Hi everyone

I'm happy to see some new posts and I wanted to share an article that
a friend emailed to me regarding a new book that targets some of the
issues we've been discussing.

The book is called "Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women
Scientists Speak Out" and it's edited by Emily Monosson. She has a
companion website at:http://sciencemoms.wordpress.com/

It looks really interesting and worth a read (in all of our spare
time! ha!)

Best to everyone!
Carolyn

Here is the article about the book:

A new book explores the challenges of balancing motherhood and a
career in science

When toxicologist Rebecca Efroymson flew to Washington D.C. to defend
a grant proposal before a federal agency, she lacked child care
options and was forced to bring along her sick toddler. On the day of
her presentation, she left her feverish, screaming son in a hotel room
in the care of his grandparents, who had taken a train down from
Philadelphia to babysit. Fatigued by lack of sleep, Efroymson admits
that she did not give her best presentation, and her grant was not
funded. "This was the first time that my split life might really have
impacted my work and the viability of my job," she writes.

The "split life" between work and child rearing is one familiar to
millions of working parents. For women, balancing work and family can
present particularly difficult challenges in the highly competitive,
often male-dominated world of research science. Efroymson's story is
one of many told in a timely new book, Motherhood, the Elephant in the
Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak Out.

Editor Emily Monosson has collected the voices and personal stories of
34 mother-scientists working in various fields. In eloquent and often
witty essays, these women directly address the challenges of being
mothers in the scientific workforce.

Contributors to this volume include biologists, physicists,
geologists, and oceanographers. They are professors, writers,
independent consultants, science policy experts, teachers, and
government researchers. For those who fear that motherhood is
incompatible with traditional scientific research careers, this book
offers some stunning examples to the contrary. An atmospheric chemist
writes of raising five children as she works and rises to a position
of leadership at NASA. An astronomer raises four children, each born
only eighteen months apart, as she first achieves tenure at the
government Space Telescope Science Institute, then takes on a faculty
position at the Rochester Institute of Technology. Other women seek
non-traditional careers in a quest for balance, and forge new paths
for themselves. The editor of the anthology, Monosson, is a prime
example: trained as a toxicologist with a Ph.D from Cornell, she has
established a career as an independent consultant, researcher
, and writer.

The diversity of career paths described by Motherhood's essayists is
impressive and eye-opening. These women demonstrate that there are
number of different ways of balancing work and family life. Even for
those who eventually end up in traditional careers, the road may be
circuitous. Some of the women in these pages drop out of the workforce
for a few years while their children are young, or work part-time.
Many have setbacks, and make career compromises for a spouse's or
their children's sakes. Some eventually return to the lab and tenure-
track careers; testament that these traditional careers - often
thought of as rigid, unyielding pathways - may have more flexibility
than we have been led to believe. Indeed, the fluidity of scientific
careers - the shifts between home life, academia, industry,
government, and back again - becomes a major theme.

It is not all sunshine and success, of course. Many of these women
also write movingly of the sacrifices they have made. Full professors
admit wistfully that they wish they had been able to spend more time
with their growing young children. Meanwhile, some of those who
deviated from traditional research tracks report a twinge when they
envision the scientific careers they might have had.

These pages also reveal that discrimination is alive and well in the
twenty-first century. In one harrowing chapter, Gina Wesley-Hunt, an
evolutionary biologist, tells of how she was fired in 2006 from a
postdoctoral position at an unnamed institution. The reason for her
dismissal? She was fired for being pregnant. As she learned to her
shock: "The equal opportunity office and office overseeing interns and
postdocs told me there was no policy that protected me. It was
entirely up to my PI, and I was on my own."

Essays in the book are arranged chronologically, according to the date
by which the writer's PhD was conferred. The book opens with
scientists who received their PhDs in the 1970s, and marches onward
through the 80s and 90s, ending with the voices of women who are in
graduate school today. In this way, the book tracks the sweeping
social changes of the past thirty years. Despite the great influx of
women into science careers over the last decade, it is sobering to
read that conflicts between work and family have not changed. Indeed,
some of the essays in the last section read as though they could have
been written decades ago.

Monosson provides social and historical context in her introduction,
and to each section of the book. She notes that in the 1970s, women
earned only 17% of the doctorates awarded in science and engineering.
Today the figure is around 45%. However, women continue to be
underrepresented in the highest tiers of scientific employment, and
are more likely than men to work part-time or to leave science
altogether. Monosson closely examines this phenomenon, dubbed "the
leaky pipeline." She discusses the growing body of evidence which
points to the demands of motherhood as a major cause of the leaky
pipeline, citing the work of Mary Ann Mason and Marc Goulden, among
others, who found that women academics who have babies at early stages
of their careers are less likely than childless women to achieve
tenure. As early as the 1970s, Monosson notes, there were published
calls for more family-friendly and flexible career structures in the
sciences. These calls have been repeated in each s
ucceeding decade.

It is often said that motherhood is not for the faint of heart. The
same could be said for a career in science. The debate over what
causes the leaky pipeline, and remedies to address it, rages on. The
pace of institutional and cultural change can seem glacial. In the
mean-time, scientists who are also mothers can find support by sharing
their stories with one another. Monosson's book provides a valuable
medium for doing so. As one woman writes in the opening pages of
Motherhood: "In the final analysis, every woman finds her own way.
It's just good to know that none of us is alone."

Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory: Women Scientists Speak
Out. Emily Monosson (Editor). Cornell University Press, Ithaca, 2008.
232 pp. ISBN: 978-0-8014-4664-1. $25.00.

This article was written by Vanessa Fogg; she is a freelance
scientific writer and editor based in
Grand Rapids, Michigan. She holds a Ph.D in molecular cell biology
from Washington University in St. Louis. She is also a mother.

Emily Monosson has established an accompanying website and online
community to discuss issues of motherhood in science, which can be
found at http://sciencemoms.wordpress.com/