Career, interrupted.

I just received notification that my grant application hasn’t been funded. I am getting used to rejection, and I somewhat expected it. It isn’t the rejection that is upsetting me so much as the reasons why. The reviewers were pretty positive; there were a few minor issues with the proposed research, but they thought that I had come up with a good collaborative project that would establish me as a leader in the field. They praised my PI, they praised the fact that I had reached out to other members of our university, they praised the potential impact of the research. Blah blah blah. The major concern they had was that, although I was very productive in my previous research career I had not, as of yet, published a paper as a post-doc, and that my non-productivity might be a warning flag as to the feasibility of my actually completing the proposed research.

Unproductive? Let me ask you this… where, on my CV, can I put that I got pregnant and gave birth… twice?

The powers that be in the scientific community have recently incorporated a ‘time-out’ waiver into the climb up the faculty ladder, so that women who have had children will not get penalized for a seeming ‘lack of productivity’.

This is good. Except… that means you have to wait until you actually have secured a faculty position to have children. Only… most every female I know doesn’t want to wait that long… and they don’t. They start having children as a postdoc, as I did. So where is my ‘time-out’?

Maybe the lesson here is that I made the wrong choice. I shouldn’t have tried to do it all. I should have stopped working for a while. I didn’t, thinking that it would be the wiser move to keep going, even if at a crawl instead of at a run. Only, now everyone else is approaching the finish line while I am still at the starting gate. Can I ever catch up?

3 comments:

Becky said...

You can catch up....didn't you just get a paper accepted? If your score was close, then contact the program officer with the update about your recently published paper! Why didn't your advisor bring it up in his letter? The NIH does have a funding mechanism for women who took time off to have kids, but they really took time off instead of continuing to work as you and I did. I know where you are coming from...three years into my postdoc with the first papers only now on the horizon.

Lisa said...

That sucks. It seems that it's an antiquated system if it doesn't recognize women in the field who do things like have babies....

Anonymous said...

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