women in society
skookumchick | July 22, 2008Finally, a thoughtful article about women and work in the NYT. This quote I found particularly important:
"When we saw women starting to drop out in the early part of this decade, we thought it was the motherhood movement, women staying home to raise their kids," Heather Boushey, a senior economist at the Joint Economic Committee of Congress, which did the Congressional study, said in an interview. "We did not think it was the economy, but when we looked into it, we realized that it was."
Food for thought: how does this manifest itself in science and engineering jobs particularly? Or is it…
sciencewoman | June 22, 2008In a week when others in the blogosphere are discussing TIME magazine's coverage of a pregnancy boom in Gloucester, Massachusetts, there was something else that caught my eye (and my ire). I've sent the following letter to the editors at TIME:
I'm very disappointed in this week's illustration for "5 things you should know about.". It's got three guys and some glammed up starlet posing to show off her cleavage and heavy makeup. In a week when the only woman in the accompanying text is Abigail Breslin in the American Girl movie, the illustration sends a strong message to girls that being sultry…
sciencewoman | March 21, 2008Picking up where we left off a week ago...Caplan outlines 11 myths about women that she argues are pertinent to the case of women in academia. I'm going to skip over the first batch of myths, and focus on the ones specifically about women and working.
20. Full-time men work full-time, but part-time women only work part-time - and both full-time and part-time male employees work harder than females.
I think this myth encompasses the perception that if your office is occupied you are working, and if it is not you are not. Never mind that in your office you might be checking the sports scores (…
sciencewoman | March 5, 2008I'll pick up on a comment thread from the last post, in which I argued that whether women with high earning jobs and high earning partners were "opting out" or being forced out missed the fact that many women with high-earning jobs are financially supporting their families and can't afford to even contemplate "opting out."
Randy asks:
Why don't husbands opt out to help wives? I have seen it done. and again, there is little reason why folks can't survive on one income (in one of those incomes is coming from decent tenure track job)
Off the top of my head, I can come up with several reasons…
sciencewoman | March 4, 2008In the 15 February Science Magazine, Phyllis Moen reviews the book "Opting Out? Why Women Really Quit Careers and Head Home" by Pamela Stone. Stone examines the phenomenon of women leaving successful to stay home by actually interviewing the women who opt out. As Moen writes:
Social scientists have documented the work and family pressures women experience, as well as the costs to women's careers of scaling back or leaving the workforce. But until now no one has systematically investigated the actual dropouts. Thus all the analyses of the stress experienced by employed women ...tend to…
sciencewoman | February 7, 2008I should say up front that I work in a fairly family-friendly department. They were fantastic when I interviewed (Minnow was just 1 month old) and my colleagues have occasionally asked after her development. I brought her to class once last semester and nobody said anything negative.
And there's a couple of really committed Dads in the department.
Generally, that's great. I'd love see all dads actively involved in their kids lives, and I'd prefer to work with colleagues who understand that there is life outside of science.
But what's not so great is when I see those colleagues getting cut…
sciencewoman | February 5, 2008Bitch PhD pretty well sums up how I feel about today's primary choices.
To those of you who live in states that have primaries or caucuses today, please go out and make your voice heard.
Even if you're not quite sure who to vote for.
sciencewoman | December 14, 2007Via BitchPh.D. comes this story of a 7 year old who jumped in front of her mother's murderous ex-boyfriend to save her mother's life. The little girl was shot six times (and her mother twice) before the police finally showed up. Child and mama both miraculously survived, but they are going to need some help. Please go over to Bitch's, read the whole story, and see what your heart tells you.
sciencewoman | December 1, 2007Kate, our lovely host for the December edition of Scientiae has decreed that the theme is "transcending the debate." Here's my (late) entry. Look for the carnival up around the 3rd.
Much of what I've been blogging about lately has not particularly been about science or about women in science or about women at all. Sleep issues, daycare dilemmas, family-friendly cars, etc. are hardly the terrain I was writing about when I launched this blog 2.5 years ago. But they occupy a lot of my mental space today.
Since moving to Scienceblogs.com, the number of male commenters on this blog has increased…
sciencewoman | November 13, 2007This morning as I reached into my closet, I suddenly realized that the shirt I'd been planning on wearing would clash with the background on my power point slides for this morning's lecture. Having made that discovery, I couldn't subject my students to visual assault, so I had to pick out a different shirt.
If you are looking for me today, I'm the one not wearing a blue-striped shirt.