Supporting professional women scientists
Deborah Yoder-Himes
Monday, 06 July 2009 18:23 UTC
About two years ago, I attended an international meeting for my field of study in which thousands of microbiologists flooded to Toronto, CA. At this meeting, my husband and I went to a workshop about how to balance a family life and academia which was led by a respected tenured professor at a major research institution. The discussion quickly led to whether sucessfully raising children and obtaining tenure could ever co-exist or if the academic system was still too stacked against women with families. In the midst of this, I posed the question, “How can we actively support women scientists if we ourselves do not have tenure yet?” to the speaker. Her response was that we couldn’t or shouldn’t “rock the boat” until we get tenure ourselves. However, this response left me feeling hollow. Afterwards, I thought of some options such as inviting assistant professors to give talks at our institution, actively searching out new collaborators, and being solid mentors to women in our labs.
My question is this. Can others think of additional ways to support women scientists in their careers even if we are not in a ideal position? I hope to find an academic position in the next few years and would like some input as to the steps I can take now and when I take a position to support my fellow scientists.
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And this was a woman speaker who said this? I’m quite shocked. When I was a young scientist, I was certainly inspired by other women around me who seemed to be enjoying their work either running a lab or working in one in one role or another. I think being among other people like you, who are managing to deal with the dreaded work-life balance and seeming to be having fun and striving to get good results, really helps.
I think that inviting women to speak in seminars is particularly beneficial – and if any of them have a particular interest in encouraging younger women, passing on tips, etc (as I remember eminent scientists doing when I was young – even Dorothy Hodgkin on one occasion!) then they can have a post-“official” seminar session on those topics. Of course not all women are interested in doing this, and nor should they be. But if they are, then that is great.
In my career at Nature I have also been struck by how some important male scientists have helped to promote women colleagues, eg by recommending them as News and Views authors, peer-reviewers, etc. I think that if men feel they can help, many of them will.
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Yes, a woman scientist who had got tenure about 7-10 years prior to speaking with us. I am glad to hear you’re shocked as I was quite shocked too. When I looked disturbed by her response, the moderator (another woman scientist) of the session stepped in and agreed with the speaker.
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As a post-doc I’m not really in a position to do much to help other people, in terms of recommending them for anything, but I think we can all do something to support the women around us.
Female PhD students often suffer from a lack of confidence compared to their male counterparts and post-docs can at least talk to them and encourage them. Post PhD the number of women already starts to be reduced.
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There’s an interesting new report out by Rebecca Smith (Biochemical Society) and Sarah Dickinson (Royal Society of Chemistry) called Shaping career paths in science
. It asks whether the doctoral study experience different for male and female chemistry and molecular bioscience PhD students. I thought it might be relevant here… -
Thanks Ruth. This article has an interesting statistic.
“…although biosciences has one of the highest proportions of female undergraduate students at around 60%, and around half of undergraduates in chemistry are female, at professorial level the proportions of women are much lower; 13% for biosciences and 6% for chemistry.”
This is very interesting and quite telling. I particularly like how losing 80-90% of your female PhDs constitutes a pipeline that is only “leaky” and not something more strongly worded like “broken”.
“The qualitative study identified a number of issues that arose during the PhD and that affected a larger proportion of women than men. These included supervision issues such as suffering little pastoral care and having to cope with a supervisor who lacks interpersonal/management skills; a lack of integration into research groups leading to feelings of isolation and exclusion; being uncomfortable with the culture of their research group especially where the culture was particularly ‘macho’; concern about poor (though normal) experimental success rates, apprehension about what others may infer about their skills and competence.
Considering these points a little further, male chemistry students view the frustrations and pressure of research as an initiation, which will result in their acceptance into the scientific community. By contrast, female chemistry students see these as an ordeal and become anxious that the poor success rates in their experiments reflect badly on them personally…”In this case, it seems like, on average, the women suffer from more personal insecurity so bolstering confidence in female graduate students is invaluable.
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Very interesting topic!
As a PhD student nearing the end of my thesis I recognize much of what is stated in the report, especially about feeling like a failure because of failed experiments. My impression is that I feel this way to a larger extent than my male lab-mates, although I know that I am actually quite good at what I do. I have been wondering about why this should be, and one thing that came to mind is the “good school-girl” thing that many of us are used to. I don’t know about everywhere, but at least in Sweden where I am from, girls tend to get much better grades in school than boys. Still, boys tend to climb the ladder higher and faster when it comes to making a career. I was thinking that maybe girls are in a way getting used to the gratifying “quick fix” of studying for an exam and getting a good grade – fast feedback, and you move on feeling good about it. Maybe our self-confidence relies too much on this feedback? Science poses a completely different sort of challenge and you need a lot more endurance and a lot more confidence to put up with all the failures and too keep on trying. But this is just an observation – I have no idea how to solve the problem, except for keeping on trying to boost our self-confidence. Encouraging girls to stop studying for school exams is hardly the way… -
Hmm, in my experience it’s not that women (and minorities) lack confidence but that others lack confidence in them. It’s an interesting report (shaping career paths in science) that seems to describe the consequence of discrimination. It only appears to be the people who are interested in eliminating discrimination that attend equality workshops and read relevant literature. So perhaps in order for equality to succeed those that promote it should be rewarded in some way (not punished in any case). This may encourage a greater spectrum of people to become involved in equal opportunity. I feel that women and minorities do not have a lack of confidence in their own abilities but in their social positions within their working environment. Perhaps they should be given more support in the workplace not just by those with seniority but by those around them, including work colleagues, students and technical staff.
The question that Deborah raised initially was how to support women scientists, one solution could be to include them in your research in someway so that they can increase their profile. This may be through conducting an experiment or through editing a paper. Also, this probably goes without saying, if a female scientist assists in any work that is published make sure that she is an author in the paper or poster and not just mentioned in the acknowledgments.
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Suzanne Hmm, in my experience it’s not that women (and minorities) lack confidence but that others lack confidence in them
I think that both are true, that women suffer from a lack of confidence but that others lack confidence in them also.
When I talk to other women in science many have had doubts about whether they are really good enough…I don’t know many men who have worried about this, although of course it may be that they just don’t vocalize their doubts as readily as women! I imagine that expressing doubts about your own ability makes others doubt you too but I think as Anna said that women often have a greater need for feedback and reassurance, and that this is what leads them to openly admit that they have doubts. This is anecdotal of course.
On a more scientific note there was a study (sorry I don’t have the details to hand) in which they asked people to evaluate their own skill level and then conducted an objective assessment of the skill. Men tended to overestimate their ability and women tended to underestimate theirs.
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I agree with a lot of the ideas written in these replies. Though I’m not presently working for others, my personal discoveries demand a lot of courage to step into new ideas about life without expecting others to support my ideas and experience. To go where no human has gone before takes a lot of self-confidence and a desire to evolve. I also need to be prepared to not apologize for my intellectual gifts, no matter how much I force people to have to rediscover “life” by using them. Supporting women scientists sometimes demands we first learn to support ourselves. This I have found to be true.
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Thanks to the wonderful support of our equality department I have the reference to the study I mentioned.
Gender differences among physician-scientists in self-assessed abilities to perform clinical research..
Bakken LL, Sheridan J, Carnes M.
Acad Med. 2003 Dec;78(12):1281-6.This of course is not necessarily a way to support other women if we are not in an ideal position ourselves, but maybe one thing we can all do is try to campaign for mentoring and other schemes that help women to over come issues such as this. As Colleen says the first thing we must do is try to believe in ourselves.
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