To some extent our gender will always affect our work; that isn't sexism, that is life. My husband didn't have to carry around 30 extra pounds, run to the bathroom every hour, or modify his work practices to avoid exposure of our unborn baby to hazardous chemicals or radioactive substances. He didn't have to write detailed to-do lists at the end of every day just in case he went into labor that night, and he didn't have to stay out of work for 6 weeks after finally giving birth. He didn't have to drive to work exhausted after being woken three times during the night to breastfeed an infant, and then stop what he was doing twice a day to go pump. As much as we might not want them to, these things do impact your career. And that, right there, is the problem; not that they impact your career, but that we don't accept that they will.

The fact is, when I was a technician and then a graduate student, there were very few women in tenure track faculty positions at my university. As a technician, I worked for the only female faculty member in the whole department. The whole OB/GYN department! While I was there she was undergoing all sorts of hormone treatments in an ultimately futile attempt to get pregnant- she had put it off until it was too late. Later, as a graduate student in a different department, things were a little bit better. There was not one, but two female faculty. Neither of them had children.

All of the married men did.

However, in my class, in my department, there were only female students. In our program as a whole, the majority were female. That is a trend that has continued. My graduate lab had a male PI… and the rest of us were female. My current post-doc lab finds itself in the same situation. In a way, that is hopeful; so many women being trained, some of them must succeed. The problem is this: the reason there were no men was because they all went out and got jobs.

The women, though equally talented, had more to worry about: their spouse's career; the extra time it took to have children; geographical limitations. It's nice to say "don't let these things impact your career choices" but the reality is that they do. I'm sure I would have a faculty job right now, maybe not at Major Research University, but certainly at Small Liberal Arts College… if I was willing to move. But I'm not. And I still have to reassure myself that That is OK. I am driven; I do long for success; I applaud those who have achieved it; but don't denigrate me for the sacrifices I chose to make. Because it is a sacrifice.

The hardest thing about it is not looking at it as a failure. It's not that I have failed to get a job… it is that I have succeeded to make a Home.

The other kind of discrimination that really gets to me, and no one talks about, is career discrimination: the idea that of these alternative careers (by which I mean, anything other than a full time tenure track position at MRU) is really just the backup when you fail to get a 'real' job. When I tell my PI "I made the top four for this faculty position at small college" and he responds with the completely unenthusiastic "Oh. Well, it's too bad you'll be leaving science now", I cringe. Gender discrimination stinks, but career discrimination affects us all. We need to understand that there are many different definitions of success; we need to embrace our strengths and let them take us to the best path for ourselves. We need to understand what it takes to be a successful scientist/mother, and then define that as success. Then the guilt and strings will stop holding us back, and we can be free to work on removing those gender gaps.

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?

I went touring a new day care center for my 3 year old yesterday, and I was happy to see that they have- in addition to the play area, the art area, the block area, the reading area, and the sensory table area- a science area. Yep, a whole area (read: table and bookshelf) devoted to science. Start em young!

Wait. Do I want my daughters to follow in my footsteps?

The sad answer to that question is... no. Unless they really really really insist. It is a tough profession, especially for women. I was sitting at a seminar two days ago in which the only female that made the cut in the search for a new faculty member was presenting her work. I sat in the back, so as to leave the front and center open for the old boys network - I mean- current faculty. Yes, those chairs were all filled with ... men. No, wait, I apologize; In the interests of full disclosure, I should tell you that there was one female. I'd never seen her before, but apparently there is a female faculty. They kept interrupting the candidate with questions- a normal occurance in this sort of situation. But what is not normal is that twice when they stopped her to ask a question, one of the other faculty would answer it, and then they all went off on a discussion amongst themselves while she stood at the front of the room perplexed and desperately trying to get a grasp of the situation. She seemed quite intelligent, her research is very good, she has papers in top notch journals (Science, Cancer Cell). They had invited her to come. And then they barely gave her a chance to speak.

This didn't happen with the men. She seemed equally competent, but the faculty didn't seem interested.

I sat in the back, and I realized that if I really wanted the job I wouldn't let that bother me. But I also decided that I could never have that job, when, 15 minutes later I snapped out of a glassy eyed daze just in time to hear the conclusions, and I realized that I have a hard enough time staying alert during these things, forget about asking intelligent questions of the speaker.

Then one of the professors made a completely inappropriate 'joke' and I began to wonder... why would I want to work with these people?

So here I sit, tucking my daughter into bed, and asking myself: why do I need daycare, why do a sacrifice my time that I could be spending with my young girls in pursuit of an academic research career that I am becoming increasingly more convinced that I will not enjoy? I've invested so much time in this career path... I can't quit now. Can I?

It is the eternal dilemma.

My paper finally got accepted. It was the fourth journal and the third revision... but it is done. It just goes to show... perseverance pays.

Friday I faxed in the proofs. Any day now it will show up on pubmed. It is my eleventh paper, third as first author, and first as corresponding author. It is the first one that I really did write... I've written others but after handing my draft in to my PI and making all the 'suggested' changes it was barely recognizable as my own. Not so with this paper. In fact, I'd been working on it for so long that I'd forgotten what I'd written. After reading it again for the proofs, I thought "Damn, I wrote a good paper!".

It is a bit disturbing that two years worth of work got condensed into 6 pages and three figures.

And then my two year old got her hands on the first page of my proof... and drew all over it. It looks not at all unlike those aforementioned first drafts, only she was an even more harsh critic, leaving little to recognize on the page. Now, when I read it, I really smile... because the blue scribbles make me think of something even better then work. I think I'll frame it.