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 [...]
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 [...]
Truth Values: women in the equation
It’s evolved into women in science month here at Webb of Science. On October 9, I saw Gioia De Cari‘s one woman show, “Truth Values: One Girl’s Romp through MIT’s Male Math Maze” at the CUNY Graduate Center. Larry Summers’ now infamous comments about women in science inspired her to turn her own experiences as [...]
Chemistry Nobel, women, and the "choice"
On Monday, I mentioned that it was a good week for women in science. Well, it got even better today with the announcement of the chemistry prize. Ada Yonath of the Weizmann Institute of Science becomes the fourth woman to be awarded a Nobel Prize in Chemistry (sharing the prize with Venkatraman Ramakrishnan of the [...]
Nobel Prize for telomeres: focusing on the ends of DNA
It’s Nobel Prize season again, and the science behind this particular award for Medicine feels like a familiar friend. I got my crash course in telomeres and telomerase from a group meeting talk that one of my lab colleagues gave almost exactly a decade ago. The science recognized was done a quarter century ago. DNA [...]
Encouraging (women) scientists to opt in to academia
It’s an interesting week to talk about women in science. On Tuesday afternoon, I listened in on the end of a White House panel discussion about Title IX and its impact on women in both athletics and science and technology. Scientific American also reported on a new government study about the state of women in [...]
