Dear Ms. Price,

I know that I (as all of us insecure linguists/editors do from time to time) am "picking on words".....but...?

I just read: "...in science, the culture can be less forgiving than elsewhere..."...and my first thought (as a man who knows rather a lot of quite successful female "scientists" who don't, insofar as I know, feel in the least victimized or oppressed or whatever)was "Why would they need a 'forgiving' environment?"

Your rather markedly obvious implication is that female scientists need to be afforded a "forgiving" environment.

I'm also suddenly recalling some fairly recent letter (written by someone who rather obviously knew what he/she was talking about) in which the letter-writer responded to some broadsheet wail about a supposed dearth of "female" scientists in this Oppressively Misogynistic nation by citing the numbers of "foreign" women who were quite diligently and quite productively going about their work while they pursued degrees, etc, at the letter-writer's (who semd to be an academic) university.

I'm just a middle-aged homosexualist who majored in English at an impressively liveral arts school in the early 80's. So, obviously, I know how easy it is to pass for "educated" in this country. That said...I don't want to live in a country full of scientists (I assume that would include our doctors and nurses?) who perhaps, during their arduous trek through gradskoolz, were afforded a more generous share of "forgiveness" because they were female or black or gay or whatever.

In short, I think that you're playing right into the hands of the Rush Limbaughs when you complain that the "sciences" are less "forgiving" when it comes to female scientists.

sincerely,

David Terry

I guess I qualify. 10 years ago, I was a computer systems analyst in the private sector. I was a slave to the job. It required a lot of after hours work. Any type of update work had to be done when no one was using the computers and there was a huge amount of pressure. If the computers didn't work, I would have the boss in my office screaming that he was losing a million dollars a day because of my screw up.

I got married and had 2 children. While pregnant with my first child, the business was leveled by a tornado. I completely rewired a large manufacturing facility 9 months pregnant. We were due to move into the new facility on a Friday. I had my child on the Wednesday before via C-section. I got out the hospital on Sunday and went to work on Monday with my child. Baby #2 was luckier. I had her a few days before Christmas, so I got to have 2 or 3 days. Mind you, I was offered paid maternity leave, but the reality of the situation was that I was needed.

The stress was too much, running to daycare, getting to work, dealing with the daily crisis. I quit to take a much easier job with local government. I find the work rewarding and the flexibility of employer makes it the job of a lifetime.

I don't think there is anything that would have made that bearable for me. More flexibility would have helped, but still the job requirements are to be there at odd hours and there until the job is done. I've been asked many times to go back into high level computer jobs, but being a mom is a lot more important. Actually there is nothing would make a job like that acceptable anymore. Life is too short.

It really is a time warp. Girls and young women have been increasingly moving away from science and engineering (as well as business and finance) at the entry level as well. It's not just taking time to change the culture, like with aircraft pilots or film directors — in those other fields it actually appears to be going backward.

There are always a few women (and maybe men, who knows) who invariably declare that no proper woman should want to go into those icky male fields in the first place. It's easy to dismiss that sort of thing as dinosaur thinking that has had its day and is scheduled to die out any day now.

But maybe that's dangerously cavalier. Maybe there really is a cultural reaction against the de-gendering of work roles — a reaction in which women are themselves becoming implicated.

As Catherine Price begins to point out, this becomes a nearly intractably more complicated subject when we consider that Americans in general are becoming less and less interested in — indeed, capable of — basic scientific competency. If nobody even knows how to teach science, how is it possible to produce any new scientists at all, let alone inspire young women to take an interest in the field and make a leap of faith in themselves?

Perhaps these things go hand in hand, anti-intellectualism and cultural reaction, and a society that craves a retreat into ignorance will also find increasing comfort in the arbitrary strictures of conventional gender roles.

If you're curious about the academic side of things, the NSF has been pumping a decent amount of funding into their ADVANCE program. As far as I know, they're trying to do two things:

1) Figure out where women drop out of scientific careers and why.

2) Fix it.

Anyway, you can google around.

...for a woman to quit her job to raise kids for a couple years than to spend 8+ hours a day with a bunch of overworked virgins.

I wish that the data for men was also presented. Do 52% of men also drop out?

I am a former engineer/scientist turned patent attorney. The reason is that the various employers I had depended on but didn't appreciate scientists or engineers.

The most glaring example was when my team and I worked in excess of 60 hours/wk for 6 months, including over the Christmas holidays. We met our deadlines and the company made millions delivering the new product.

Our reward was free pizza at a meeting in which we were congratulated and given another project with similar demands. The dumb ass VP thought the pizza was special while not realizing I had been invoicing carryout for anyone still working at around 7PM.

Meanwhile, the executives, sales, and marketing guys all made a fortune. As a reward, the VP of engineering also got a company car (a jaguar) for his wife.

My team shredded over the next year. About a quarter of them left engineering altogether. Of the folks who remained affiliated with engineering, many shifted over to technical sales with an eye towards shifting completely over to non-technical jobs.

Very few of the techies I've worked with in decades past are still techies and most of them are telling their kids not to go into engineering.