There is a lot to discuss on the topic of gender equality in the sciences.  Hopefully, people will talk about their own experiences here and/or we can brainstorm about how we can resolve the current issues.

just a thought..is it a question of gender equality or gender based discrimination?

It is bedtime for me.  I will respond to any new comments in the morning.  I hope more people are willing to join in the conversation then.

In Canada, the pre-tenure position is extended for women who choose to conceive.  This is not true here.  Young women faculty here have to choose tenure or children but rarely both.

Well, it's not universally true.  My advisor had her tenure clock paused while she had kids...and this is a top 5 school.

But I absolutely feel sympathy for what you're saying overall.  The fact that my advisor had her tenure clock paused is a rarity when it should be the norm.

Larry Summers' comments about women in science were shocking, but not nearly as shocking to me as the amount of people who rallied behind him (like Pinker especially).  It's a pernicious attitude that isn't going away any time soon  :-/

Hmmm.

Based on my own classes and such, I think you'll find that there are very few women in physics [its a pretty male dominated field], and maybe more women than men in biological sciences- while it seems chemistry, seems to be a fair better at having more diversity.

my research group is actually more dominated by women, we only had 1 guy in my research group. And most of the women in my research group were biologists.[i was the only chemist]

maybe Ill ask around and see what other peoples research groups look like-

The first clear step is to give girls in primary school equal footing at the beginning.

[by the way, just curious, what university are you at?]

To what extent do you think the subject itself matters?  I would think to the extent that someone's work can speak for itself, and the harder the science the more likely that is, the more easily correctable gender inequality might be.  But that may be too simplistic.

In your summary you wrote:

The women who are here sometimes are not well integrated into the greater community.

Earlier you wrote:

There are also groups in our department with the opposite problem.  They are predominantly female and few men join because the persona of the group has been set.

What is going on here, do you think? Few men are joining these "female persona" groups because men in general prefer working with other men, and/or because there is some sort of stigma attached to a group that is currently predominately female?  And is the psychology the same in the other direction?

I'm thinking about how the word "nurse" in the past always brought to mind the image of a woman, and "doctor/physician" a man.  Those fields seem much more integrated nowadays.  Does anyone know if gender bias issues in medical academia today is better or worse or about the same, compared to other sciences? And if it's better, does that field have some particular lessons that could be learned/applied by other disciplines?

and it made me thankful of my current situation as i am currently on paid maternity leave from my job for 1 year.  i believe that in the US its 3 months?

it makes a big difference.

anyway - highly rec'd.

Actually what you say about tenure deferral is not true of all universities.  There are a number of universities throughout the United States that do offer such deferrals for both men and women who have newborn children.  I know as a friend of mine applied for one and received it.  Nonetheless, both men and women with young children are at a tremendous disadvantage in the tenure system.  People think that college professors sit around doing nothing because they generally only teach two or three classes a semester.  What they don't realize is that between research and publication we are generally working 80 hours a week.  This is especially true at the pre-tenure phase of one's career, and I suspect is even worse for people in the humanities who do far more writing and presenting.  You really give up your life when joining academia.

It has been a while since I was a Grad Student/Post Doc, but things were not that different back then from what you described.

Some groups had a lot of men, some groups had a lot of women.  Groups that had a lot of men generally had a lot of trouble recruiting women.  We talked about this (ours was a very small school, so we were forced to talk), and decided that the underlying reasons was not gender discrimination (well, it was .. because gender discrimination means making a distinction based on sex, but it was not gender discrimination in the bad sense).

Rather, it was that even within the sciences and engineering fields, women like certain areas... and flocked to those areas, while men liked a different set of areas... and flocked to those areas.

talk about the finer points.  In my own short life I have seen us go from "the first female in XYZ science class" to "a man to woman ratio of around 3/2".  40% is certainly an improvement over 0.001%...

You touch on a point that was well discussed in Redstocking's "Can a Feminist be a Mysogynist?" diary.  One of the things that we need to understand if we are going to erode the remaining discriminatory walls is that not only is anyone capable of doing anything (such as girls doing science), but that everyone is capable of being discriminatory.  Significant sexism may have been a primarily male trait when I was born, but today it may be fair to say that women are equal in that regard, for better or worse.  

I venture to suggest that women may have surpassed men in many areas of gender discrimination, and that it is today easier for a female to join a "male group" than for a male to join a "female group".  I have never or almost never (can't think of one) heard anyone say "what is she doing here?" when a female is in an otherwise male group I've been part of, but having often been the only male in a group I've had lots of jokes or outright (and rarely rebutted) derision directed at me from women in those groups.

But I know we can move past all of that, and that these things are not unexpected artifacts of our self-correcting system.

What will be interesting as the pedulum's swing dampens is if we will see - and be able to rationally discuss - any real statistical gender-demographic differences.  Our co-mammals display a consistent significant gender difference, and while our cognitive abilities allow us to develop beyond those things we are nonetheless not far removed from our pre-human past (about 20,000 generations, or in other words you could fit all of your mother's mothers in a small stadium).  An interesting SciAm article in the last year or two argues that the explicit division of social roles in early homo sapiens was a key factor in out-competing with homo-neaderthalis.

We have three kids, who show us both the inherent differences and the blurring between them.  Damien has always had strong interest in technical stuff, but loves art and is perhaps the most empathetic person I know.  Roxanne is a broad-spectrum genius for whom maths are no more a challenge than anything else and who has to know how every single thing works.  Christine is a compulsive creative artist, as girly as the day is long, and will only pay attention to learning anything but art inasmuch as I can show her how it is a creative exercise.  All of these traits we can trace back to their newborn attitudes, so while Nurture may be an inextricable factor, there seems little doubt that Nature played a hand as well.

More rambling, I'm afraid, and as likely as not to earn me a righteous flaming.  It is a bigger topic than it used to be (when the main point was "women should be allowed to vote!"), though, and that in itself is a good thing.

-chris

I am a female PhD student in the Biological/Medical sciences.  My mother is a scientist and a professor.  She completed her PhD in the early seventies and has had an extremely successful research career.

One of the things I've noted is that every female scientist from her generation seems to have a story about the colleague who tried to steal her work when she was a young scientist.  I can't tell if this speaks to a history of scientists taking advantage of their female colleagues, younger colleagues, or just taking advantage of their colleagues in general.

I'm in an area of research that is moving towards being dominated by women. Female students outnumber male students, and I imagine that in 10 years, there will be more female faculty than male  faculty in my department.  The university is slowly implementing tenure policies and other policies that favor scientists with families.

I'm very interested to observe changes in the sciences over the next few decades.  I predict that we will see many more women going into computer-related fields in the next decade, and this will change the field over time.

Grad school is really a difficult environment to get a handle on what drives people.  You mention a colleague that won't ask questions because she fears being labeled a dumb girl.  I believe this person exists and that she may have said that.  She may even honestly feel this way.  

But science is full to the gills with people who won't ask questions for fear of looking stupid.  A friend and colleague of mine in graduate school was seemingly fearless in this regard and he always seemed to ask the obvious questions that the rest of us wanted to ask, but it seemed too simplistic.  He added a great deal to most discussions and really helped me (a male) break out of this poker face most scientists put on.

There is an expectation in science that we know all the answers.  A lot of it is bluster and facade.  We are highly trained and most of us are quite intelligent, but it isn't reasonable to expect all of us to have our bases covered in all of the fields we encounter.

So I guess I'm saying your colleague may have been reluctant to ask questions just because all of us are reluctant to ask questions.  It's unfortunate that she brings a gender-based perspective to it, but that's hardly the fault of the modern scientific culture.

Thanks for the great diary.

congratulations, CaChemist.  you discovered the grad student contigent at mydd.  it's pretty sizable, as it turns out.

The other diary, which you refused to comment in and didn't even link to, mentioned the fascinating example of (Barbara?) Barnes, who was in science in academia, and underwent a sex change to become (Ben?) Barnes. Ben noticed a stark difference being a man. He was interrupted less frequently and one colleague even said "He is much smarter than his sister Barbara."

Thanks for the diary. I was curious about your experiences after seeing your post in the other diary, so I'm glad you followed up on it so the rest of us can hear about them.

I'm curious: Why don't FMLA and ADA apply to graduate school? I'm not sure why graduate students wouldn't have the same protections that other working women in this country have when they have children. It's hard to believe that the pre-tenure time period isn't extended for medical disability.

American women have fairly limited job protection and disability pay to have children compared to other countries, but plenty of women in plenty of fields manage to do it, so I'm not sure why this would affect graduate students more than women in general.