Women’s contribution to science goes unheard

There shouldn't be symposium speaker line ups that look like this one from 1934, in 2013, but for many complicated reasons, there sill are.

The 9th Aircraft Engineering Research Conference, 1934. NASA

I posted for The Conversation UK on a recent article in the Journal of Evolutionary Biology. In a nutshell we showed that high quality science led by female academics is under-represented in comparison to that of their male counterparts and that this may have to do with men accepting more speaking invitations than women.

Why is this the case? We don't know, but it is important to discuss it.
http://theconversation.com/womens-contribution-to-science-goes-unheard-15532. 

Also check out the excellent comment stream on Athene Donald's blog
http://occamstypewriter.org/athenedonald/2013/06/24/all-male-invited-speakers-its-complicated/

The bigger picture is important: If this dearth of female voices in conferences harms women’s advancement within academia, then society as a whole is also losing some of its best scientists.

No "Homer Simpson Effect" among high achievers

Life is crazy busy.  Talks to prepare, job applications to prepare, lab work to do, kids got stomach flu - whew! 

So just a short note referring you to a nice trio of letters examining how male and female scientists self-rate their expertise.  It seems that there is no difference among high achieving tropical ecologists.  But I tend to agree with Dugale et al. that the outcome might have been different had males and females at earlier career stages been sampled.  

Gender differences in science: no support for the ‘Homer Simpson Effect’ among tropical researchers

Biased sampling: no ‘Homer Simpson Effect’ among high achievers

Homing in on the ‘Homer Simpson Effect’: reply to Dugdale et al

Academic Women Sans Babies

I must embarrassingly admit that I haven’t gotten a huge response to my query about people's responses to the NY Times article about four women scientists at the top of their fields.  However, I have talked with several women about this and there seem to be differences in the responses between women with and without children.  I’m still hoping for some more comments, so I’ll leave that for now, except to say that you can still drop a comment (and get your friends to do so too). 

 

Image: renjith krishnan / FreeDigitalPhotos.net

Now to switch gears.  I am guilty of including the topic of children and motherhood in most of my thinking and blogging about women in science.  However, I am aware that there are many women in science who do not have kids (for many reasons, one of which is that they do not want kids).  These women also struggle to stay in the game.  This highlights the fact that women face barriers irrespective of their reproductive status.  Furthermore, for women in science without kids these barriers might be even higher. Men with kids are revered for being super dads and super scientists.  Women with kids are admired for managing to “have it all”.  Both men and women with kids can play the “baby card” when they are exhausted or burnt out.  However, women without kids also get exhausted, have bad days, run into prejudice, but they have no card to play, they must be super scientists, made of titanium, all the time. 

On that note: I recently came across a great blog post, tied to a great survey, that assembled a panel of women academics to answer questions on life in academia without mentioning kids or motherhood.

Enjoy!