What They're Saying

A few days ago I wrote about The Problem of the Problem of Motherhood in Science, a post inspired by Meg Urry's book review of Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory by Emily Monosson. A vigorous discussion ensued in the comments - thank you all for participating! It turns out the author of the book was paying attention, and she contacted me by email. Emily Monosson told me she feels her book was misrepresented in Meg Urry's review. I agreed to post here the contents of her email to me. Here's the email: I am writing, as editor of Motherhood the Elephant in the Laboratory, in…
Yeah, I should be asleep, restoring strength for spending another day with mom. But I'm catching up on email and blogs and preparing for the upcoming Diversity in Science Carnival WHICH YOU SHOULD TOTALLY BE WRITING SOMETHING FOR - GET BUSY, NOW! And in the course of all that I read this post by Stephanie Z which led me to Sheril Kirshenbaum's post (Goodbye, Sheril, we will totally miss you here at Scienceblogs) Where Are The Women With BIG Ideas? I'd like to point readers to a recent piece from The Guardian asking 'Where are the books by women with big ideas?' Books like Freakonomics,…
Over at Fairer Science, at the end of an excellent rant about the uselessness of one-shot workshops, Pat Campbell writes: One other thing, if I see one more article about why there aren't more women in science that concludes "it's the children" I am going to run amuck. This one says "Women don't choose careers in math-intensive fields, such as computer science, physics, technology, engineering, chemistry, and higher mathematics, because they want the flexibility to raise children..." Say what? Good to know that it's only the math intensive fields; so friends if you want a science career and a…
NSF ADVANCE Workshop For Women Transitioning to Academic Careers The University of Washington's 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. This workshop will be very helpful to women interested in making the transition to academia. The workshop speakers will primarily be successful…
The Global Marathon For, By, and About Women in Engineering is going on right now! for the next 24 hours. It's part of the Eweek celebration, which was last month, which I totally missed because I was off in a haze not blogging at the time. As I write this, Maria Thompson of Motorola is doing a session on Increasing Your Innovation IQ. 2008 Global Marathon Sessions can be revisited here.
If you've been reading the blogs of some of my Sciblings, you know there is this Pi(e) Day contest going on, till March 14. (Get it?) You are supposed to bake a pie, then post a picture and the recipe. Janet in particular has been posting some very tasty looking pies, and her violet custard pie was just astonishing. I thought briefly about submitting an entry but (1) I am no baker, (2) even when I have attempted to bake something, it's never been a pie, and (3) having seen these other entries, I'd be ashamed to even think of submitting whatever shabby thing I could probably come up with…
When you walk or drive by a shuttered factory or other rusting, decaying industrial hulk in your city, do you notice it? If you do, do you just think, "urban blight"? Or do you think "there goes some history in need of documenting?" If the latter, you might be an urban explorer in the making. Keep in mind your new hobby would be illegal, but that hasn't stopped a lot of intrepid souls. Sunday's Philadelphia Inquirer had an article on these determined individuals, who often risk life and limb (and ignore many a no-trespassing sign) to explore and document abandoned industrial buildings…
As a graduate student, I observed the nascent field of functional magnetic resonance imaging and thought to myself with some amusement "modern phrenology! Now with big, fancy, expensive equipment!" Count me among those who have never been terribly impressed with fMRI, and certainly not with its applications in what is known as social neuroscience. Now we have this: Late last year, Ed Vul, a graduate student at MIT working with neuroscientist Nancy Kanwisher and UCSD psychologist Hal Pashler, prereleased "Voodoo Correlations in Social Neuroscience" on his website. The journal Perspectives…
The Feb. 20th Chronicle Review has a set of articles about grad school life. The statistics on how grad school cultivates and enhances depression and mental illness are, well, depressing. But if you are or ever have been a graduate student, you knew that already. Studies have found that graduate school is not a particularly healthy place. At the University of California at Berkeley, 67 percent of graduate students said they had felt hopeless at least once in the last year; 54 percent felt so depressed they had a hard time functioning; and nearly 10 percent said they had considered suicide…
I love Ursula K. le Guin's the Earthsea series, and recently finished reading the final novel, The Other Wind. Those who are familiar with the Earthsea books will know that among other topics, le Guin explores traditional gender roles, their change, and men's disparagement of women's power. Towards the end of The Other Wind, one of the characters, Tenar, observes How men feared women! she thought, walking among the late-flowering roses. Not as individuals, but women when they talked together, worked together, spoke up for one another - then men saw plots, cabals, constraints, traps being…
Here's the story: Samia was hacked off about something. I know I recommended white science bloggers link to other bloggers in a show of link-lovin, but some of the stuff I see just seems tokenizing/LOOK AT ME I'M OPENMINDED! Ew. Fuck a bunch of wannabes. This kinda got Isis hacked off. What the fuck??? No, I mean seriously. What the fuck?... ...So what has you upset Samia? Is it a particular incident or the blogosphere in general. Either way, you've got to offer more guidance than today's brief blog-lashing. You've established yourself as an advocate for diversity and as someone who is…
Perhaps you have noticed our newly redesigned front page, and on that page, a link to the Rightful Place Project. In his inaugural address, President Obama promised to restore science to its "rightful place". Seed Media Group is starting a dialog in response, asking the question "What is science's rightful place?", through Seed Magazine and ScienceBlogs. Our benevolent overlordz have asked us to offer our thoughts in response to this question. You'll see at the Rightful Place page that you can submit your own thoughts on this question, and there is a link to the Rightful Place blog to…
Gordon Brownell is the person who got me to go to MIT. I had turned down my acceptance at MIT because my then fiance (now ex-husband) did not get in. Dr. Brownell telephoned me himself to ask why I had declined the nuclear engineering department's offer. When I explained the circumstances, he replied, "oh, is that all? Well, we can take care of that!" And he did. He arranged for my fiance to be accepted into nuclear engineering as well, and so off the two of us went to MIT. And that, my friends, is how you actively recruit women into your program.* It was with great sadness that I…
It drives me nuts that there are so many great articles in the Chronicle of Higher Education - behind a paywall, where you can't see them unless you have a subscription. The December 19th issue had a great essay, In Search of New Frontiers: How Scholars Generate Ideas. If you have a subscription, that link will be useful for you. If not, try to rustle up a print copy somewhere on your campus. The author, Robert L. Hampel, talked about how one selects a Good Topic for Future Research (GTFR). He came to question the advice he'd been giving to first year PhD students: Fill a gap in the…
Over at Adventures in Ethics and Science, Janet Stemwedel has written a fabulously complex post about ethics and population, which I highly recommend for your reading pleasure and contemplation. It was inspired by a post by Martin on the ethics of overpopulation, in which he offered a grand and simple three-point manifesto: It is unethical for anyone to produce more than two children. (Adoption of orphans, on the other hand, is highly commendable.) It is unethical to limit the availability of contraceptives, abortion, surgical sterilisation and adoption. It is unethical to use public money…
Though university administrators seem to be widely reviled among faculty members, one of the best jobs I ever had was in administration. Many wonderful opportunities came my way; possibly the most mind-stretching, exhilarating, and rewarding of these was the chance to spend four weeks attending the Summer Institute for Women in Higher Education Administration, held at Bryn Mawr College. Just imagine spending four weeks with several dozen intelligent, interesting women from colleges and universities all over the U.S., from a range of administrative areas (including faculty members looking to…
Late last month the Chronicle ran a neat piece in its Careers section, titled Mothers in the Field. It's not behind a paywall - yay! Joan Ramage Macdonald, assistant professor of geology at Lehigh University, and Maura E. Sullivan, PhD candidate in ecology at the same university, write about their experiences taking their young children with them into the field. And I do mean into the field! Joan took her infant with her into the Yukon Territory to do her research on the evolving snowpack. Maura does research in permanently saturated wetland environments, and first took her daughter with…
That would be Ronnie, Becca, Clare, and Andre, who joined me at Farmacia in Philadelphia this past Sunday for a delightful brunch and lots and lots of good talk. Many thanks to the benevolent Seed overlords for subsidizing our little get-together. I had the frittata. . The food was wonderful. I had a blueberry-pomegranate sorbet that was unbelievably delicious - intensely flavorful and silky smooth, not at all grainy or icy. They make their own ice creams and sorbets. Nice job! We sat in our booth throughout the brunching hour and well into mid-afternoon; the waitstaff was gracious…
The Chronicle has a nice piece on PhD engineers adjusting to corporate culture, and for once something they offer isn't behind a paywall, so you can actually read it! Here's the intro to whet your appetite: You might expect to see few similarities between the career path of an engineering Ph.D. and that of a humanities Ph.D. as they transition out of academe. After all, engineers have it made, don't they? They can walk right into industry jobs that are exactly like the work they did in graduate school and never miss a step, right? Not entirely. I interviewed an electrical-engineering Ph.D.…
I read it in the Philadelphia Inquirer. (Longer version here in the LA Times.) In a news release, Roy Den Hollander, who's best-known for suing Manhattan nightclubs because they offered free or discounted Ladies' Night drinks to women, contended that [Columbia] university could not use government money, such as federal financial aid, to fund its Institute for Research on Women and Gender. Women's studies courses, he maintained, discriminate against men and are therefore in violation of the Fifth and 14th amendments. He also called Columbia a "bastion of bigotry against men . . . [that has…