science

As the Presidential campaign heats up (what you think it’s hot now?) the rhetoric about the “War on Women” will continue to escalate. Even though the GOP will continue to replay Hilary Rosen’s unfortunate “Ann Romney has never worked a day in her life,” quote, we need to refocus on what I believe Rosen was trying to focus on. The fact is that Ann Romney has never had to worry if her paycheck would stretch to the next payday, if she would get assigned enough hours at work or if taking a day off from work would result in being fired. Those are the issues I would hope we focus on as the United States decides who will lead them for the next four years.

Back in the lab, mothers in science have similar issues to contend with.

In the recent issue of  “American Scientist” the married social scientist couple of Williams and Ceci offer up the theory that perhaps the reason why there are so few women in science and engineering is that women want babies. BABIES! Oh, those cute, plump little beings that bring women’s work to a standstill (well except for changing diapers, feeding, clothing, rocking to sleep, but that’s not work, work, right?).

The premise Williams and Ceci present is that most, if not all, institutional discrimination has been dealt with. Let’s go with that for the sake of non-argument, ok? Their hypothesis is that “the hurdles women face often stem from a combination of several factors, including the decision to have children and cultural norms that place the burden of raising children and managing households disproportionately on women.”

My first reaction (besides laughing, but I said let’s assume no other discrimination is taking place, right?) is that change does not happen this quickly. Even if we could say that equity had found its way to how women in science and engineering operate (fair shake in the grant, publishing and tenure processes) in the last ten years (to be generous), how quickly do we believe it will take to get a change in the landscape? Do Williams and Ceci believe that once the equity horn was sounded that women would hightail it out of the lab into the bedroom to start reproducing? That women who fled to other careers would run begging to be let back into their abandoned labs? Let’s give it a generation before we focus in on just motherhood as the root cause.

On the other hand, let’s go with Williams and Ceci. Let’s say that everything is hunky-dory except the whole mommy thing.

Let’s deal with why the mommy thing becomes the biggest challenge…

Sue Rosser recalls her own challenges with being pregnant and in graduate school. How people immediately expected less of her despite any decline in her work. She even reports that an adviser suggested that she have an abortion because her second pregnancy would interrupt data collection.

Rosser also outlines the systemic challenges to combining motherhood with a career in academic science – mainly paid leave after having the adorable career ending package, er, baby:

Although the National Institutes of Health offers eight weeks of paid leave to postdoctoral fellows who receive the National Research Service Award, recipients can only take the leave in the unlikely situation where every postdoc at the university is also eligible for eight weeks of paid leave. A study conducted by Mary Ann Mason of the University of California at Berkeley documented that of the 61 members of the Association of American Universities (the top elite research institutions), only 23 percent guaranteed a minimum of six weeks paid leave for postdocs and only 13 percent promised the same to graduate students.

Academic science is not your typical workplace. Experiments do need to continue, but much like a law firm, there are other bodies in the lab that can carry on the work. We just need a system that supports this model of respecting that scientists are human beings and as such we get pregnant, have babies, get sick and have to take care of our families.

Rosser ends her piece with some amazing advice for women and men who want to combine parenthood with a career in academic science. The one I repeat over and over to my students is PICK YOUR LIFE PARTNER CAREFULLY! This continues to be the biggest choice women have to make. Will your partner understand when you have to stay late to make sure an experiment doesn’t explode? That you do need a month on the open sea collecting fish? Or need to travel to Africa like Rosser?

In many ways, I wish that Williams and Cece were correct. That the question of why women aren’t staying in science is all about babies. Because we can fix that. We can build child care centers, we can pay women to stay home in order to heal from the birthing experience and bond with their bundles of joy. Sadly, I think it’s not the only reason. But maybe we need to start acting as if it is the reason and start changing the structure of how science is done. Because in the words of Ann Romney, we need to respect the choices women make and, for me, that means having institutions created that support women in those choices. Because it’s not much of a choice if there isn’t a way to act out that choice, now is there?

I don’t know where to start.

On Monday, one of the fiercest champions of women in science died of breast cancer. I knew Susan more with her work on women in science. Rather, I connected with her around our shared work rather than our shared motherhood. I remember introducing her to my best friend at Blogher 2009, “This is Susan, she’s a rocket scientist. Really!” I’ve rarely ever been so proud of a friend as a colleague and a person.

We shared a student a few years ago. One of the women in my program spent her internship under Susan’s wing. Once I realized this, Susan and I exchanged a flurry of emails about how amazing this young woman is. That student was lucky to have had time to share with Susan. All the students, women and men, who interned with Susan were lucky.

When I say Susan was fierce, let me offer this as an example:

I tried to be nice.

I tried to be quiet.

I tried to keep this site a supportive, welcoming place where e-mentoring could be had for the price of a click.

But really.  REALLY?  When the long-awaited first images of Stardust’s encounter of Tempel 1 were released today, THIS is the headline NASA chose?

NASA Releases Images Of Man-Made Crater On Comet

MAN-Made?  What about the names Lucy, Jessica, and Karen confused you?  Were none of the hundreds of scientists and engineers who worked on Deep Impact women?

NASA.

You know better than this.

You know that language matters, and that women matter to the future of the space agency.

Or, at least, you did.

What happened?

Yup, even as sick as Susan was, she didn’t hesitate to rip NASA for their biased language. That’s why I loved her so.

I’m going to miss my partner in crime.

But when I think of Susan’s fight against breast cancer, she did not just fight for herself, she fought for all of us. She would rant about the lack of funding and research. It wasn’t until the 1990s that women were even expected to be included in breast cancer research (in fact, in any medical trial). There’s a lot of catching up to do and we’re going to need all hands on deck. Men and women.

In Susan’s husband’s post telling us of her passing, he said, “In lieu of flowers, please consider furthering Susan’s legacy through a contribution to the Inflammatory Breast Cancer Research Foundation. Or please choose to make a difference somewhere, anywhere, to anyone.”

So there we have it. Our marching orders. Come on everyone, our Warrior Princess has spoken.

Thanks to University of Wisconsin – Madison researchers for another study that says girls can do math!

We’ve been here before. I’m not blaming them. This research needed to be done. I wish it didn’t. But it does. This study does not only address if girls can do math or not, but it also addresses the frequent “solution” to helping girls do well in math and science — single-gender education.

From the conclusions of the paper:

[W]e conclude that gender equity and other sociocultural factors, not national income, school type, or religion per se, are the primary determinants of mathematics performance at all levels for both boys and girls. Our findings are consistent with the gender stratified hypothesis, but not with the greater male variability, gap due to inequity, single-gender classroom, or Muslim culture hypotheses.

In other words, the gap we see between girls and boys math ability is due to society and culture. “[T]hese major international studies strongly suggest that the maths gender gap, where it occurs, is due to cultural factors that differ among countries – and that these factors can be changed.”

It is not due to some mystery math gene on the Y-chromosome (greater male variability), not due to more boys having access to math classes (inequity), not due to separating boys from girls nor is it due to some mystery about Muslim culture. The last one is the most odd theory some people cling in order to not see that gender equity in society has an effect on girls and math performance. It was in Freakanomics. Essentially it goes like this: Since girls in Muslim societies have little equity, but they do awesome in math, feminism/gender equity has nothing to do with girls doing math.

‘The girls living in some Middle Eastern countries, such as Bahrain and Oman, had, in fact, not scored very well, but their boys had scored even worse, a result found to be unrelated to either Muslim culture or schooling in single-gender classrooms,’ says Kane.

He suggests that Bahraini boys may have low average math scores because some attend religious schools whose curricula include little mathematics.

Also, some low-performing girls drop out of school, making the tested sample unrepresentative of the whole population. [cite]

The Muslim society theory depends on the strength of single-gender classroom theory. Kane and Mertz also debunks this beloved theory on how to combat the lack of girls in math and science. Other studies have tried to debunk the single-gender classroom/school theory by pointing out that most single-gender schools have smaller classrooms. I only say “try” because some people have ignored them.

Last month my office co-sponsored a Girls and Computer Science Day for high school girls. During the lunch Q&A panel where some of our undergraduate and graduate women in CS talked about how awesome our CS department is, I chimed in. I told the girls that our quest to see more girls in CS is not merely a pro-girl movement, rather it is a movement to ensure that we have as many heads at that table as possible when solving problems our world is facing. I don’t do my job just to get girls and women into science and engineering to get the numbers up. Rather women and girls add something to the process of how science and engineering is done. It is not that women do better science, but with women at the table, science is better. Kane and Mertz sum it up pretty well in their concluding remarks:

Eliminating gender discrimination in pay and employment opportunities could be part of a win-win formula for producing an adequate supply of future workers with high-level competence in mathematics. Wealthy countries that fail to provide gender equity in employment are at risk of producing too few citizens of either gender with the skills necessary to compete successfully in a knowledge-based economy driven by science and technology.

Now that we’ve settled these questions, let’s get back in the lab and get some science done, shall we?

“Mom, I think I’d like to be a photographer,” my 10-year-old daughter, Maya, said recently.

“That would be very cool.”  Inside, I found myself thinking: I hope you can earn a living doing that.

Don’t get me wrong.  I’m a believer in the arts.  I sang in a high school show choir before Glee made that seem cool.  I worked backstage on all of my high school’s plays and minored in theatre at Muskingum College just because I loved it.

In fact, maybe because I know I have a bias toward the arts and humanities, I worry about how to correct for that.  I also know very well the barriers women face in entering the male-dominated—and lucrative—STEM fields.  I love sharing blog space with Science Grrl, Veronica Arreola, and I definitely gain insights from her posts.  I want to try to expose Maya to those potential career paths, too.

But the National Women’s Studies Association’s annual conference in Atlanta, Georgia last week gave me a new way to think about the transformative potential of the arts.

I listed to Lisa Yun Lee, the director of the Jane Addams Hull House museum, talk about why she makes efforts to support the arts with her programs.  She explained that her immigrant mother—who she knew as an accountant—had wanted to be a poet, a calling she gave up when she came to the United States.

I attended Ashley Lucas’s moving one-woman show, Doin’ Time Through the Visiting Glass, which examines the impact of incarceration on families.  Before the performance I admit I had given little thought to how prison shapes and binds those on the outside.

Lee’s remarks about her mother and Lucas’s performance reminded me that I want Maya to pursue her passions, wherever they take her.  I want her to be the photographer—or the poet—who can realize her vision and possibly make art that makes change.

As I prepare to head down to Atlanta for the National Women’s Studies Conference and the Girlw/Pen panel, I have to share with you one of my new favorite sites: Gendered Innovations.

What is Gendered Innovations?

Gendered Innovations employ sex and gender analysis as a resource to create new knowledge and technology.
The Gendered Innovations project:

1) develops methods of sex and gender analysis for scientists and engineers;
2) provides case studies as concrete illustrations of how sex and gender analysis leads to innovation.

There is a wonderful video of Londa Schiebinger explaining the project too.

What I love and greatly appreciate about this project is that it nicely explains why gender is important in science and engineering. From seat belts that project pregnant women and their fetus to heart disease researchers working with women in mind, gender plays an important part of science and engineering innovation.

This chart outlines all the points along the innovation path where sex and gender must be acknowledged in order for the outcome to be relevant and appropriate for all.

Setting Research Priorities and Making Funding Decisions? Who is valued? Is the National Institutes of Health funding research in women’s health at an appropriate level? And just becuase there is an Office of Women’s Health does not mean the funding matches the need.

Once funding is approved by Congress, does NIH set objectives that will positively impact women’s lives? For years heart disease was seen as a men’s disease and that women also had it. But women exhibit symptoms differently. We are still trying to educate women and the medical community to these differences.

There’s a laundry list of things to consider when deciding on methodologies, gather and analyzing data and evaluating the results with consideration to sex and gender. Most importantly is that fine line of setting up a research project to look for gendered differences and being able to identify those differences afterward.

And off to market we go! Will our voice activated gadgets recognize the higher pitch of women’s voices? Will the hot new drug work just as well in women as in men?

It’s not just about women either. Men are left out of research on so-called women’s diseases like osteoporosis.

For a researcher who is still learning like me, I really enjoy the terminology page. Because even the most seasoned feminist needs a quick reminder of when to use sex or gender appropriately.

Obviously I give this site a huge thumbs up. It is great for those who just want to understand what the big deal about gender in medicine/science/engineering is or for those of us who are doing or planning to do our own research into how gender impacts innovations.

I respect that some of you are anti-vaccines–or just anti-Gardasil—but I hope that some Girl with Pen readers will join me in cheering what I consider a better-late-than-never decision by the CDC’s Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices. It has officially recommended that boys and men ages 13-to-21 be vaccinated against the sexually transmitted disease HPV (human papillomavirus) to protect from anal and throat cancers.

There are many reasons this makes good sense. As I wrote in the Winter 2010 issue of Ms., there’s overwhelming evidence that HPV can lead to deadly oral, anal and penile cancers–all of which affect men and all of which are collectively responsible for twice as many deaths in the U.S. each year as cervical cancer. However, vaccines are a touchy topic, and I want to be clear that I’m not advocating in favor of or against anyone’s decision to get an HPV vaccination. I do strongly advocate for boys and girls, men and women, to have equal access to Gardasil and any other FDA-approved vaccine. Private insurers are required to cover HPV vaccines for girls and young women with no co-pay under the 2010 health reform legislation, and with this decision, that coverage requirement will extend to boys and young men, effective one year after the date of the recommendation. And, whether or not you or your loved ones get vaccinated against HPV, we will all benefit from more vaccinations, considering the extent of this sexually transmitted epidemic/pandemic, which affects as many as 75 percent of adult Americans and can be spread by skin-to-skin genital or oral contact (yes, that includes “French kissing”).

However, the media coverage of the recommendation includes a line of reasoning that I, as a sexual health educator and researcher, find offensive, ignorant, and inaccurate. The New York Times wrote: “Many of the cancers in men result from homosexual sex.” Really? What counts as “homosexual sex”? Most public health experts and HIV/AIDS researchers view “homosexuality” primarily as a sexual orientation, sometimes as a social or political identity, but not as a type of intercourse. Anyone who studies U.S. sexual norms knows that oral sex and anal sex–the behaviors cited as increasing risks of HPV-related oral and anal cancers–are not restricted to men who have sex with men. In fact, the NYT article itself asserts, “A growing body of evidence suggests that HPV also causes throat cancers in men and women as a result of oral sex” –so you don’t have to identify as a “homosexual” man to be at risk; you don’t even have to be a man.

Nevertheless, the New York Times goes on to muse that “vaccinating homosexual boys would be far more cost effective than vaccinating all boys, since the burden of disease is far higher in homosexuals.” Thankfully, the author also thought to check this idea with a member of the CDC committee, who seemed to grasp the ethical and practical challenges of making a recommendation based on a boy’s or man’s “homosexuality.” Kristen R. Ehresmann, Minnesota Department of Health and ACIP member, is quoted as cautioning, “But it’s not necessarily effective or perhaps even appropriate to be making those determinations at the 11- to 12-year-old age.”

Still stuck on the question of sexual orientation, that NYT author seeks to console potentially “uncomfortable” parents of boys by reassuring them that “vaccinating boys will also benefit female partners since cervical cancer in women results mostly from vaginal sex with infected males.” So, is the message, if you don’t want to imagine your son having oral or anal sex with a male partner, then you can focus on the public health service you are providing for girls and women who have male partners?

Instead of contributing to a homophobic panic, I thought it might be helpful to field a few frequently-asked-questions:

Q: Do you have to have a cervix to benefit from the “cervical cancer” vaccine? A: No. Despite its early branding, Gardasil has always been an HPV vaccine. Physiologically speaking, boys and men could have been benefiting from the vaccine since its initial FDA approval.

Q: Why are they recommending vaccinations for girls and boys as young as 11? A: Vaccines only work if given before contact with the virus. Reliable data on age of first “French” kiss is not available, but recent surveys show that about 25 percent of girls and boys in the U.S. have had penile-vaginal intercourse before their 15th birthdays.

Q: Are you too old to benefit? A: If you have not yet been exposed to all four of the HPV strains covered by Gardasil, then you can still gain protection. The more challenging question is: How would you know? The only ways to test for HPV (and then HPV type) is by tissue samples being sent to a lab. Most HPV infections are asymptomatic.

Q: What’s the risk of not getting vaccinated? A: We know that U.S. cervical cancer rates have dramatically decreased in recent decades due to improvements in screening, such as the Pap smear, and better treatment options. However, rates of HPV-related oral and anal cancers are reported to be increasing–and our screening options for these types of cancers are not as effective, affordable or accessible as those for cervical cancer.

Q: So, what can an unvaccinated person do to protect him/herself from a cancer-causing strain of HPV? A: Abstain from behaviors that can transmit the virus, such as deep/open-mouthed kissing, and use barrier methods when engaging in vaginal, anal or oral sex.

If this last answer strikes you as unreasonable, then mobilize your political energies to advocate for increased funding for HPV research. We need and deserve better ways to be tested and treated for the types of HPV that have been linked to serious and potentially fatal cancers. And, as my own research has shown, we have to get rid of the harmful stigma surrounding HPV and other sexually transmitted infections. We need to stop linking STDs to immorality. You can help by making sure your community supports medically accurate, age-appropriate sexuality education. And if you or a loved one wants more information about sexual health, then check out these free online resources.

(Originally posted on Ms. blog, cross-posted at AdinaNack.com)

There are many reasons why women are underrepresented in science & engineering. Some are specific to certain areas and some are systemic. When I was an undergraduate in science, as I tell my students, many moons ago, the advice I received from older women was to wait until tenure to start having kids. In the late 1990s that meant waiting until about your mid-late 30s. That did NOT sound like a good plan. Nowadays I see more graduate students and post-docs starting families. I know not an ideal time, but it coincides better with fertility.

That is why I practically screamed in my office when I read that the White House was announcing some new initiatives at the National Science Foundation to assist in this family versus career battle:

• Allow postponement of grants for child birth/adoption – Grant recipients can defer their awards for up to one year to care for their newborn or newly adopted children.
• Allow grant suspension for parental leave – Grant recipients who wish to suspend their grants to take parental leave can extend those grants by a comparable duration at no cost.
• Provide supplements to cover research technicians – Principal investigators can apply for stipends to pay research technicians or equivalent staff to maintain labs while PIs are on family leave.
• Publicize the availability of family friendly opportunities – NSF will issue announcements and revise current program solicitations to expressly promote these opportunities to eligible awardees.
• Promote family friendliness for panel reviewers – STEM researchers who review the grant proposals of their peers will have greater opportunities to conduct virtual reviews rather than travel to a central location, increasing flexibility and reducing dependent-care needs.
• Support research and evaluation – NSF will continue to encourage the submission of proposals for research that would asses the effectiveness of policies aimed at keeping women in the STEM pipeline.
• Leverage and Expand Partnerships — NSF will leverage existing relationships with academic institutions to encourage the extension of the tenure clock and allow for dual hiring opportunities.

These are some serious changes folks!

For one, as the Sylvia comic points out, women, from my own sampling, do want to use their awesomeness to help the world. What some young women struggle with is seeing how their fab science and math skills translate into working with people to solve the world’s problems. I know, I know…for some of us it is obvious. For some of us it takes time to learn how imperative it is to have empathetic and caring people in science and engineering. Not that only women are those things, but girls are raised to value emotions and relationships. But even when they can see how much of the world they can impact with their civil engineering skills, many have plans to be mothers one day.

I do not believe women are leaving science & engineering because they want to be mothers, but it may be influencing how easy it can be for them to decide to leave when they hit other challenges and roadblocks.

The no cost extension benefit will be tricky. Most, if not all, scientists and engineers have others working for them off these grants. From graduate students and post-docs to supporting department administrators (like the accounting office), all that would also be on hold.

My cynical side needs to be reminded that these are just the beginning. Hopefully if the National Science Foundation is sending this strong and clear message that women in science & engineering are valuable enough to enact these changes, that other institutions like universities will follow. Perhaps bridge funding for the graduate students who need to keep working on their experiments while the faculty member is bonding with a newborn? More on campus child care centers to allow parents to stay on campus (and in the lab) longer each day, instead of dashing out at 5 pm to make the 6 pm pick up.

These changes are a start. Not a small start either, but still a start. And a huge signal to the next generation of scientists and engineers that their human lives will be valued as much as their lives in the lab.

Is the legality of abortion in the U.S. a moot point if too few ob-gyns are willing to perform the medical procedures?  A recent post on FREAKONOMICS inspired me to find out more about a new article in the journal Obstetrics & Gynecology titled “Abortion Provision Among Practicing Obstetrician-Gynecologists.”

This group of researchers mailed surveys to practicing ob-gyns and reported on the data from 1,800 who responded. The article’s main findings are as follows: “Among practicing ob-gyns, 97% encountered patients seeking abortions, whereas 14% performed them.” Their analysis of the data revealed that male physicians were less likely to provide abortions than female physicians. Age was also a factor, with younger physicians being more likely to provide abortions.

The new article’s abstract states, “…physicians with high religious motivation were less likely to provide abortions.” I wonder if the large numbers of ob-gyns who do not provide abortions speaks to moral judgments that this medical procedure is a sin. So, the legality of abortion may be rendered pointless by physicians who may be making decisions based on religious doctrine? Access to abortion remains limited by the willingness of physicians to provide abortion services, particularly in rural communities and in the South and Midwest.” Does a woman’s geographic location doom her to restrictions on her ability to obtain a medical procedure that is protected by law?

During my study of women and men living with genital herpes and HPV/genital warts infections, I coined the term moral surveillance practitioner to describe the doctor-patient interaction style of health care providers who conveyed a sense of disapproval, judgment, condemnation, and even disgust to their patients who had sought their sexual health services.  In the case of STDs, these practitioners tended to blame their patients for having contracted a medically incurable infection because of their own “bad” and sinful sexual behaviors.

It would be interesting to see if a companion study to the newly published one, perhaps a qualitative interview study, would reveal a more nuanced understanding of the attitudes and values that ob-gyns hold about their female patients who seek abortion services.  With women’s physical and/or mental health often hanging in the balance of the ability to receive a legal abortion, we deserve to know more about the large number of ob-gyns whose moral opinion may be taking precedence over their ethical obligation to, in the words of the Hippocratic Oath, “First, do no harm”…in this case, to do no harm to their female patients who may be harmed by not having a medically safe, legal abortion.

__________

Note: If you’re curious about physicians’ insights and experiences in providing (or not providing) abortion care, then check out two recent books: Carole Joffe’s Dispatches from the Abortion Wars: The Costs of Fanaticism to Doctors, Patients, and the Rest of Us and Lori Freedman’s Willing and Unable: Doctors Constraints in Abortion Care. And, for more of the latest research on reproductive health care and policy, explore the work of UC San Francisco’s reproductive health think tank ANSIRH.

It always feels awesome when something I shared on Twitter is retweeted so many times, my phone starts to chirp. That is what happened on Tuesday when I heard the news that the winners of this year’s Google Science Fair were all girls.

This year’s Google Science Fair winners are all girls! http://bit.ly/ojt2zM #stem

Comments on the retweets included “Woohoo! Get it, girls!” “This news makes me so happy,” Who runs the world…,” “That’s awesome!” and “Hooray!” Were these tweets from anti-boy feminists? Heck no! But I get asked that question, either indirectly or directly, when I cheer on a headline about girls running the table at a competition. Spelling bee, chess, science fair, mathlete, and so on.

I am sensitive to how the cheering looks. Believe me, I do. I went through a very long and deep “Girls Rule, Boys Drool” phase. It wasn’t until I was a mom and raising my daughter that I was smacked in the face with the complexity of raising a pro-girl girl without making it sound like we were being anti-boy.

I am also aware that the tide is changing. Women are going to college more then men (that’s been happening since at least the 1990s) and girls are the majority of high school valedictorians. I get it. And yes, more women are heading into science, especially the fields the girls did their experiments in (chemistry, medicine, environmental science, biochemistry). But that does not mean we can’t jump up and cheer when we see three brilliant young women win like this.

This is why. Even for someone who has a degree in biological sciences, sees the progress on a daily basis, and watches first hand young women evolve into promising researchers, the “Girls don’t do science” taunts just never seem to fully go away. For some of the women in my life who were talked out of science, told they can’t do math or all the above, headlines like this are validation that their third grade teacher was wrong, wrong, WRONG! And yes, for some of us, it is also just plain and simple celebrating that 39 years after Title IX, a mere two generations, we are witnessing what it truly an exhibit of girl power. Three young women unafraid of their brain power holding some pretty kick ass LEGO trophies.

In the end, no matter how far we have come, women and girls in science still have a long way to go until we get to not just parity in numbers, but parity in leadership roles, paid fairly and so on. Until we get to that utopia called “parity” I’ll be cheering on all our victories, large and small.

There are rare moments when I read an article or listen to a recording and can’t form words to respond. Today is one of those moments and it is because you really should just listen to this recording for yourself. It’s that perfect.

The NYTimes invited four women who are at the top of their respective fields of science in for a roundtable discussion. They shared their thoughts about:

Differences between men and women in science:

TAL RABIN: Even when we do make it to the conferences, I think that there is still something different about the way that we promote ourselves.

I remember standing next to one of my co-authors, and he was talking to some other guy, and he was telling him, “I have this amazing result. I just did this, I just did that.” And I was sitting and thinking there, what result is he talking about? Until he got to the punch line. It was a joint result. It was a result of mine also. I would have never spoken about my result in the superlatives that the guy was speaking about it.

MS. KOLATA: What would you have done?

DR. RABIN: I would have said, you know, “I have this very interesting result, and we achieved very nice things.” But not “This is the best thing since we invented the wheel, and here it is.”

Having a family:

MS. KOLATA: It must be exciting for your children to grow up with a mother who has such passion for what she does.

DR. APRILE: It depends on the child. The second of my daughters used to say, “Mommy, why can’t we have dinner at 6 p.m. like everybody else?” They finally accepted these crazy hours that I had to live with.

Asking where the women are going:

DR. KING: I think the choke point is going from a postdoc to an assistant professorship to a tenure-track position. In my experience the largest remaining obstacle is how to integrate family life with the life of a scientist.

What they would say to their daughter about going into science:

DR. RABIN: The truth is that I feel differently. I think that the life of a scientist is a fantastic life. I think it is exciting because every day there is something new that you can go and think of. There are challenges, no doubt, and the times when you can’t solve things. So I think it is all a wonderful life. And not to mention even things like time flexibility, traveling around the world, meeting a lot of exciting people. I think that these are fantastic jobs.

This is the type of conversation I would have KILLED for as an undergraduate. The one faculty member I tried to have this conversation with rebuffed me. She was pretty old school, couldn’t go to Harvard with the men and it took me awhile to figure out why she wouldn’t address the gender issue. I don’t blame her either. When you build up a defense mechanism, it is hard to let it go.

What I love about the conversation are the differing opinions. As I tell my students, there are no firm answers. You gather up all the data you can and make the best decision you can. From this conversation, one can see that difference decisions all lead to some awesome science making.