I've been catching up on my Google reader in between experiments since while I was gone I had limited Internet access. If you haven't been reading it, Dr. Isis's Letters to our Daughters project has had some great stuff.
The latest letter, from Dr. Hannah Jang-Condell got me thinking. Dr. Jang-Condell talks about her decision to have children in graduate school and the support she found in her department. It's a good letter, you can go check it out at Dr. Isis's if you're interested.
Anyway, as I said, this letter in particular made me realize that of the female faculty members that I know in my department, none of them have kids. In fact, when I went to look up how many female faculty we have in the entire department I realized that only 14% of our faculty are female, whereas 42% of our lecturers are women. Still, that means that only 21% of faculty and lecturers (PhD positions) in entire department at my major university are women. Wow. Of these 7 women faculty members, I know 3 quite well, 1 in passing and I've never met 3 of them. 4 of them are recent hires (past 5 years). Those statistics are pretty damning.
I don't have numbers on the graduate students, my group is currently 60% women (not counting undergrads), the lab next to us is 50% women, and across the hall they're also 50% women, I know of one group that's only women, but I can't think of any that are only male. There's all sorts of talk about leaky pipelines and what not, and we discussed this at my conference last week too. One woman said, matter-of-factly, "well the women all have babies". I bristled immediately at that response because the implication is that it's either family or career. At my undergraduate liberal arts college many of the female faculty members had children, but here I can't think of any who do - that is other than the lecturers. It's an interesting problem, and I don't have an answer. I couldn't imagine having children in graduate school, and I don't know of any women students in my department who have made that decision. I know my boss would frown upon it, but now it seems that maybe the whole department would too. Not that I'm considering it, but it's an depressing thought.
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- Mrs. Chemist
- I'm a married chemistry graduate student, taking it one day at a time and hoping to learn something new while I'm at it.
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1 comments:
A while ago I counted up the female/male lecturers in our department, and it also resulted in some sad statistics...
Of a faculty of 25 members (who are actively lecturing and have their own research groups), there are five women. Two of them have only been appointed in the last two years. There is also two other women with PhD's, but they are in essentially administrative roles. Of those women, two have children. One of whom is head of a disipline, pulls in alot of funding and has a large research group. Two days after giving birth to her most recent child, she was back in her office to mark exam papers. Her maternity leave was non-existent.
Of the postgrads in the department, I would estimate we are easily 60% female. The numbers probably edge closer to 50% female/male for postdocs.
So where do all the women end up indeed?
After investing all this time I certainly don't want to step out of the game for too many years to rear childrean. A few years is a lifetime in science. Is that what is happening?
:(
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