Ah, the wonderful careers we pondered when we were young. I can only recall ever having two career dreams for myself: when in elementary school, I knew absolutely that I would become an elementary school teacher when I grew up, and in high school I changed my mind and wanted to earn my degrees in physical therapy.

Practical and lacking incredibly in imagination, I know. What a lame kid I was. Didn’t I ever want to be a queen or a ballerina? Nope. I would have totally ganged up with the Dukes of Hazard, and in the fourth grade, during the 1984 Olympics, I spent a few months trying to work out how I could actually become Mary Lou Retton (cute, short, and all gymnastics-y, just like fourth-grade me).

The most impractical my real dreams and aspirations ever were: the bizarre number of graduate degrees I felt I needed to hold in order to follow my teaching/physical therapy paths. I was always certain that my working life would not begin until I had at east one PhD on my wall. Why? I have no good answer other than the fact that I thought my grandparents were all amazing and had all been academic badasses.

There’s a study in Britain that’s been going on for over fifty years, called the 1958 British Birth Cohort Study. When this group hit the age of eleven, the children were asked to write 30-minute essays about what their lives would be like at the age of 25. It’s fascinating to read how clear their plans were at age eleven, and how things turned out when reality hit.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

(when I grow up…)

Ever wondered why there are more girls into studying the STEM subjects (Science Technology Engineering Math) than there are women who actually pursue careers in science, technology, engineering, and math? The girls and young women who become interested can stay focused enough on their STEM career dreams all the way through majoring in STEM subjects in college. Then things start veering off the tracks.

Somewhere during the earning of the BS degree, minds are changed and the women veer away from what had been their dream careers. Some don’t even complete their intended degree and switch to something less STEM-oriented. What the heck happens?

The American Association of University Women (AAUW) has just published a report on exactly that: Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics.

From the quick-and-dirty:

In an era when women are increasingly prominent in medicine, law and business, why are there so few women scientists and engineers? A new research report by AAUW presents compelling evidence that can help to explain this puzzle. Why So Few? Women in Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics presents in-depth yet accessible profiles of eight key research findings that point to environmental and social barriers – including stereotypes, gender bias and the climate of science and engineering departments in colleges and universities – that continue to block women’s participation and progress in science, technology, engineering, and math. The report also includes up to date statistics on girls’ and women’s achievement and participation in these areas and offers new ideas for what each of us can do to more fully open scientific and engineering fields to girls and women.

Further Reading:

Report Examines Why Women Are Under-Represented in STEM Fields
The Hotness of Geek Barbie
You Can Kiss My Math Because Smart Girls Are Hot
Smart Girls Are Hot

Posted by Alexa Harrington

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I was out of town this weekend, but, alas, I was not in Bronxville, N.Y, listening with rapt attention to Carmen Ashurst, keynote speaker of the 12th Annual Women’s History Month Conference at Sarah Lawrence College.

Do you know who Carmen Ashurst is? She’s the former president of Def Jam Recordings and Rush Communications, and is the author of the forthcoming book, Selling My Brothers: The Movement, The Media and Me. Ashurst also appeared in the documentary, Hip-Hop: Beyond Beats and Rhymes.

The ideas/points/questions/answers the conference aimed to cover:

Music has long served social movements as a sound track, as a means of communication, and as its own arena for activism. While multiple generations of feminists have used music in these ways, it has played especially vital roles for those born since the 1970s. This conference will explore the ways in which young feminists have defined and expressed politics through music and musical cultures and communities. Among the questions we will ponder are: How does music reflect sites of agreement and conflict among different groups of feminists? How have movements like Riot Grrrl and Hip Hop feminism attracted young women to feminist activism? How do young feminists’ uses of music compare with those of earlier generations?

Posted by Alexa Harrington

The world order has finally reconciled itself! Barbie no longer thinks “Math class is tough!” Now she’s lighting up cubicle jockeys with her smokin’ bod and her tight pants! She will be fetching lattes for no one.

I actually like Barbie, to be honest. I know she’s supposed to be evil and make little girls feel badly about themselves, but I had about 20 Barbies when I was an impressionable young thing and I’ve never had body issues. Besides, how can you not respect a girl who can maintain that posture and walk around 24/7 on her tip-toes with a rack like that? Barbie’s a badass, I don’t care what the angry hippies say.

Further Reading:

For Some Girls, the Problem With Math Is That They’re Good at It
Approach to School Affects How Girls Compare With Boys in Math
Math, Science, and Girls: Can We Close the Gender Gap?
Girls’ Math Anxiety Undermines Performance in Other Subjects
You Can Kiss My Math Because Smart Girls Are Hot
Mattel Says It Erred: Ten Talk Barbie Turns Silent on Math

Posted by Alexa Harrington

It’s shocking. I’m overwhelmed with dumbfounded bafflement. How can this be? They went and published an anthology of science writing, and all but three of the authors are of the male persuasion. Is that even possible? Hold on! I’m thinking.

I think yes, there’s a staggeringly high chance that this could have occurred. There’s many a female science badass out there, but I can guarantee she’s spending a large portion of her time and energy trying to hold her ground in a man’s world.

It’s almost Christmas, and we’re all supposed to love each other even more because the country is littered with sparkly dead trees and overtly cheerful Muzak, so I’ll spare us all the rant. Let’s just say I’m a huge fan of DNA and its structure. It’s beautiful, it’s poetry, it actually chokes me up. I’m not kidding. I also think Watson, Crick and Wilkins were amazing. But that doesn’t change the fact that Rosalind Franklin was treated like sh*t despite her ability to kick DNA-structure ass.

I’m well aware of the fact that the Nobel folks don’t hand over the prize to dead people, and that they only allow sharing between a total of three recipients. Three living ones. So Franklin wouldn’t have been eligible regardless. However, it would be fascinating to know whether she would have been chosen to receive the 1962 Nobel Prize for physiology/medicine instead of one of the men had she been alive at the time.

It’s been almost fifty years. I would have hoped for some improvement on the equality front.

And there they went—all the diplomatic words just left my building. I will stop short of explaining exactly how much people suck. Happy holidays. Go forth and treat people fairly.

Further Reading:

The Rosalind Franklin Papers

The Nobel Prize in Medicine or Physiology 1962

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Do smarty-pants professor types feel they need a bigger challenge? Was defending their dissertation not enough? All of those years of undergraduate and graduate work, living somewhere near the poverty line, working and striving for those extra letters after their names? Why do obviously intelligent humans do this to themselves? Because they want to spend their working days in a place of higher learning, with ivy-covered walls and trees that change color in the fall, with a tenured position, teaching hundreds of fresh, shiny little faces, each one eager to learn all that the prof has to teach.

These days, actually landing a tenured position at a college or a university is right up there with the Holy Trinity of Nearly Impossible Occurrences: winning the lottery; playing in the NBA; and being struck by lightning. And do you know what makes landing a sweet teaching gig even harder? Being married to another PhD-havin’ brainiac who would also love to land a tenured position. What are the chances both halves of a PhD couple will actually end up making a living in academia?

The Clayman Institute for Gender Research at Stanford University has noticed that women don’t move as quickly or as easily through the gauntlet as their male counterparts do. A major part of this can be attributed to gender issues. But there seems to be another glitch in the Tenured Woman system: a high number of female academics are partnered with other academics, sometimes in their field. Here are the problems that situation can bring about, according to the Clayman Institute:

“Both married and domestic partners in dual-career relationships suffer decreased job mobility and the benefits in terms of opportunities, experience, salary, and working conditions that mobility can bring. This is especially true for women in the sciences, who are more often partnered with other academics. While only 7% of the members of the American Physical Society are women, for example, an astonishing 44% of them are married to other physicists. An additional 25% are married to some other type of scientist. A remarkable 80% of women mathematicians and 33% of women chemists are married to men in their own fields. Such partnerships are at cost to their mobility and advancement given the rarity of dual offers.”

Starting in November 2006 the folks at Stanford’s Clayman Institute began conducting a nationwide survey of 30,000 faculty. The point? A very good one:

“The Institute’s ‘Dual-Career Academic Couples’ study will culminate in policy recommendations aimed at helping universities recruit and retain greater numbers of women in leading faculty and administrative positions. Restructuring university practices will help transform the way universities do business and grow academic cultures where women, too, can flourish.”

I love it when research institutes use their powers for good, not evil. I found some interesting bits about dual-career issues, women in academia, gender issues, and what some folks are doing to try to increase the female population in the upper echelons of academia, especially in the math and science fields.

These three links add up to the motherlode of links on dual academic career couples and women in science. You could spend weeks trying to find the info these lists have.

Further Reading:

Stanford List
Women in Biology List
Dual Science Career Couples List

Posted by Alexa Harrington

Scoring some funding or getting a smidgen of a paycheck in academe is hard enough in a stable economy, but it becomes a turnip-squeezing situation when the economy hits the skids. Female Science Professor has two posts up that explain some of the problems academics are facing, and which crises warrant the most panic.

Budget Axe and Bad Economics 101 are both worth reading. They have informative, entertainment, and misery-loves-company value.

Posted by Alexa Harrington

In honor of Danica McKellar’s new book, Kiss My Math, I’m re-posting my thoughts on the hotness of smart girls below.

My daughter doesn’t have math homework yet, but I’ve already staked out helping her with it as my exclusive territory. Fortunately, my husband was a political science major, so he’s totally fine with “letting” me be in charge of all math and science-related aspects of our kids’ education. He will be in charge of teaching them how to turn boring discussions into heated debates, how to argue their way out of paper bags, and how to confuse the opposition using vocabulary words in lieu of logic.

I suck at debating—I’m more of an action girl. But I am good at math. It’s logical, it follows clearly laid-out rules, and when you do it right you can almost hear the little snick sound the universe makes when everything clicks into place.

Thus far, according to my daughter, everything Mommy does is super cool. Mommy being good at math, Mommy coloring inside the lines in the Flower Fairies coloring book, and Mommy knowing the lyrics of every Social Distortion song all come in under my seven-year-old’s umbrella of My Mom Is Super Cool (Except When She Tells Me Princesses Are Helpless Pains In The Ass). Someday this bubble will burst and my daughter will drink the Math Is Hard Kool-Aid and see me not as a trigonometry badass, but as a supremely embarrassing dorky mom who likes math (how lame).

Before that happens (somewhere around middle school, I think) I have to convince her that being smart is hot and knowing how to kick algebra booty will not be detrimental to her future. I have less than eight years to instill in her a solid smart-girl ethic before she hits the teen years and never speaks to me again.

If worse comes to worst, I can always employ some cranky military tactics and make her watch The Wonder Years until she gets how hot Winnie Cooper is. Then I’ll show her this math proof and tell her the hot girl coauthored it. Then I’ll give her the book Math Doesn’t Suck by Danica McKellar (Winnie) and tell her to read it if she knows what’s good for her.

Or not. Sometimes you can lean so far to the left that you end up going to the right. Don’t worry, I won’t crush my good intentions with evil tactics. Between me telling her that Barbie was wrong and all of the positive attention girls, math and science are getting lately, it’s conceivable that my daughter’s relationship with math could be healthy and well-adjusted.

Good articles on girls, math and science:

For Some Girls, the Problem With Math Is That They’re Good at It

Approach to School Affects How Girls Compare With Boys in Math

Math, Science, and Girls: Can We Close the Gender Gap?

Girls’ Math Anxiety Undermines Performance in Other Subjects

Posted by Alexa Harrington

I know this has been The Week of the Mommy, but here’s one more bit to ponder and then I promise to be done. This article lays out nicely how difficult it is to find work-life balance. It’s important for melting down parents to read about how everyone else is having an out-of-control moment/day/week/life. Because when you haven’t slept and your whole day is one peanut butter, cream of wheat or fuse bead disaster after another and you’re wondering how it can be possible to work this hard and to be in such an extreme state of constant motion and still not manage to get anything accomplished in a day, it’s necessary to have solid evidence that other parents are grappling as desperately as you.

Seriously, how hard is it to take a damn shower? There’s water, soap, more water, a towel, done. Not so with children running amok. There is no sneaking off and showering while leaving tiny people unsupervised. Their food-in and food-out needs must be met; all food must then be removed from the table so no one chokes to death while the parental unit is showering; and then—the deep dark secret of parents who claim to loathe television and maintain a high volume of literature input in the house—the television must be turned on so the little hellions won’t harm themselves or the property during the 180 seconds that mommy is in the shower.

And still, still, even with full access to the television crack pipe that my children are whores for, 60 seconds into my frantic Speed Shower of Doom, someone is banging on the bathroom door demanding to know where their mommy is and when she will be returning. This moment has three possible outcomes: (1) I turn on the ceiling fan and drown out their cries (sort of); (2) I yell something no non-parent will ever imagine they will utter some day when they become parents: “Every mommy has the right to shower alone!” or “GO AWAY!” or “You’re making me insane!” or, when I’ve given up, “Whatever, dude. Cry all you want. It’ll just make me shower longer.” and (3) the dumb mommy unlocks the bathroom door and stupidly gives in and lets the two-year-old in to have a shower/bath too. This is immediately regretted when the six-year-old shows up and suddenly mommy is trying to get clean while standing calf-deep in what she’s pretty sure is a kiddie pee party.

Okay, done with the mommy theme. I refuse to become a mommy blogger. As far as I can tell, the blogging populations with the highest numbers are mommies and convention geeks.

Further work-life balance reading:

Strategies for Work Life Balance

50 Useful Blogs for Work-at-Home Dads

Downsizing for Work-Life Balance

Working Moms Need Not Feel Guilty

Opting in: Having a Child Without Losing Yourself

Avoiding the Mommy Track: Returning to a Career After Maternity Leave

Home Jobs for Moms: A Guide to Choosing the Right Opportunity for Stay at Home Mothers

A Stay-At-Home Mom Re-Enters the Workforce: A Chance at a Second Career

Stay at Home Mom and Work at Home Mom

Balance is Bunk!

Posted by Alexa Harrington

This past post ties in with the mommy vein as well, but more from a student perspective.

Jon Morrow from On Moneymaking just did a guest post on Brazen Careerist about why he regrets getting straight A’s in college. He lays out pretty clearly what he did, what he got out of it, and why it wasn’t worth it in the end. Some of the comments on the post had a definite pent-up rage undertone—I’m not entirely sure why. Were the commenters feeling threatened by Morrow’s ponderings about his own life and the decisions he’s made (which I’m fairly certain had nothing to do with them)? Who the hell knows.

I understood where he was coming from, even if the cranky commenters didn’t. And I can back him up in saying that being obsessed with your college GPA to the detriment of your actual life is unnecessary. As he points out and as I’ve said before: unless you’re applying to some highly competitive grad school program, an exquisite grade point average isn’t something anyone important will ever give a rat’s ass about.

I did the same thing Morrow did: I studied all the damn time and was focused to my very core on getting the highest score on every lab write-up, assignment, quiz and exam. I had an amazing physics instructor once who was smart, tough, unsmiling, and told us on the first day of class that she didn’t believe in extra credit so we shouldn’t waste her time asking for it. She expected us to learn the material well and to do the work she assigned, end of story.

And then she handed back our first set of lab reports and told the class that one student had gone above and beyond what even she expected and she had therefore gone against her twenty-year no extra credit policy and had given this particular student several extra points. This turn of events did not amuse her, and she stood over me and stared me down while announcing this in front of my glaring classmates. The grade-obsessed perfectionist half of me was supremely proud and was jumping up and down (on the inside) with delirious joy, thinking “Oh, hell YES! I kick ASS!” The normal half of me thought, “Crap. Now they all hate me and think I’m a freak.”

Which I was. Physics Class Me occured when I was working on degree # 2 and was ditching my infant daughter, my husband, my friends and any semblance of my life in order to devote every waking moment (of which there were quite a number as I rarely slept) to achieving academic success. Necessary? Yes, if I wanted to get into the program I was so focused on. No, if I had taken a step back and gotten my priorities straight. Unconsciounable? Absolutely. I ditched my child for about the first three years of her life because I couldn’t just let go a little (unclench) and get a few B’s.

Lest you think the perfection obsession was limited only to the New-Mommy-Staggering- Under-the-Weight-of-Parental-Responsibility Me, I have another sparkling example of School Obsessed Alexa. I had two weeks left of my senior year at Evergreen. There are two important bits in that last sentence: (1) normal people, if they are capable of unclenching, can usually find it within themselves to do so during the last two weeks of senior year; (2) I was at Evergreen, where obsessing about academic perfection is dumb because there are no grades.

Anyway, I had just returned from a photography road trip and had a lot of printing to do in the darkroom before my final project was due to be shown. My then-boyfriend, now-husband asked me to go away with him for the weekend to the San Juan Islands. His friend is a pilot and had offered to fly us there. How romantic. I knew that what my boy really had planned was to propose to me. He had set up this whole thing, his friend was willing to fly us, he had a ring, etc.

I played dumb, pretended I just thought he wanted to go waste a weekend of printing time at a bed-and-breakfast, and told him I loved him very much and it was a very sweet gesture but I needed to stay home and rack up as many printing hours as possible in the darkroom before my project was due. I’m usually a very forthright and honest girl (I have no filter between my brain and my mouth, so I tend to say everything the moment I think it), so it’s fortunate I held back and didn’t say, “I’m too busy with school to get engaged to you this weekend. Better luck next time, pal.”

Isn’t that awful? I’m such a bi*ch. I cringe when I recall that stunning moment. For the record, he proposed after I turned in my project and hung my show. We’re living happily ever after and I’ve since learned my lessons regarding life vs. school and I’m a much better mom, wife and friend because of all the learning I’ve done (read: cringe-worthy moments have carved me into a real person).

Anyway, school is good and working hard is commendable. But the pursuit of perfection to the detriment of your real life is usually not worth it. Find some sort of balance. Minus the crystals and granola. Unless that’s your thing.

Posted by Alexa Harrington