As I mentioned previously, among other things, failing the quals and being kicked out of the program has left me suddenly without health insurance after the end of this month.  For the summer, I have work lined up, but it is without benefits.  After that, I hope to be able to work for Husband’s company, which would make us both self-employed.  (For stability, I’ll get a real job if we don’t have a solid amount of funds in the company account).  After I found on e-health insurance that a medical plan with prescription (and maternal) coverage for Husband and I combined would run $700 a month,  Sara from Yellow Ibis shared with me this great NYTimes article on finding health insurance for the self-employed.

From the article I found this great resource, healthinsuranceinfo.net, which is hosted by the Georgetown health policy institute.  From there, you can get a free state-specific consumer guide on getting and keeping health insurance.  I haven’t completely delved through my state’s guide yet, but I’m glad I found this great resource!

But I’m not sure they have any idea what would actually increase the numbers.  I got to this article from a new commenter, avacodo in paradise, who mentioned the article here.

A draft bill introduced by Rep. Eddie Bernice Johnson, a Texas Democrat, would promote the use of workshops “to increase awareness of implicit gender bias in grant review, hiring, tenure, promotion, and selection for other honors based on merit,” according to a news release issued by the House Science Committee’s Subcommittee on Research and Science Education.

Although specific details on the bill or the workshops it proposes have not yet been given, I am skeptical that this would be the most effective way to change.  Having workshops that people are required to attend, I think, often leads them to harbor resentment at the group that they perceive as needing special treatment. Additionally, such workshops are often only held annually or less, which doesn’t give nearly as much emphasis on the issue at it should. Personally, I think actual policies would do a better job of effecting change - policies that support the hiring and retention of women, and policies that support the needs of parent workers.

There were no actual scientists at the congressional hearing, but the one academic who was there had similar ideas. Donna Ginther, an associate professor at the University of Kansas who conducted research on women in academic science, suggested

The best way Congress could help women in academic science, she said, would be to improve their access to child care. She proposed allowing universities to support child-care facilities with the indirect costs that they take from research grants made to faculty members.

That’s a great idea.  Now can we take it a step further and offer real incentives for those universities to do so, such as, I don’t know, legally requiring it? Or perhaps we could actually offer subsidized childcare to all citizens, like they do in some of the more progressive countries in Europe.  Imagine, society as a whole taking on some of the burden of raising the next generation!

Today, the California Courts affirmed the right to gay marriage!  Awesome!  I actually happen to have a friend in California who recently got “domestically partnered.” I’m so glad that now he can get married if he wants!

In the past few months I’ve continually come across mentions of Millenials or Gen Y, and since I know I fell in around there age-wise and identify most strongly with the young people of today, they have always piqued my curiosity. So I immediately clicked through to the article when I saw Bob Herbert’s op-ed “Here Come the Millenials” on the list of most e-mailed articles on the NYTimes.

When I first got there, I wasn’t sure what to expect. I thought, “Here’s what other people are reading about my generation.” But it actually turned out to make me more self-aware of how not alone I am, how many, many others who grew up in the same America I did are facing the same things.

A number of studies, including new ones by the Center for American Progress in Washington and by Demos, a progressive think tank in New York, have shown that Americans in this age group are faced with a variety of challenges that are tougher than those faced by young adults over the past few decades. Among the challenges are worsening job prospects, lower rates of health insurance coverage and higher levels of debt.

This struck me hard. Husband and I absolutely face all three of those (bold emphasis mine). While we are highly educated and skilled enough that we are both confident we can find jobs when needed, the choices may be more limited than we’d originally hoped.

When I met Husband, he was working as an elementary school computer teacher, despite his degree in CS and experience in web jobs during the late 90’s. He didn’t want to do this forever, but it was a job, and it paid something, so he was there. He had been doing web design on the side, and I encouraged him to try to find a job in that full-time. He was miserable in that job, so with his freelance plus my work-study income, we decided that he could quit, quickly improve his web portfolio, and find a new job. That winter, he did, but it didn’t include benefits, vacation, etc. He took it as a way to get his foot (back) in the door, and worked for a year without health insurance coverage. Meanwhile, we both had racked up debt on my credit card for things like, oh, eating.

The story could continue but I’m going to stop there. You get the point. Similar themes as we progressed through the next 3 years, and here we are. My being kicked out of school leaves me without health insurance, and Husband has been unwisely living without it for a year and a half, despite the fact that he’s on medications and has some medical issues. For the summer I have work lined up, but, surprise surprise, without the possibility of benefits. I just looked up yesterday the cost of putting Husband and I on a health insurance plan for the self-employed - $700 or more combined. Each month.

Among other things, we are fed up with the government. We see that in a completely free-market economy the rich get rich and the poor get, well, shit on. We both think that while free-market works well for a lot of things (like motivation for work to be done well and efficiently), we need more safety nets, more regulations to ensure opportunities for the poor and minorities, and more compassion in American politics.

Later in the article, Herbert writes:

According to the study: “Millennials mostly reject the conservative viewpoint that government is the problem, and that free markets always produce the best results for society. Indeed, Millennials’ views are more progressive than those of other age groups today, and are more progressive than previous generations when they were younger.”

The study is right on, because that’s exactly how we feel. This is not the America I learned about growing up. I see so many people in worse situation than ours (around me everyday when I go home to my apartment in the Bronx or any time I visit Husband’s family), and Husband and I both are fed up with the political state of the country. Even most of the “liberals” aren’t liberal enough for us. You think America offers equal opportunity? Bullshit.

I’ve been thinking, for a few days now, that I want to do something really special for my mom this year, to show her how much I love and care about her. But we’re quite broke at the moment, since my sudden but exciting change in career trajectory means we no longer will be receiving a spring stipend payment in the next few weeks. We know we’ll be ok, though, because I have my babysitting job (15-20 hours a week) and the company’s next round of pitching will be in about 2 weeks, and we’re sure we’ll get some significant funding then. And for the summer, my advisor will be paying me to be a “part-time staff associate” so I can help finish up some of the projects we were working on together. But this next month or so will be challenging for us, so I couldn’t pursue some of the more classic ideas, like sending her something really special.

So I’ve been thinking about what I could do, and I think that, while I don’t have much monetarily to share, and we’re not close enough for me to stop by and give her a hug or take her to lunch, I do have my thoughts and my words. So I will share those.

In my childhood and teenage years, my mom and I spent lots and lots of time together. She would drive me to ballet, or soccer, or tap-dancing. I remember standing in the driveway, dressed up in a leotard or a skating outfit, and posing for pictures while she photographed me. I remember being in one of my first performances, dancing in a group number on an auditorium stage to some Irish music while my mother sat in the audience and watched. I remember going to the ice skating rink with my mom and my brother’s boy (cub?) scouts group, and falling in love with the ice. I remember those early days, waking up while it was still dark out to go and practice at the local rink. I remember the first time we went to the new skating complex and training center that was being built in Marlboro, MA, to get a lesson with the new skating director there, when I was still just a young skater and we were both still learning about the skating world.

I remember how my mom was always there, with me, by my side and watching as I learned new jumps and spins, tried new things and fell, time and time again. Yet she always brought me back the next day or encouraged me to skate the next session, so that I could get up and keep trying, keep pushing to be better, to land new jumps or to try new moves. And she kept supporting me as I advanced through my skating career, through the many years of practice and competitions, new skates and dresses, the endless driving and travel, and the really high monetary cost of pursuing the sport of figure skating (Seriously. It’s expensive!). Most of all, I’m glad she supported me through all of the bruising falls and that she was there to celebrate with me for the triumphs.

And she was still there for me when I decided, during the summer before my senior year of high school and after months of training to compete in the Senior Ladies division at regionals that fall, after all of that, that it was time for me to leave competitive skating behind, to move on to other things. I know it was hard for her too, as it was for me, but she supported me as I pursued academics more keenly, as I began joining things like the math league and putting more time into school clubs.

That fall she supported me and helped me to keep up the confidence I needed as I applied to 10 different undergraduate programs. And she was there with me to celebrate and to be proud when I was accepted into 9 of those programs, including two full tuition scholarships to schools in MA (where we lived) and including my first choice school, an elite university in NYC (which offered me need-based financial aid but not scholarships). And that fall, she encouraged me as I went off to my first-choice school, leaving MA for life in NYC. I know it must have been really hard for her, living at home alone with my father for the first time in years, both of her children off at college in the city (my brother was at school in Boston). But when I called to talk she always listened and cheered me on. Now, when we talk, we listen to each other’s problems and offer advice, love, and help to each other. I always feel better after talking to my mom, and I hope that she does too.

Mom, I am so thankful for the solid foundations you provided and for the endless support and encouragement as I pursue my dreams, no matter where they take me. Thank you for giving me the space to make my own mistakes while always being there to listen when I fell down and had to get back up again. I consider you one of my best friends, and I feel lucky to be your daughter. Most of all, I love you with all of my heart.

Happy Mother’s Day!

I came across this article from ScienceNOW about a new study on whether the mom’s calorie intake at the time of conception affects the gender of the baby. The idea that it might is based on the Trivers-Willard hypothesis:

In 1973, biologist Robert Trivers and mathematician Dan Willard predicted that to maximize the number of her descendents, a mother should have some control over the sex of her offspring. If she’s healthy and has plenty of food, male offspring are her best investment because they can produce more progeny than can females. But a mediocre male cannot, so mothers with limited resources are better off having girls.

The study, You are what your mother eats: evidence for maternal preconception diet influencing foetal sex in humans, was done in the UK by Fiona Mathews, Paul J. Johnson, and Andrew Neil. Unfortunately, I couldn’t get access to the full text, so all I had to go by was the abstract and the article from ScienceNOW, but it sounds interesting. Mathews and her colleagues proposed that if the Trivers-Willard hypothesis is true for human mothers, a mother with greater total calorie intake might have more male babies.

The researchers looked at what the first-time mothers were eating at the time of conception. They found that of the mothers who consumed a total amount of calories in the top 1/3 of the subject pool, 56% had sons. In the lowest calorie group, 45% had sons. Male births are in a “small but detectable decline” in some industrialized countries- since 1970 the proportion of male births in the US has gone down by .1% - and now researchers have evidence that maternal diet may be one of the factors involved. There are likely other factors as well, such as environmental contaminants.

One of the interesting parts of the study is that it found a slightly stronger correlation between how much cereal the mother eats at the time of conception and the gender of the baby. Only 43% of mothers who ate less than one bowl of cereal per week had sons, while 59% of mothers who ate at least one bowl of cereal each day bore sons. From the ScienceNOW article:

With fewer women eating breakfast, Mathews says that the Trivers-Willard effect could be at least part of the explanation for dropping sex ratios. Breakfast may be particularly important for maintaining blood sugar levels, which have been linked to increased production of males in other mammals, although the precise mechanism is unknown (ScienceNOW, 30 November 2007).

I really wish I could read the actual article, because I’m particularly curious about this part. I eat lots of cereal - but rarely for breakfast. Rather, I munch on staples like cheerios for snack food at any time of day. The ScienceNOW article continually makes the jump from cereal to breakfast, and I want to know the details from the actual article. Did they ask whether they ate the cereal at breakfast time? If the effect is really about blood sugar levels, then the question of whether they ate breakfast may be more important than how much cereal they eat. And what about women who eat breakfast, keep steady blood sugar levels, but also keep a low overall calorie intake? Where did they fall?

Finally, I also take issue with the title of the ScienceNOW article, “Want a Boy? Eat your Wheaties.” While I understand that it is easier to stick to either X% have boys or X% have girls, I had a bit of a visceral reaction to the “Want a boy?” part of the title, because while I know I’ll be ecstatic and loving with my children no matter their gender, I’ve always daydreamed most often about a baby girl.

While an article title must provide a hook to get the potential reader to go read it, this title seems to me to really simplify the findings. Maybe something like “Want to choose your baby’s sex? Modify your diet.” would have gone down smoother but still hooked people. It seems like it would be easy for an average person to read the actual title and either think “That must be crap science” (this admittedly crossed my mind) or “I’m going to go eat Wheaties every day now.” In reality, from what I can gather with just the abstract and the ScienceNOW article, eating breakfast and/or cereal every day may increase your chance of conceiving a son to 59%. That is a significant increase, but the 41% of mothers who follow that and have girls is no small number of moms. And if I want to have a girl, should I start skipping breakfast and avoiding cheerios? That sure would seem foolish going into a pregnancy.

I came across these through a commenter, Emily, on the May Scientiae Carnival. Emily’s book, Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out, came out recently. She’s set up a blog where she hopes to encourage discussion about how we combine motherhood and science. I haven’t read the book yet myself, but once things settle down and we have some meager amounts of cash, I’ll probably go right out and get it!

Through Emily’s blog I also found out about this book: Mama, PhD: Women Write About Motherhood and Academic Life. It will be released later this year and looks like a promising collection of essays about combining motherhood and academia. This book also has an accompanying blog at MamaPhD.com.

I don’t write about skating all that much, but I’ve mentioned it occasionally. In middle school and high school I was a competitive figure skater. I was browsing some skating blogs on the internet today and came across this post about the traffic on a freestyle sessions. Reading it really brought back memories…largely of some of the most frustrating parts of the day-to-day training!

Every skater copes with traffic differently. Some barrel ahead as if wearing blinders: the hapless individuals in their paths must either move or get flattened. Some skaters can’t contain their aggravation, frequently displaying rink rage. Other skaters constantly stop for everyone else, in the process never fitting in any of their own elements and therefore accomplishing little. Others are well-meaning but clueless, seeming to lack depth perception, often misjudging how close they are to gliding directly into someone else’s camel spin. Some just haven’t yet gotten the hang of steering; they see the traffic but can’t physically maneuver around it. Still others manage to find that balance of being both productive and safe.

I fell into various of these categories at different stages in my training.  Often, I was the one constantly letting others go ahead of me or in front of me, or psyching myself out so much that after circling 5 times and being cut-off or not finding an opening, I would finally get one only to “pop” or miss the jump.  In later years, I got my focus more under control and learned not to be afraid of the others, but I probably also got more reckless, sometimes taking off for a jump awfully close to someone moving nearby.  I remember one of the first times I took off for a double axel really close to someone and I still focused enough to land it.  I was proud of my focus and my coaches were too, since I was often much more submissive in letting the other skaters get in what they wanted to do, but it’s definitely a shame that sessions had to be that crowded as I have definitely seen some close calls - or actually cases of injury.

Hey there, and welcome to my cozy spot by the window. From here you can see all sorts of great insights into the lives and careers of women in science. It’s a particularly great scene right now as I have invited all you wonderful science-inclined cats to come and join me to talk about our changing views of ourselves and of our careers. The occasion is the May Scientiae carnival, and there were lots of great submissions. In fact, I really want to take this chance to note that there seem to be lots of new women-in-STEM bloggers out there. We’re creating a community, and it will help all of us. I’m so glad to see it seems to be growing at a faster rate, with all of the new bloggers I’ve seen since 2008 began!

I tried to include all of the submissions so if I forgot anyone, please leave me a comment. You’ll definitely want to follow through on the links and read all of the great posts, so be sure to bookmark this page or the links so you can come back and read them when you have time!

As a suggested prompt, I asked about how our career goals have changed over the past year, 5 years, or 10 years, and how our views of ourselves have changed in that same time frame. I also asked about how where we are now is different from where we imagined, and what role things outside of science have had in our changing perspectives.

How do our career goals change over time?

If there was one thing that was constant for all of the respondents it would be that our goals and aspirations have changed over time. For some, interests and desires have changed considerably, while for others, small tweaks have been made as we learn more about our chosen career paths.

Jennie tries to get some perspective as she tells us about how she can question her career goals constantly, saying “So in answer to the first proposed question my career goals have changed over the course of a day.” Later, she tells us more about her path to where she is now:

My long term goals have never been definite, I’ve just been cruising along going which ever direction my life takes me (re: question four, my husband has determined where I lived, am living and will live so that has shaped a lot of what I study/do). I enjoyed my undergraduate educational experience, my undergrad research project and my technician-type job at a government agency. I’ve wanted to be a scientist since I can remember. When I was in elementary school I wanted nothing more than to wear a white lab coat and make discoveries.

She’s not alone. Maria at Green Gabbro gives us the “soap opera summary” of her path from burned out undergrad to young professional, back to grad school within a year and then thinking about leaving within the following year. Then she tells us how she came to learn that “clinging too stubbornly to long-term goals” doesn’t work for her. She concludes, “Instead of planning for a long-term goal, I am planning for change.”

Similarly, Rivikah tells us that she’s not sure how she got from where she was 10 years ago to now, saying “most of the decisions along the way have been obvious ones.” And Addy tells us that not having a plan has worked out pretty well for her. She shares:

Despite my lack of “a plan”, things have turned out amazing well: I am happily married as we approach our 9th anniversary this summer, I have a happy, healthy eight-year-old daughter, and I have just gotten tenure. I really can’t complain (not that I don’t!).

And Silver Fox takes us through her journey over the past 10 years in her post “5 and 10: where has the time gone?” She tells of moving in and out of the mining exploration industry and of the other places her path crossed in between. She also isn’t much of one for long-term goals, saying instead, “that some of my best ideas have been almost spur of the moment things, ideas that have ultimately taken me to places I never would have imagined - like being a field geologist.”

*Wayward Elf takes us through the path of her own career, with her goals being a “moving target.” She tells us of all of her different jobs, and how among them, her favorite was the video store:

I’ve had a paying job of one type or another since I was 14. I have never not worked. Sometimes I fantasize about it would be like to be unemployed or retired.
…
My favorite job, bar none, was at the video store. I loved that store. I liked the coworkers, I adored and respected my boss, I liked (most of) the regular customers. I loved that I was getting paid to stand around talking about movies, watching movies (free tape!), repairing broken tapes, and, best of all, just interacting with people all day.

Twice Tenured wrote a great post about what she originally thought she wanted (to teach at a SLAC), what she found at first and loved (a tenure track job at a regional master’s level institution), how she left that to solve her two body problem and eventually found a job at a SLAC near her husband. She shares great details as well about what it was like to teach and research at both types of institutions and how the student bodies varied.

Kim tells us of how writing about the beauty and wonder she sees helps her remember her passion for her science. “I do geology because it’s beautiful,” she says. After having her son, she says she ” slacked off, let the fieldwork slide, didn’t publish.” Others, like myself, prefer to recognize this as her having (quite justifiably) changed her priorities for the period of time when her child was young. Now, she says:

I’m working my way back. But I can’t do it by simply sitting down and writing an impersonal article. I need to be driven by the sense of wonder, as well.

Brigindo takes us along a detailed journey of her path from the “superstar track” to a place that fit her and her family’s lifestyles better. Of her current position, she writes:

It felt like a good fit. It felt like a place where I could at least attempt to have the lifestyle I wanted and where my new research agenda would be welcomed. It gave me the opportunity to teach what I consider to be a reasonable amount of classes. It’s been almost 2 years and it’s working for me, big time. I know there are many from my previous life that don’t “get” my choice since I’m no longer on the superstar track but I no longer get their choice either.

Liberal Arts Lady, who is a scientist who will be starting this fall as a new professor at a liberal arts focused institution, talks about a shift in what is important to her:

I started out as a gung-ho, I’ll-suffer-anything-for-the-project undergrad, and although I’ve really enjoyed the majority of my field time, over the past few years I’ve become much more reluctant and resigned to field work as actual work that also takes me away from my home life.

What have we learned about our chosen careers as we’ve gotten more immersed in them?

Probably few of us had a good idea of what it’s really like to follow our chosen career paths at a young stage in our lives. Some of us grew up with professors close in our families, and were able to see into at least a particular type of science job. Others had little to go on except for what we learned from popular media. Some of us (this cat included) didn’t even consider the thought of pursuing a PhD until partway through our college experience. Ecogeofemme tells us:

In short, I had no experience with the concept of a Ph.D. before I went to college and had Ph.D.s for professors. Scientists were people interviewed on the news about cancer breakthroughs or marine biology.

Similarly, in her post “I wanna be a scientist when I grow up“, Doc-in-training highlights what she didn’t know when she entered college (emphasis mine):

Up to this point, nevertheless, the aspiration was merely about getting into college, so that I could spend more time on space stuff, along with the fact that I would be trained to get a job with a cool job title and rewarded by regular paychecks. But quite honestly, I had no idea what a rocket scientist, or any kind of scientist, does on a daily basis. I mean, two of my extended relatives are professors – one of them is an astrophysicist and the other is a food scientist. But they are extended relatives and were living somewhere overseas. So I got a good concept of what a scientist does from… hmm… television (?!), but I didn’t know what I didn’t know.

Whether we knew professors or researchers as we grew up or we discovered this career path as an option after we were already in college, all of us learned more about science research and the world of academia after we entered grad school.

In her post “Not what I’d planned, but what I was meant to do…the impossible?” ScienceWoman writes about how watching her mother work as a professor at a teaching-focused institution affected her views, and then about how she went from not wanting a job where she has to be good at both teaching and research to her current position. She shares:

As I worked through my PhD and my life evolved, I learned some things that made my mantra of ‘teaching OR research’ seem a bit less tenable, and the impossible started to seem a bit more attractive.
…
My job requires both teaching and research and expects me to be good at both. It’s not exactly what I planned, but I really think it’s where I was meant to be.

Hannah at Young Stellar Objects writes in her post “Changing with the times”:

However, it isn’t just about having good ideas. It’s as much about politics and networking and self-promotion and schmoozing as it is about writing papers and winning grants. My postdoc years have been a lot about becoming savvy about self-promotion and trying to get over being an introvert.

While some women are still determined to continue even as they’ve seen more of the difficult realities of being a women in academic science research, others question if this is where they want to stay, while still others are already planning to pursue other avenues. In an older post that Ecogeofemme cites, she writes about her decision that she wants “nothing to do with academia long term.” And Candid Engineer tells us how she’s questioned her competency and abilities along the way, eventually realizing that she probably can be a professor but unsure if she wants to be one:

I am getting older and more experienced in the ways and burdens of adulthood. I regard life as a complex prism of needs, wants, actions, and consequences. So today, if you asked me, I would tell you that, yes, I believe that I could make a fine professor. I would also tell you that I don’t know if I want to.

The Ethical Paleontologist tells us about her progression over the last ten years from a bright-eyed and headstrong 18 year old to where she is now, “Now? I’ll be honest. The year at Wash U almost broke me.” She later explains, “It was events within the science that destroyed the passion - I’m sure if I still felt that ambitious I’d find a way around the job-PhD problem.”

And I wrote a post analyzing my current career path and questioning whether it was what I wanted anymore. Not a week later I learned that I had failed my qualifying exam (for the second time) and am being kicked out of the PhD program I was in. Remarkably, I’m pretty upbeat about it all, ready to go try some other way of combining my skills, something that will use my broad and varied skill set better than the very focused area of academic science research. The more I’ve learned about academia and academic research, the more I think it’s not really the best place for me.

How has being a woman in science impacted our view of this?

For most of us, being a woman pursuing these career paths has impacted us in some way. Some of us were outright denied access to opportunities because of our gender. Challenges earlier in our careers led us to make choices along the way, sometimes choices that might help to learn more about those barriers that were faced. Pat from Fairer Science gives us a great overview of her career in acts, telling us about instances in her younger days where she was outright denied access to things because of her gender. Now, she is actively working to change the world (Go Pat!):

Act 5: President Pat founds Campbell-Kibler Associates, an educational research and evaluation firm with an emphasis on science and math education and gender, disability and race/ethnicity.

Others heard often of how girls weren’t supposed to do what we want to do. Doc-in-training tells us of how her willingness to tell others of her aspirations changed over time, as she grew better able to handle the “girls-shouldn’t-do-this craps.”

Still others deal with more subtle aspects of being a woman in science. Jokerine pointed me to this post by a current undergraduate in science, and as a fairly recent B.S. recipient myself, I can completely relate. Despite the fact that I and many of the younger women in science, unlike those who came earlier, were admitted to many top schools in order to study science and engineering, we still see many of the things Noel writes about in her post. She shares:

So please, stop acting like a sleazy pig. Because of the things you say and do, I feel obligated to look frumpy and completely covered up. I feel self-conscious for looking and acting feminine. I feel embarrassed to participate in an academic discussion or show any signs of comparable intelligence. I even feel a little inadequate on performing tasks that I am perfectly capable of doing. It’s the type of workplace discrimination that nobody would ever acknowledge or address.

In her post, Hannah also tells us about the subtler aspects of being a women in science. She adds some great insight into how promoting our ideas can be hard for women in science:

When it comes time to apply for faculty positions and tenure and all that, it’s more about the impact of your research. This is where the networking comes in: you gotta give talks, go to conferences, talk important people up, promote your ideas, yadda yadda. You need to find people who will promote your ideas for you as well: advisors and mentors. Then social conditioning comes into play. It’s hard to break into the old boys’ network. Heck, it can be hard to speak up when you’re talking informally in a group where you’re the only woman. It’s hard to get over the social conditioning that says you should be quiet and meek, and someday Prince Charming will notice that elegant but little-cited paper of yours and swoop in with a job offer on a silver platter.

And for many of us, our desires to start a family and to balance our non-work lives with our scientist sides lead to yet more challenging choices and changes in perspective. And of course, many of us have seen new reasons to worry about geography and location of jobs after we’ve met someone we want to make a life with.

Amanda tells us about how she always wanted to be a doctor when she grows up, to work toward curing diseases. After discovering she likes research, she decided to pursue a PhD. But after dating and deciding to marry her Dr. Man, she has discovered new uncertainties. She also finds herself asking an all-too familiar question, “Can I do everything?”

Woman Scientist tells us about how she progressed from fearless child to questioning grad student. She asks “Can I be a great mother and a great scientist at the same time? The more important question is do I want to?” For now, she’s going to press on. She concludes:

There may come a time when I change my mind. Until then, I keep telling myself that I can do this. I have to remind myself of that a lot, but I’m starting to believe it. I’m really starting to believe it.

Stepwise Girl talks about the price of the career path she’s been following:

I never really had a precise career plan, but I seized opportunities to carry on doing what I realised I love doing: research. But the career has interfered with all other aspects of my life. I met Husband doing fieldwork (how’s that for a field collection!), so it’s of course not all bad or impedance. But currently the career is delaying personal life plans. That’s what I chose. But, just like everything else, it comes at a price. This dawned on me only a few weeks ago.

*Mother of All Scientists wrote a great post in her series “On going back to work,” which discusses her feelings about returning to work after spending a maternity leave with her beautiful daughter, Bean. She tells us in her recent post, part 8, of how working time being time away from her precious daughter has made her place more value on the work being worth it:

Before I think it would have been too much for me to actually contemplate leaving the bench for good. After all, it’s been 6 years since I realized that bench work wasn’t right for me, and yet here I am. But having the Bean has really made me re-evaluate my priorities. And I’m just not going to settle for a job that makes me unhappy. If I’m going to be away from the Bean, I have to make that time count. I want a career that makes the time away from her “worth it”.

Julie tells us about the day her life changed forever - the day she learned that the baby her and her husband had planned as she finished up her PhD and looked for a post-doc was, in fact, twins! She shares:

Before getting pregnant, I kind of had some, well for lack of a better word, fantasies about combining motherhood with a science career, but all of those imaginings were for only one baby. How would I manage to fit two children into my career? At the same time? I had absolutely no idea. At that point, I kind of just tossed my plans out the window. Whatever would come would come and I would deal with it as it came. I would finish my degree and figure out my life later. It turns out that it was a good thing I chose a “take it as it comes” approach because my life was about to get even less predictable.

And finally, in her post “Career, interrupted“, the Raising Scientists blogger tells us about a recent setback which I would argue is a clear instance of institutionalized discrimination. She tells about how, despite mostly positive reviews, her grant proposal was rejected for reasons she was given no opportunity to explain:

The major concern they had was that, although I was very productive in my previous research career I had not, as of yet, published a paper as a post-doc, and that my non-productivity might be a warning flag as to the feasibility of my actually completing the proposed research. Unproductive? Let me ask you this… where, on my CV, can I put that I got pregnant and gave birth… twice?

We’ve moved from the outright discrimination (no girls admitted!) of Pat’s days to institutionalized discrimination to the more subtle gender issues where young woman find themselves dressing messily so as to have people pay attention to their ideas instead of their breasts. Maybe change is occurring, but is it happening too slowly? Luckily, there are still many brave women scientists for whom the current state of the system is workable, and for many, their love of science may get them through. Hopefully, all of us will do what we can to help effect some change, from outside the academic science world and from within it, so that those who truly do want an academic science career won’t be hindered by many of the biases we still face today.

ScienceWoman plans to work for change:

My hope now is that I can work in some small way to transform academia into a place where future generations of young women won’t think that the combination of teaching, research, and motherhood is an impossible combination.

How have our views of ourselves changed?

Lots of submissions included great details and insight into how our self-perceptions have evolved over time. Many of the posts linked to already have also touched upon this, so be sure to go check out the original posts!

Many bloggers talked about feelings of doubt and fears of stupidity. ReBecca at Dinochick blogs wrote an excellent and detailed post about her career changes in the past ten years. At the end of her post, she leaves us with some great insight as to how she has managed to deal with the changes and setbacks that she has faced:

My brain and I are not always friends, and sometimes I am just not smart enough to get where I want to be I guess. I wish I were more intelligent, articulate, or better at playing the game. I finally figured out that I have to work with what I have been given. I had to learn to love myself for who I am. I can not make my brain work any better than it does. I can try to learn and improve, but I am only what I am. And I have to accept that. While I am about to give up a job I really love for a man I really love, I know that I am not giving up a part of myself in the process, and that is the most important thing that I never did before. This new chapter is only going to help me continue to pursue my goals because this time I know I have this individual’s utmost support and encouragement on all levels. My goals might have been delayed some, but they are still there.

Acmegirl from Thesis - with Children tells us about how she’s moved from pursuing a career as a dancer and choreographer to studying physical therapy to redefining herself as a scientist. Then, she considers how she can make her own box to fit into:

I’ve always been into science. I just didn’t see myself as a scientist. I still sort of stutter on the word when people ask me what I do. I’d rather say I’m a graduate student. This is an ongoing process, I guess. Ten years ago, I had no idea what I would look like as a scientist. I couldn’t really fit myself into that box. Instead, I’ve taken up the challenge of creating a different box. It needs to be a pretty big box, since I like to dance around in the lab while doing experiments.

Cherish Maunders from Faraday’s Cage is where you put Schroedinger’s cat wrote a wonderful introspective post in which she analyzes each of the prompts I asked. She talks about realizing that her struggles weren’t always because of her own ineptitude but rather because she was in the wrong environment:

I always thought I was pretty dumb, and this has been a huge obstacle for me to deal with. It wasn’t until the past five years, especially dealing with the struggles my older son had and the homeschooling that made me realize that I’m not. It’s amazing how I used to feel that my struggles were due to my own ineptitude. Watching my son go through the same things I did helped me realize that a lot of it was not due to me being stupid or inept but that I was in the wrong environment with the wrong teachers. It has really changed my whole perception of growing up. I spend a lot less time mentally beating myself. I’ve stopped being angry at how things changed…now I just need to learn to accept that the people involved were just doing their best. (Dealing with this is probably a good goal for the next five years.)

Lab Cat tells us about how she learned to deal with her dyslexia as a teenager, and overcame this disability by forcing herself to look everything up in a dictionary until she had memorized the correct spelling of things. It paid off and she says “finally my Mum, a remedial English teacher, stated that I was cured of dyslexia, which she had never met in her professional life before.”

Most of us have experienced doubt and fear at some point in our careers. Some of us came out the other end feeling more sure and confident. Academic tells us about how despite the fact that she knows an academic career won’t be “easy, rosy, or clear,” she is confident now that she is in the right place:

One thing that has been becoming increasingly true is the realization that I want to be an academic. I can see that my chosen path will stretch me far outside of my comfort zone. However, there’s a lot of power in knowing that I am choosing the path instead of being my advisor’s puppet. Even though I’m on the front end of the graduate school experience, I’m coming to appreciate the uncertainty that is the journey.

Rebecca from Adventures in Applied Math wrote a wonderful post in which she showed her changing perspectives on graphs. You really should go check it out there to see the graphs and her explanation of them!

So, that about rounds out our discussion of our changing career goals and views, the effect being a woman has played, and our changing self-perceptions. There are so many different perspectives and experiences being shared out there in the blogosphere; hopefully this month’s Scientiae Carnival provides a good glimpse into some of the many varied stories of women in science, engineering, technology, and math.

A few other things to check out

I feel a bit like the teacher who at the end of a long, tiring, yet informative lecture says “OK, class, you can go in a minute I just need to tell you a few more things…” and then goes on for another half hour. Here are some off-topic submissions and articles of note:

1. Podblack cat talks about Women and Superstitions (and a candy bar whose advertising slogan is “It’s NOT for girls!”)

2. At Missives from the Frontal Lobe, KLDickson rants about decreased government funding in the US and speculates about the future of intelligence research.

3. A post in the theme of last month’s Scientiae about playing the fool: Jingling Bells at the blog The Honeycomb:

Now, as a generalist working with specialists, I find I’m sometimes the first to confess ignorance. I fear that if no one breaks the ice people will posture rather than communicate, especially when attempting to work across disciplines.

4. I came across this article through MentorNet about a new book, Gendered Innovations in Science and Engineering.

5. This article was suggested to me in the comments 3 times by 3 different commenters after my posts about analyzing my career path and pursuing other careers that meld science, writing, and mentorship.

6. Sheril Kirshenbaum asks “Is Our Children Learning? (maybe not)” and then leads a discussion. She says, “Moreover, if the examination methods were reasonable, I’m extremely troubled by the ladies’ overall performance. Therefore, I plan to spend this week exploring the disparity that leaves me speechless.”

*These submissions were added after the initial posting. Sorry I missed them the first time!

Lately, I’ve been remembering strongly a song that I used to play back when I was in my final year of high school (2001-2002). I can’t remember for sure when it was - whether it was after I had decided to stop competing in figure skating, whether it was after I was accepted to my top choice college and had worked out with my parents for me to attend that school in the fall, or if it was something else during that time. It was a time of big changes and of my decisions about what to do with my own life, and it was a time in which I left some things behind which had made up a lot of who I was up until that point. I felt like I was shedding my skin, and I felt freed by the opportunities ahead of me. I remember at the time that the chorus really struck a chord with me, as well as the last verse about the comfort of your cage and your secrets, which I felt, I think, about my bulimia. Now, the chorus still strikes a strong chord, but also some of the first and second verses speak to me more strongly.

Anyhow, I find it very therapeutic to just listen to the music and the melody and belt out, “There goes the world, off of my shoulders!” So I’ve decided to use a quote from this song for my new Cat Wisdom. The song is Quasimodo by Lighthouse, and overall it feels very fitting to this point in my life too. So, here are the song lyrics, which I took from sing365.com (I couldn’t help it, I felt the need to emphasize the parts that speak to me about this particular experience):

you can be right
and I’ll be real
honesty won’t be a pain that you’ll have to feel
cause I don’t need your approval
to find my worth
I’m trapped inside of my own mind
afraid to open my eyes cause of what I’d find and I
don’t want to live like this anymore

CHORUS:
there goes my pain
there goes my chains
did you see them falling
because this feeling
that has no meaning

there goes the world
off of my shoulders
there goes the world
off of my back
there it goes

does it scare you that I can
be something different than you
would it make you feel more comfortable if I wasn’t
you can’t control me
and you can’t take away from me who I am

CHORUS

have you ever felt
like your only comfort was your cage
you’re not alone
I’ve felt the same as you
have you ever felt
like your secrets give you away
you’re not alone
I’ve been there too
cause everyone is looking
and everyone is laughing but I think
everyone feels the same
everybody wants to feel ok
everybody wants to
everybody wants to feel

there goes my pain
there goes my chains
did you see them falling
because this feeling
that has no meaning

there goes the world
off of my shoulders
there goes the world
off of my back
cause I don’t want it
I don’t want it
you can’t change me
you can’t break me

there goes the world
off of my shoulders
there goes the world
off of my back
there it goes