This month’s Careers feature ("Are Women Better PIs?") opens with a story from Sue Rosser, author of the recently published Women, Science, and Myth: Gender Beliefs from Antiquity to the Present. In 1973, as a postdoc in zoology at the University of Wisconsin and pregnant with her second child, she was advised by her PI to get an abortion. She didn’t. That same year, I made my way to forestry school at Northern Arizona University. I was told that women couldn’t be forest rangers, and urged to find another course of study. I did.
This was just before the flowering of “women’s lib”; a year or two later, it’s unlikely that such politically incorrect statements would be vocalized. Yet 5 years later, when I entered graduate school as a budding soil microbiologist, in a large lab with 20-some grad students and postdocs, there was only one other woman colleague. My ...
