Dr. Mom

When toxicologist linkurl:Rebecca Efroymson;http://www.esd.ornl.gov/people/efroymson/index.html flew to Washington D.C. to defend a grant proposal before a federal agency, she lacked child care options and was forced to bring along her sick toddler. On the day of her presentation, she left her feverish, screaming son in a hotel room in the care of his grandparents, who had taken a train down from Philadelphia to babysit. Fatigued by lack of sleep, Efroymson admits that she did not give her best presentation, and her grant was not funded. "This was the first time that my split life might really have impacted my work and the viability of my job," she writes.The "split life" between work and child rearing is one familiar to millions of working parents. For linkurl:women,;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/54852/ balancing work and family can present particularly difficult challenges in the highly competitive, often male-dominated world of research science. Efroymson's story is one of many told in a timely new book, linkurl:__Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out__.;http://www.amazon.com/Motherhood-Elephant-Laboratory-Women-Scientists/dp/0801446643

Editor linkurl:Emily Monosson;http://www.eoearth.org/contributor/emily.monosson has collected the voices and personal stories of 34 linkurl:mother-scientists;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/16673/ working in various fields. In eloquent and often witty essays, these women directly address the challenges of being mothers in the scientific workforce.Contributors to this volume include biologists, physicists, geologists, and oceanographers. They are professors, writers, independent consultants, science policy experts, teachers, and government researchers. For those who fear that motherhood is incompatible with traditional scientific research careers, this book offers some stunning examples to the contrary. An atmospheric chemist writes of raising five children as she works and rises to a position of leadership at NASA. An astronomer raises four children, each born only eighteen months apart, as she first achieves tenure at the government Space Telescope Science Institute, then takes on a faculty position at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Other women seek non-traditional careers in a quest for balance, and forge new paths for themselves. The editor of the anthology, Monosson, is a prime example: trained as a toxicologist with a Ph.D from Cornell, she has established a career as an independent consultant, researcher, and writer.The diversity of career paths described by Motherhood's essayists is impressive and eye-opening. These women demonstrate that there are number of different ways of balancing work and family life. Even for those who eventually end up in traditional careers, the road may be circuitous. Some of the women in these pages drop out of the workforce for a few years while their children are young, or work part-time. Many have setbacks, and make career compromises for a spouse's or their children's sakes. Some eventually return to the lab and tenure-track careers; testament that these traditional careers - often thought of as rigid, unyielding pathways - may have more flexibility than we have been led to believe. Indeed, the fluidity of scientific careers - the shifts between home life, academia, industry, government, and back again - becomes a major theme.It is not all sunshine and success, of course. Many of these women also write movingly of the sacrifices they have made. Full professors admit wistfully that they wish they had been able to spend more time with their growing young children. Meanwhile, some of those who deviated from traditional research tracks report a twinge when they envision the scientific careers they might have had. These pages also reveal that discrimination is alive and well in the twenty-first century. In one harrowing chapter, linkurl:Gina Wesley-Hunt,;http://insidemc.montgomerycollege.edu/showStory.php?id=2699 an evolutionary biologist, tells of how she was fired in 2006 from a postdoctoral position at an unnamed institution. The reason for her dismissal? She was fired for being linkurl:pregnant.;http://www.the-scientist.com/article/display/14237/ As she learned to her shock: "The equal opportunity office and office overseeing interns and postdocs told me there was no policy that protected me. It was entirely up to my PI, and I was on my own." Essays in the book are arranged chronologically, according to the date by which the writer's PhD was conferred. The book opens with scientists who received their PhDs in the 1970s, and marches onward through the 80s and 90s, ending with the voices of women who are in graduate school today. In this way, the book tracks the sweeping social changes of the past thirty years. Despite the great influx of women into science careers over the last decade, it is sobering to read that conflicts between work and family have not changed. Indeed, some of the essays in the last section read as though they could have been written decades ago.Monosson provides social and historical context in her introduction, and to each section of the book. She notes that in the 1970s, women earned only 17% of the doctorates awarded in science and engineering. Today the figure is around 45%. However, women continue to be underrepresented in the highest tiers of scientific employment, and are more likely than men to work part-time or to leave science altogether. Monosson closely examines this phenomenon, dubbed linkurl:"the leaky pipeline.";http://www.the-scientist.com/2008/1/1/67/1/ She discusses the growing body of evidence which points to the demands of motherhood as a major cause of the leaky pipeline, citing the linkurl:work;http://ucfamilyedge.berkeley.edu/marriagebabyblues.pdf of linkurl:Mary Ann Mason;http://www.grad.berkeley.edu/deans/mason/ and linkurl:Marc Goulden,;http://facultyequity.chance.berkeley.edu/about/leadership.html#goulden among others, who found that women academics who have babies at early stages of their careers are less likely than childless women to achieve tenure. As early as the 1970s, Monosson notes, there were published calls for more family-friendly and flexible career structures in the sciences. These calls have been repeated in each succeeding decade.It is often said that motherhood is not for the faint of heart. The same could be said for a career in science. The debate over what causes the leaky pipeline, and remedies to address it, rages on. The pace of institutional and cultural change can seem glacial. In the mean-time, scientists who are also mothers can find support by sharing their stories with one another. Monosson's book provides a valuable medium for doing so. As one woman writes in the opening pages of Motherhood: "In the final analysis, every woman finds her own way. It's just good to know that none of us is alone."linkurl:____Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out__.;http://www.cornellpress.cornell.edu/cup_detail.taf?ti_id=4821 Emily Monosson (Editor). Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2008. 232 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8014-4664-1. $25.00.____Vanessa Fogg is a freelance scientific writer and editor based in Grand Rapids, Michigan. She holds a Ph.D in molecular cell biology from Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a mother.____Emily Monosson has established an accompanying website and online community to discuss issues of motherhood in science, which can be found at linkurl:http://sciencemoms.wordpress.com/;http://sciencemoms.wordpress.com/__

Dr. Mom

The Scientist ARCHIVES

Become a Member of

Meet the Author

Vanessa Fogg

Related Research Resources

Study Confirms Safety of Genetically Modified T Cells

Research Resources

Podcasts

Webinars

Videos

Infographics

eBooks

TaqMan Probe & Assays: Unveil What's Possible Together

Meet Aunty and Tackle Protein Stability Questions in Research and Development

Detecting Residual Cell Line-Derived DNA with Droplet Digital PCR

Making Real-Time PCR More Straightforward

Products

Product News

Biotium Launches New Phalloidin Conjugates with Extended F-actin Staining Stability for Greater Imaging Flexibility

Latest AI software simplifies image analysis and speeds up insights for scientists

BioSkryb Genomics and Tecan introduce a single-cell multiomics workflow for sequencing-ready libraries in under ten hours

Agilent BioTek Cytation C10 Confocal Imaging Reader