let's talk about solutions
sciencewoman | October 3, 2009This job ad from Katherine Hayhoe, amazing climate scientist and one of my favorite Twitter people, is EXACTLY the sort of career opportunity that we need to see more of.
The realities of our world are that many of us need or wish we had
more flexible jobs - in terms of hours, location, and what we can do
with kids underfoot. With that in mind, about 10 years ago I started a
research consulting company that I hoped would create that ideal job
for me. Today, atmosresearch.com provides occasional to full-time work
to more than a dozen people, over half of us women.
Given our focus on providing…
skookumchick | September 23, 2009Look what showed up in my most recent issue of the NWSA Journal (NWSA=National Women's Studies Association)?
I'm in print! W00T! This co-authored paper is in the current issue, which is a special issue on "Inclusive Science" that came out of this conference last summer.
I'm pleased to be in the same lineup with Cindy Foor, whose fabulous paper on industrial engineering as "imaginary engineering" you should really read (the original paper came out of the NWSA conference a few years back), as well as Meg Upchurch, whose paper on on our problematic metaphor of glial cells as "housekeepers" is…
skookumchick | September 21, 2009Are you a person in industry who is thinking about a transfer into academia? This ADVANCE-sponsored program might be something you're interested in:Our first annual On-Ramps into Academia Workshop will take place this October 18-20th, 2009 in Seattle, Washington. The purpose of this workshop is to assist women currently working in industry to transition into positions in academia. As part of the resources we will provide to On-Ramps participants, we are planning on building out a list of open faculty positions in STEM departments. If there are any open positions at your college or university…
skookumchick | September 12, 2009A couple of weeks ago, I "attended" a webinar hosted by WEPAN (Women in Engineering ProActive Network) on their recently unveiled Knowledge Center. I had never participated in a webinar -- I called up a conference call phone number, and logged into a website, and saw what the presenters had on their computers. Different presenters at totally different locations could also take charge of what everyone was seeing; it was a neat experience.
I was attending with participants from a few other organizations, including MentorNet, the Association of Science-Technology Centers (which is the…
skookumchick | September 6, 2009A reader recently sent in the following question:
Hi Ladies --
I've been reading your blog for most of my graduate career, and am currently beginning my first post-doc position. I've got a question for your readers, and I'm dying to know if anyone's really come up with a good solution for it. How can you become a (nearly) paper free academic (with the exception of lab notebooks)?
I ask this because after moving from my rather large (by grad school standards) office to a rather restricted lab space, I've been forced to realize that I can no longer keep all my printed and scribbled on pdfs. I'm…
skookumchick | August 30, 2009Whew, we've survived the first week of school. Only 1 week in, and I'm already overwhelmed: 25 things on my Omnifocus list of things to do, and one of them, due Wednesday, is "revise paper." Yikes. No wonder I'm blogging first.
I decided during our road trip that I was giving short shrift in my life to the little things that really matter to me, the little reminders that make me feel like life isn't just about my job. Some of those things include:
singing in a choir
going to the farmer's market
gardening
reading novels before going to bed
cooking dinner for others out of lots of fun things…
skookumchick | August 27, 2009A missive from FairerScience blog guru Pat Campbell:Want a job?
This is not a title you see much in this economy; but we and our partners at Northwestern have two job openings: Social Science Research Associate (5 years). and Social Scientist Research Associate/Postdoctoral Fellow (2 years).
I am so excited about this study-- we are looking at the processes and criteria young women are using to make career decisions in the biological/biomedical sciences, especially related to academic careers, as they progress from undergraduate into PhD training, comparing students with different…
skookumchick | August 23, 2009As usual, I find myself at the beginning of a semester trying to figure out how to balance my life a bit more better, and perhaps contradictorily, how I can structure my days better to be able to find time to recharge.
Because of my work with ADVANCE, I'm interested in understanding the work experiences of all women faculty in STEM, including and particularly women of color. To this end, when a colleague who is the director of the Black Cultural Center on campus recommended the book The Black Academic's Guide to Winning Tenure Without Losing Your Soul by Kerry Ann Rockquemore and Tracey…
sciencewoman | August 2, 2009The ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change received an award from the National Science Foundation ADVANCE program to hold professional development workshops for Ph.D.-level women in industry, research labs, consulting, or national labs who are interested in transitioning to academic careers in STEM. The first workshop will be held October 18-20, 2009 in Seattle. A recent press release about the workshops is at: http://uwnews.org/uweek/article.aspx?id=49062
The workshop speakers will primarily be successful women faculty members who began their post-Ph.D. careers in industry, research labs…
sciencewoman | July 22, 2009Another letter from my inbox:
Dear Sciencewoman,
I am a mom of 3 just starting my own lab. I have been thinking hard about how to recruit good postdoc talent despite the fact that I have no track record as an independent investigator. And then I remembered an article about an organization to help mentors and mentees who would like to return to science after a break (for taking care of children, family, whatever) to find each other. I was psyched about using such an organization because juggling three kids during my training taught me pretty quickly that productivity is often more about…
sciencewoman | July 3, 2009After the weekend, I'll be back with a follow up to the post on my progress towards tenure, and I'll try to address some of the substantive and thought-provoking comments that you all have raised. But, here in the States, it's already a holiday weekend, and so for today, I'll punt and take on a side issue from that comment thread.
Comrade Physioprof commented:
"hir" is a total ...abomination! It is so ...distracting it totally ruins the flow of reading, because it is NOT A REAL ...WORD!
In terms of identifiability of an anonymous individual, how much difference does a factor of two make in…
sciencewoman | July 1, 2009In January 2008, a reader (Serious Scientist) sent me a query about dealing with inlaws who thought she should give up on her scientific career when her baby arrived. They wanted her to go to a baby shower across the country, without her husband, and she was dreading the trip and the questions and judgements that would certainly arrive during the party. I encourage you all to look back into the archives and read her original letter, and the wonderful advice everyone offered to Serious Scientist.
Serious's letter, even buried back in the archives, has generated a couple of recent comments.…
sciencewoman | June 18, 2009Have you ever bought an album and discovered a song so dark, so sad that it makes you physically uncomfortable to listen to it? What do you do then? Can you stand to hear it or do you skip the track in favor of something a little lighter?
For me, the songs that twist my stomach in knots are the ones with stories of domestic violence, child abuse, or rape. And when I find one of those songs, I force myself not to delete it from my playlists and I pay attention when my iTunes shuffle pops it up. The singers recorded those songs for a reason - to tell us that terrible things are happening…
skookumchick | June 10, 2009
Do you know a woman in science or engineering who has taken a career break
from her academic position?
The NSF-ADVANCE program at George Washington University is doing a study of women in career breaks, whether voluntary or not, to understand the pipeline of women professors in science and engineering we are conducting a NSF-sponsored survey on women in career breaks. They are interested in women who have completed their PhD or DSc, have been employed in an academic setting and were, or have been, in a career break for less than five years. They are seeking to interview such women to help…
skookumchick | June 7, 2009Purdue is now on summer time, which means it is a time for day-long retreats, meetings, and types of work. I've experienced two flavors of day-long meetings, and have one or two insights to share with you about each.
My first meeting was one scheduled months in advance, with various academic heads of state (ok, not really) and leaders from across campus. The day was organized to get some specific kinds of work done, and I had high hopes; however, as it turned out, half the attendees had not read their email, and therefore had only done half of the preparation for the first activity (a…
sciencewoman | June 5, 2009Sheril, Isis, Alice,Zuska and many others have introduced you to the Silence Is the Enemy project, aimed at condemning and reducing sexual violence in places like Liberia, Congo, Darfur and other conflict ridden places in the world. In Liberia, for example, as many as 3/4 of the women have been raped, often repeatedly. And 28% of new rape victims are under the age of 4. Those are girls the age of my daughter and the girls who play on the playground with her. Raped and left to suffer a lifetime of physical and psychological consequences. (At the bottom of this post, please watch an important…
skookumchick | June 2, 2009Cornelia Dean at the New York Times reports on a new report by National Research Council on the status of women faculty in STEM fields. I haven't read it yet (just ordered a copy), but Dean reports one particular item of note, "The panel said one factor outshined all others in encouraging women to apply for jobs: having women on the committees appointed to fill them."
Hark at this, faculty search committees. And please figure out ways to value women faculty members' time on search committees, because everyone will ask the few women there are to serve on all the search committees, which can…
skookumchick | June 1, 2009For the past few years, I have been horrified by Nicholas Kristof's posts about violence against children in various crisis zones around the globe - and I have been captivated by his stories of choosing to engage as a human being with such distress and pain rather than a so-called "impartial" or "objective" journalist. In particular, I think of his reporting in 2004 from Cambodia about children forced into sex slavery and his decision to try to buy two girls to free them from traffickers, and his decision with his family to open a school east of Phnom Penh to educate girls to help prevent…
sciencewoman | May 27, 2009A while back I sent the following letter to my dear friend Dr. Isis at On Becoming a Domestic and Laboratory Goddess, because we all know who wears the hot shoes around ScienceBlogs.
Dearest Isis,
Though we may not always see eye to eye on the practicality of footwear, I adore your sense of style. Both your writing and your wardrobe choices are hot! Your Letters to our Daughters project has been blowing my mind with its awesomeness. You are truly a goddess of style and substance. I implore the goddess to spend some of her time to help me with a fashion challenge.
The academic year…
skookumchick | May 15, 2009 I feel hung down, brung down, hung up, and all kinds o' mean nasty ugly things, and the last thing I've been feeling like doing is spending more time on my computer, let alone blogging. But this video, produced for SMU's engineering program tweeted by the NAE and listed on the iFoundry blog is way cool, and, I hazard to say, is the kind of engineer I am trying to be.