Notes on the leaky pipeline: realism or disillusionment? [Updated]
[Update in italics: May 3, 2012] After I wrote this post PLoS ONE published a paper that fits nicely with the points I was making.] Beryl Benderly’s blog post over at Science Careers caught my eye yesterday because she mentions a 2008 report from the UK about the retention of women chemistry PhDs in academia. As [...]
A leaky pipeline postmortem
I was just a couple of years into my chemistry Ph.D., when a good friend forwarded me a copy of an article about this MIT report: A Study on the Status of Women Faculty in Science at MIT. I wasn’t surprised when I read about the inequalities in resources and that many of the women faculty had felt [...]
Social media, health and drug marketing
I recently wrote about social media and prescription drug marketing for Nature Biotechnology. The policy issues balance precariously on a number of fulcrum points: free speech, public health and safety, and the sense of online community that can grow out of social media interactions. How do you regulate how companies can talk about prescription drugs [...]
Both Science and Family– but not all at once
My latest story for Science Careers is up– about women who took extended family breaks from their careers and came back to the laboratory. I was impressed with these women’s creativity in crafting career and family life in ways that worked for them. What surprised me a little when I was doing the interviews for [...]
Molecule of the Week: Carbon dioxide (part 1 of many)
This small molecule is too big for a single post, so I’ll probably revisit it at different points in this blog. It’s the most oxidized form of carbon, often thought of as waste product: both of fossil fuel burning and of the energy reactions that fuel life. But it’s also an essential component of photosynthesis [...]
The global cancer challenge
The policy side of my reporting head has also turned to health issues over the last year or so, particularly global health. From a Western perspective, it’s easy to take for granted the scope of care and treatments that are available. But the developing world is light-years away from even hoping to have access to [...]
