Women in Science - a Notable Example

Like many women and not a few men, I shook my head in bafflement at the now infamous comments of Lawrence Summers, late of Harvard University. When Dr. Nancy Hopkins of MIT walked out on his speech, she expressed the disdain of thousands. I thought we had finally moved beyond the old concepts that there are subjects for “girls” and then there are the real subjects for “boys.”

Back in the Pleistocene era when I was in high school, there actually were different aptitude tests. I recall feeling somehow inadequate when I scored so low on the “social work” scale that I was off the chart, and embarrassed that my “science” score was much too high to be considered feminine. After all these years, and having worked at NIH and met brilliant women scientists, I believed the progress was real.

But old misconceptions die hard, and in academe they become ossified in marble minds, so that progress can only be made when the marble becomes a headstone. A young woman Ph.D. candidate in the Northwest is chronicling her life as she progresses towards her dissertation defense date. She juggles her work, her family, and the challenges of being a woman in science. Her blog is a window into a world not many of us know, but is well worth a look