Rosalyn Yalow
Sonia Pressman Fuentes referred me to some interesting information about Rosalyn Yalow from the group that puts out the Jewish Women's Encyclopedia; I had previously read a biography of her by Eugene Strauss and thought you might like to know a bit more about her.
In December, 1977 Rosalyn Yalow became the first American woman to receive the Nobel Prize in Physiology or Medicine. She was recognized for her development of the radio immune assay. She had been a physics major at Hunter College but had been rejected for graduate study in that field. As a Jewish woman, apparently she was not considered able to get any position in physics. Later, in 1941, she was admitted at University of Illinois in physics and was the only woman there. After completing her degree, she returned to New York and worked at the Bronx VA Hospital for decades, developing methods to detect tiny quantities of antigens such as insulin in blood sera. Her long-time collaborator, Sol Berson, died in 1972. She continued her work, along the way showing that insulin was not, after al, too small to trigger antibody formation, a medical misconception for many years.
In interviews, she noted that she had kept a kosher home for her husband and had raised two children. In biographies of her, one sees that she relied on child care to assist her in raising those children when she had heavy laboratory work responsibilities. In her speech at the Nobel award ceremonies, she said, "we still live in a world in which a significant fraction of people, including women, believe that a woman belongs and wants to belong exclusively in the home...we must believe in ourselves or no one else will believe in us; we must match our aspirations with the competence, courage, and determination to succeed, and we must feel a personal responsibility to ease the path for those who come afterward."
What do you think?
A Child care is still important today; without good child care, many women scientists would not be able to progress
B Child care is not so important today; a lot of women take off time before their children go to kindergarten and then continue their scientific careers
C Women in science are choosing not to have children and that is a problem
D Women simply don't have the kinds of family responsibilities she chose to have, at least partly because they lack the support they would need to do it her way
Child care, and paid pregnancy leave for grad students and postdocs, seem like no brainers if we really want to keep women in science. But they just seem like costs with no special benefit to men in administration. We need more education of admins about why these things are needed.
Hi OtakuChan,
Yes, fertility is a challenge after 3X all right. I had my daughter at 41, and it felt like a miracle. I could hardly recall when I used to wish I could turn off my fertility in my 20's. It took two years to get Heather started, and I almost lost her through a miscarriage on a trip to Carleton at about 4 months. I'm glad to say, she settled back down and was born on schedule.
A lot of women take for granted that they'll be fertile until mid 40's but find they are out of eggs earlier. No way to know when it will happen.
cheers,
Laura H
As I recall, the people who were most satisfied with their child care arrangements were those whose extended families had grandmas or aunts who really wanted to help care for their children. I went for daycare homes as opposed to big centers, partly just to be more intimate, partly to minimize germs. My mom was a kindergarten teacher for a while, during which we all had colds and flu constantly! One of my biography subjects, Joan Steitz, says that academics used day care homes while physicians used nannies. I assume this is a financial separation; probably many people would have nannies if they could afford it.
I really liked hearing about Finland, when I wrote an article for AWIS Magazine a year ago. There, universal wonderful child care makes these choices easy, and there women profs are about equal to men profs in number. That's not the only reason, but I'm sure it contributes.
cheers,
Laura
Thank you for this information on Rosalyn Yalow, Laura! IMHO Child care is very important. Many people don't realize that women's fertility drops sharply after age 3X (where X is individual ... for me it was "5"). I almost did not have my second child as a result. When I got to the reproductive endocrinologist at age 37, he said "you are practically geriatric". Techniques like IVF are a gamble, and as a previous poster said, cause stress and grief. It is not like taking a Tylenol for a headache! Clearly, if you are lucky enough to have a stable life situation with a partner, pretenure, posttenure or w/o tenure (as nonacademic jobs are) and you want children, you need to "go for it". If relatives like grandparents are hundreds/thousands of miles away, as may be the case for an academic nomad, childcare is a must!
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January 5, 2011, 10:33 am
Keeping Women in Science on a Tenure Track
By STEVEN GREENHOUSE
More women are obtaining Ph.D.’s in science than ever before, but those women — largely because of pressures from having a family — are far more likely than their male counterparts to “leak” out of the research science pipeline before obtaining tenure at a college or university.
That’s the conclusion of a study by researchers at the University of California, Berkeley, who warned that the loss of these scientists — together with the increased research capabilities of Asian and European countries — may threaten America’s pre-eminence in science.
The study, “Keeping Women in the Science Pipeline,” found that women who are married with young children are 35 percent less likely to enter a tenure-track position after receiving a Ph.D. in science than are married men with young children and Ph.D.’s in science. Not only that, the married women with young children are 28 percent less likely than women without children to achieve tenure in the sciences.
Moreover, women Ph.D.’s with young children are 27 percent less likely than men with children to receive tenure after entering a tenure-track job in the sciences. The report notes that single women without young children are roughly as successful as married men with children in attaining tenure-track jobs.
According to the report, plans to have children affect women postdoctoral scholars more than their male counterparts. Women who had children after becoming postdoctoral scholars in the University of California system were twice as likely as their male counterparts to shift their career goals away from being professors with a research emphasis — a 41 percent shift for women versus 20 percent for men.
“Of course, not all women want children or marriage,” noted the report, written by three researchers at the University of California, Berkeley: Mary Ann Mason, Marc Goulden and Karie Frasch. “As one faculty colleague put it, ‘Motherhood would only keep me from my passion: science.’”
Tenured male scientists are considerably more likely to be married with children than tenured female scientists — 73 percent for men versus 53 percent for women. The report noted that among tenured science professors, women are nearly three times more likely to be single without children than men — 25 percent to 9 percent.
The report said that one reason many women Ph.D.’s leave the research science pipeline is that only a small fraction of research universities offer paid maternity leave to graduate students or postdoctoral scholars. According to the report, 13 percent of universities provide at least six weeks’ paid maternity leave to graduate students, while 58 percent of universities provide it to faculty.
The report found huge time demands on faculty, especially women. “The time pressures of academia are unrelenting for most faculty in the sciences, who work on average about 50 hours a week up through age 62,” the report states. “When combined with care-giving hours and house work, U.C. women faculty with children, ages 30 to 50, report a weekly average of over 100 hours of combined activities (compared to 86 hours for men with children). And women faculty with children provide an average of more than 30 hours a week of care giving up through age 50.”
The report urges universities to adopt more family-friendly policies to help prevent women Ph.D.’s in the sciences from dropping out of research careers. It recommends giving paid maternity leave to graduate students and “stopping the clock” on tenure for women scientists who give birth, perhaps by giving an extra year before making tenure decisions, in effect giving them extra time to do research and publish. The report also criticized policies that require postdoctoral scholars to begin their work within a certain number of years after receiving their Ph.D. “The lock-step timing of academia needs to be more flexible,” the report says.
“America’s researchers do not receive enough family-responsive benefits, particularly the more junior researchers,” the report concludes. “All major research universities should look to build a family-friendly package of policies and resources.”
Ms. Mason, the report’s principal author and a director of the Center for Economics and Family Security at the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, noted that since 2003, the University of California system had adopted more family-friendly policies, like giving new mothers leave of two semesters without teaching in addition to their child-birth leave and giving six weeks’ paid maternity leave to graduate students.
Thanks in large part to such policies, Professor Mason said, 64 percent of assistant professors in the University of California system have children, up from 27 percent in 2003.
“It shows that you can change the workplace culture,” she said.
A. If you have them, you need to take care of them! I just had a discussion around this with some other colleagues at an informal "celebration" in our group. We were discussing how much the various options cost. Most use our on-site daycare which is great. Having a nanny at home works best for me because of the flexibility and dedicated child care. But as Sonia says it is very expensive. To Small Science Woman's point, I recall a female faculty member telling me and another postdoc that we should just wait until after tenure. After all what is Assisted Reproduction for, she asked but to allow us to "have it all". Hmmm....not quite the original intention but since it is a relatively unregulated industry I guess she hd a point.
In the 1972-1989 time period, when I was trying to raise my daughter in the Washington, DC, area while at the same time working as an attorney for the federal government and being a feminist activist, the most difficult problem I had was finding and keeping a housekeeper or someone to care for my daughter. I do not see that anything has changed today other than that it's become even more expensive.
A. Is there really any other choice?
Hi Small Science Woman,
Yes, I liked that article a lot, and saved it to discuss in my Cloning and Stem Cells class. But it's clear that IVF, her first choice, did not work for her and caused a lot of stress and grief. And you must have money to pursue the route she finally took. She had a good attitude towards it, I thought. I liked the fact that her kids can know all the women who contributed to their arrival.
cheers,
Laura
I think women academics in general are choosing not to have kids until after tenure. I don't think it's a good idea; many of them have heartache ahead. But did you see the article in the NYT Magazine this week about a woman who used both an egg donor and surrogates to have two kids? Maybe they will make that sort of choice, ignoring their biological clocks as they seem to feel they must.
