Naming Experience

I recently finished reading Intuition, by Allegra Goodman. It's a great novel, and anyone who's done time as a postdoc will appreciate it, especially if you've done time as postdoc in biomedical research. You may find yourself reading it and thinking that surely Goodman must have been spying upon your research lab at some point. She really captures the flavor of research, the tools and materials that are simultaneously so fun and so tedious to work with. She captures the emotions, too. In the first chapter, the postdoc Cliff is berated by his supervisors for continuing to work on a…
This is the third of several discussion posts for Week 3 of Feminist Theory and the Joy of Science. You can find all posts for this course by going to the archives and clicking on Joy of Science in the Category section. This post deals with the readings by Subramaniam and by Margolis, Fisher, & Miller (MFM). (Summaries are available here.) I really wish that all of you could read "Snow Brown and the Seven Detergents". There is actually a pdf version on the internet but I'm not linking to it because it seems to be a pirated version. First of it, it attributes authorship to Sue Rosser…
Well, just when I think I might be getting the migraines under control, I go and lose a whole week due to some mystery illness. It wasn't a cold and it wasn't the flu, but it sure did nail me to the floor for a week. I'm just getting back on schedule in my life. I'll try to get the Joy of Science summaries posted tomorrow but discussion posts may not be till Thursday. Anyway....I wanted to call your attention to a nifty post on the "life as a leak" subject over at Fairer Science. And back on March 20, Science Woman wrote a post on Why We Leave that is very good. The discussion in the…
X-Gal Meg Murray hasn't completely leaked out of the pipeline yet. She's taken a lectureship instead of a tenure-track position, and she writes this in a column titled Too Few Choices: Defining success is a tricky thing. Would I consider myself successful if I had moved my family across the country for my career, making my husband miserable and decreasing our standard of living? We now have a high quality of life (income aside) in a location where our kids are happy and where my husband (who provides the bulk of our income) has limitless career opportunities. Is that success? I don't know. I…
This post has gotten so long I'm going to have to break it into pieces. Here's the first installment. You've read a million stories about the leaky pipeline. They all start out more or less like this: It is no secret that women are under-represented at every level of the science and technology (S&T) system. Statistics clearly show that, much like a 'leaky pipeline', women steadily drop out all along the system. Nor is it difficult to identify the causes of the leaks. They range from gender-based biases in hiring, evaluation, and promotion; to inadequate institutional support for…
I've been planning to write a post about leaks in the pipeline - specifically, what it's like to be a leak in the pipeline. I've been thinking about this post in my head for a long time, and have even talked about it with a few people via email and face-to-face, but I'm finding it extraordinarily difficult to write it. It's the same with posts that I would like to write about the two most recent X-Gals columns (here and here). And everything else that I might want to blog about seems locked up behind these things that I want - need - to write about. I wrote a bit yesterday about gender…