore some of the over-the-top politicking that goes on at these things.

This meeting is a big important meeting… with all the right initials and held in secondary schools in the northeast in July, you know the kind I’m talking about. The meeting roster is the who’s who of my subfield, and the larger field that encompasses it- so it is a little intimidating. All my previous mentors will be there, plus many colleagues from various stages in my training. Two of my colleagues (you two know who you are), convinced me that I MUST go… good for my career… yada yada yada… They are COMPLETELY correct, it is good for my career, and when things are not going exactly as I would wish the last thing I should be doing is sitting home pouting. Plus, as I have posted about previously, there are not that many assistant professor level people getting funded in my area… so from this perspective it is totally useful to go and chat about great science with would-be-review-panel members. Sigh… but I don’t feel excited about it.

That is, I didn’t until yesterday. I was letting all the stupid details of deadlines and the grant rejection I was so not expecting things not going perfectly, let me get bogged down. I was mentioning this to a trusted senior colleague… who uttered these wise words….

You will enjoy this meeting if you uncouple your love of science at your justifiable misery at not being allowed to flourish.

So right, I love what I work on. I’m working on this grant and I think the project is so cool now if only someone else would, I could talk about it all day. Walking into the lab to talk with my ‘people’ and seeing what’s new in their experiments is the rush of my day. And after all, I want to finish those three manuscripts I have sitting here and send them out… because the work is done, I think it is good (though reviewers may say otherwise), and it should be out there! As for everything else, I am going to take the days grants one at a time ….

So, I’m buried under grants right now- but I’ll write a quick post just to keep you updated on some loose ends. Let’s start with the paper rejection that was so hotly discussed. I sent a politely worded appeal to the editor, and waited. And waited, and waited, and waited. After 18 days of waiting, I sent a second polite inquiry to the administrative person who assured me that a decision would be forthcoming shortly. 5 days later (now 88 days after the initial submission) I received a short reply that the editors were going to stick with their original decision to reject the manuscript. The rationale was that the original reviewers just weren’t that enthusiastic about the work and because someone (editors, reviewers?) felt that connection between the phenotype of my mutant and the function for which the genes are responsible was ‘not compelling’. I’m ready to move on. I am doing some light editing and waiting on one experiment which people have asked me about now and then- and then it will go out again. I’m remembering that this is a just a job, and IS NOT personal.

Now for the grant rejection. I have had difficulty getting in touch with the person in charge of the review panel- it’s summer so that’s expected. Today we had a rather lengthy conversation on the telephone- all perfectly friendly. The thing is, I don’t think I got much insight on what needs to be fixed in the grant other than that the reviewers thought it was too ambitious to be completed in 4 years time. I don’t agree, but then I don’t make the funding decisions- so I am going to do what they suggest and take out the last aim. There will be a criticism for doing this, and I know exactly what I am going to hear already- because I heard a little of it last year- I’m just going to have to try to head that off in the ‘response to previous review’.

The summary statement for the discussion of this grant was on the extremely light side- but there were comments in there about grammatical issues, and that I should have future proposals adequately proof read. I would love to fix whatever it is they are referring to- but I can’t find it….nor could my two proof readers who read the grant prior to submission. Did I mention that this is a resubmission of an earlier proposal where no one commented on the grammar the first time?? It is difficult to know what to fix, without any specifics on what to fix. It is just so unsatisfying to have a review like this! It is not personal, it is just a job.

I had to talk to administrative people about keeping my lab afloat- I had already laid the groundwork for this months ago- but it wasn’t a conversation I really wanted to have to initiate for real. I will lose my postdoc in the fall, and I had to tell my excellent student worker that she can work for credit in the fall but I can’t pay her. It breaks my heart to see people who work for me, are productive, and are really excited about the projects leave my group under these circumstances.

It’s not personal though- it is just a job.

Every now and then I get a bug up my butt about something and spend some time poking around on CRISP. Thanks to the readership of this blog, I know that I’m not the only demented wackaloon that does this. Anyway, the convergence of grant rejection, paper rejection, general lack of motivation to pick up those two grants that I am turning over in July, and all those fabulous soccer graphs that keep appearing over at Mad Hatter’s site… I did some poking around on CRISP and graph making of my own. Seems like I should have done this little bit of market analysis long ago… but nevertheless.

So, I searched in CRISP using my favorite organism (MFO) as the sole keyword. I printed the list, and tallied up all the R01s funded in 2008 (competitive and non-competitive) that have MFO as a keyword. Then I eliminated the ones that aren’t directly related (i.e. those that have MFO mentioned in the abstract with a list of 20 other organisms and it’s clear that the biology of MFO isn’t being studied in this proposal). Then, I went through the list to see how many of these MFO centered funded R01 are held by ASSISTANT PROFESSORS. I was shocked by the result.

In case you are wondering, that’s 3 of 71 funded R01s on MFO in 2008 were held by investigators at the rank of Assistant Professor (Yes, I updated the ##s when I discovered that I failed to remove two funded assistant professors when I determined that their R01s weren’t directly related to MFO, so it is actually nearly twice as bad as I thought originally). What does this look like for your favorite organism?

I returned to my office from jury duty in municipal court this morning to find this… the kind gift of a laugh from one of my cherished collaborators…I don’t usually post about politics, but this was just too good ….

It feels a little odd to be writing about negotiating for a faculty position while I’m right in the midst of some hair raising posts about near academic faculty position disasters. But well, I was never one for perfect timing. I just write it as it comes to me.

If you should be so fortunate as to have a department chair call you and offer you an academic position- you’re already pretty aware of the things that need to be negotiated. Traditionally these include:

1. Salary, and who pays what part of your salary.
2. Start-up funding for your laboratory
3. Laboratory Space.
4. Any monies for technical support- if these not included in start-up funding.
5. Anything else you can think of. Child Care support?? Paid Parental Leave..???
6. I’m sure there is something I forgot.

Pinus kindly reminds me of:

7.  Teaching and other service responsibilities- when will you have to start, and how much?
8.  Moving expenses
9.  Start date

10.  Spousal support/position…very important…

Let’s just start at the arbitrary beginning of the list, the salary.
Mad Hatter and others have been interested in ‘salary structure’ as I have already written in some of my posts that salary structure can vary from institution to institution and even WITHIN an institution from department to department. First, some definitions:

Hard Money- This is salary support provided to you from the institution itself.

Soft Money- This is money that you must bring in from external funding sources, read federal grants.

Length of your appointment- you will see this stated as a ’12 month appointment’ or a ‘9 month appointment’ and this generally means the number of months in a year that the institution pays your salary for, and this can be stated other ways as well- in terms of the % Salary support, or % hard money you will receive from the institution over a given period as well.

% Salary Support- This is where the hard and soft money comes in. Your % Salary support is the % of your salary that is paid by the institution… i.e. the % Hard Money… over the annual period of your appointment.

I interviewed at many places when I was on the job market- and just about everyone had a different salary structure. There is a vast range and almost no rules for this- the situation can go all the way from the institution paying none (or almost none, I think the 15% was mentioned) of your salary, to the institution paying 100% of your salary for all 12 months of the year. This latter situation is rare, (some people think it is non-existent but I assure you that it is not it occurred in 3/10 institutions I interviewed at), and occurs mostly in large public universities and in such places where your job will include moderate (and more) teaching responsibilities. The flashy, big name institutions where you will have lesser service commitments will GENERALLY provide you with less hard money support.- Copy medical schools into this category. Yes, you usually have to contribute to teaching ‘service’ to have the benefits of complete salary support…. In my experience, that is.

To make this all more confusing, different places use different terms to describe the same level of salary support. For example- a ‘9 month appointment’ can mean that the university pays your salary for 9 months- and you have to come up with three months worth of cash for your salary. This is the same as having a 75% hard money appointment over 12 months- you have to come up with the extra 25%… the extra 3 months. Then you have to determine whether the hard money provided by the institution for your salary will be paid out over 9 months or divided over all 12 months.

As junior faculty you should negotiate to have as much of your salary paid by the institution, so as large percentage hard money, as you can get…. And for as long a period of time as you can. This removes some pressure on you in the first years of your career to immediately come up with some portion of your salary. At places that I interviewed it was not uncommon to be able to negotiate 2-3 years of 100% salary support- followed by a drop in hard money support to 50+%… I think the figures I heard were 60%, and 75% after two to three years.

Of course this all depends on the actual $$s as well. There is no average number for the starting salary of junior faculty in the biological sciences. I am sorry to say that this can vary wildly EVEN IN THE SAME DEPARTMENT FROM YEAR TO YEAR, AND PERSON TO PERSON. There are a couple of ways you can determine what is a reasonable salary- these include looking at resources such as the book put out annually by the American Association of Medical Schools which gives a very rough guideline of what faculty are making adjusted for terminal degree, rank and region of the country. This is a VERY rough approximation. Also, if the institution you are applying to is a public university- the operating budgets for these are generally publicly available. In the case of my institution all you have to do is walk into the library and ask for it. The operating budgets are quite detailed, and you should be able to find the salaries of all the faculty and administration in these documents. With a little sleuthing you can figure out which junior faculty you are comparable to in degree, rank etc.- and see what their salaries were when they were hired.

You should have all this information gathered when the chair calls you- you should have an idea what is reasonable and you should be ready to negotiate up. A word about asking for more- I’m in favor of asking. This is because I’m a girl, and my tendency is not to ask at all- and I have to consciously fight that tendency. Why is it a good idea to have a bigger salary starting out, well- every raise you ever get will be a percentage of your starting salary… and this adds up hugely (is that even a word, hell it’s my blog I can say whatever I want…) over a lifetime of work.

I’m going to have to get back to 2-6 later…

Other posts on negotiating startup…by Physioprof at the new Drugmonkey… by Juniorprof about startup…at the old Drugmonkey…and by Sciencewoman about startup…and a few comments by various people on this post at Drugmonkey…

No, not mine. HA- fooled you. I’m down at the moment, but not out- at least not yet. On my last post… Enrique left a comment about PIs having to dissolve their labs…

Topic: what happens when your PI’s gov. grant is not renewed (resubmission # > 1) and the concomitant dissolvation of the lab. Anyone want to hunker a guess on the time said dissolvation will take?

Well, I’ve had a front row seat to this for the last couple of years. DrMrA was struggling with his renewal for more than two years. I don’t usually share too much about DrMrA- he’s not into publicity- so I’ll just share how this went from where I was sitting. First, knowing that he was coming up for renewal- he reduced staff in the lab (some of this occurred by letting people go, some occurred by graduating students) in order to save some cash to use in a 1 year no-cost extension period. Everyone but graduate students goes first, this leaves you with a drain of people at the top to do the day-to-day teaching of graduate students. This action had the intended effect, cash savings- but downsizing your lab in the middle of your career is never fun. Although, I also have to say- it is hard to plan to be out of funds for more than 1 year- so the period that followed the no-cost extension was brutal.

Second- I was on the job market during this time and was offered a really awesome position in a cold-in-the-winter-blue-state kind of place. Perfect offer, except for one thing… my better half would have had to give up his tenure. Giving up tenure in a position where the vast majority of your salary is covered by hard money, directly before a grant renewal, in the current climate, seemed like a REALLY, SUPREMELY, STUPIDLY bad idea. So, we declined the job- and fortunately I had a very good alternative at our current institution… probably partially leveraged from the fact that I had been on a broad job search and had other offers.

How bad did it get for DrMrA? Pretty bad. Morale was awful, the lab went down to 1 graduate student- who is fortunately really awesome- but still. On a personal level, we couldn’t have much of a conversation about science at home, these topics needed to be left at work at all times because it was a continuous source of stress. He fought the valiant uphill battle of continuous grant submission to multiple agencies and putting out papers, all while teaching a 70 hour load and working in the lab himself. He is absolutely, without a doubt, the toughest and most persistent person that I know. The department administration was just excellent to him- supporting supplies and his student for a time- and you can’t say that about every department. But- morale can’t be purchased.

How long could we have lasted this out? I’m not sure. We lasted more than two years, and he kept the lab moving forward successfully- with help from a very supportive departmental administrator. We are fortunate that our salaries don’t depend on grant funding as our institution is 100% hard money, so that as much of a worry for us as it is for faculty at institutions that have to supply some of (or in some cases most of) their salaries off of grants. But,… for our mental health… who knows…

Ok, I need to let off some steam once again. Last night I returned from a meeting- exhausting affairs, these are. I returned to my office this morning to find a second rejection- this time of the grant variety. Just to keep you updated, the rejection (of the paper, covered in an earlier post) is still sitting with the editor…

A little background. This grant is to a federal agency to which I can only apply once per year. In the last submission I did very well- I was just off the funding line, by 2 proposals. Comments on the science were extremely minor- the two substantive comments that we addressed in the resubmission were to add a more complete time line, and to better address the relevance of this project to the mission of the funding agency. We did these things, and tried not to do too much else to the proposal other than to clarify a couple of additional MINOR issues. The reviews were quite complementary….and I was told by the person in charge of the section that I was extremely close (15 were funded, I was #17).

So, imagine my SHOCK this morning when I opened the reviews for the resubmission. I have moved from two grants off the funding line last year, to the DO NOT FUND category - effectively a triage- for this year. Just for your entertainment … here is a brief and somewhat reworded version of the panel summary- which wasn’t much longer than I am showing you here:

Positive aspects of the proposal:

1. Important work, addressing an important problem that fits our mission.

2. Has the relevant preliminary data, and has developed the tools needed for this project.

3. Investigators are productive and clearly competent to do this research.

Negative aspects of the proposal:

4. Some sections hard to understand and there are grammatical issues. (last year they told me that this was a ‘well-written proposal’…and I barely changed anything so as not to make a mess out of it)

5. Please adequately proof read future submissions (I just have to say… WT____??? )

6. Overly ambitious nature of the work is a primary concern (consider in light of #3 above)..

7. Could be separated into multiple proposals (again- see #3 above).

8. Please consult with a successful senior scientist to focus…etc. ( and just FYI, my close collaborator has over 200 publications, - if that is not a ’successful senior scientist’ I’m not sure what is).

I wish I was joking about this but sadly I am not. And, it might look to you like I have scrubbed these comments of all scientific detail so as to remain anonymous. But- that’s just not true- this is what there was in the review- this is ALL there was in the review- there was NO substantive scientific content what-so-ever. They even remarked that I responded to ALL the previous comments from the last submission, and commented that we were highly qualified, had a good team, adequate facilities, the project is well planned and highly relevant…

So, I’m at a loss. I basically just went from we-love-this-project to don’t-bother-resubmitting with a proposal in which I addressed all the comments. To complicate this situation- I am at the end of my startup funding… so having this project funded would have enabled me to make better progress on putting out the pile of manuscripts that I am amassing on my desk - and put a little bit of a break in the continuous grant writing. Such is the life of a junior faculty member, I guess.