What do you value about your own career?

Start with the training grant students as the NIH requires that the students be followed for the life of the grant. To this day I get requests from my grad and postdoc universities asking me for my updated title and profession. The data are out there and would be easy to analyze. Why someone hasn't done it I can't say. Wouldn't the Freedom of Information Act make those data publicly available upon request? It is public money funding those grants...If you show a difference with that population, you would have the preliminary data to do a prospective study using additional assesments for student quality and outcome.

Hi Laura,

Thanks so much for starting this thread! I definitely agree with the cooperative environment, as that was one reason why I left science research. I did a bachelor in nano-engineering and went on to do a master's in nanoscience, but I stopped my master program halfway, not because I didn't love the science but because I found science research too isolating. I've tried research several times (in year-long internships, thesis, etc.) but each time I felt the same, that I much preferred working in groups where I can have the support while still doing independent research. I at least stayed in the engineering field and completed a master's in industrial design engineering, but I always wonder whether my career would have been different if the research environment was different. (I now work in industry.)

I have received more email from very successful young women who are professors at R1 universities suggesting that it is indeed still hard for women to get enough high quality students and postdocs compared to male professors of similar quality. I must say I am appalled! I do think, if nothing has been studied about this, that someone should do a study at least of the numbers. I agree that quality is harder to measure. Does anyone have ideas about how to address this problem, assuming it's as real as my correspondents suggest? Are there strategies women professors can take up that increase their chances of success? Does it help to go out and speak at colleges and recruit? We have a fair number of people who do that at Pomona College, but most of them are young men.
cheers,
Laura

I can definitely relate to the idea of choosing a female advisor, and might have done that had there been any in my graduate department. But sometimes those women who break into the circle early have tough attitudes and aren't all that helpful to their junior associates.
I'm looking around for any data out there on student or postdoc choices by gender of mentor, so thanks for this article reference, Helen!
Another professor from a R1 university who keeps up with data on Women in Science has emailed me that she believes it's true that women mentors get fewer and lower quality students but she doesn't know how that quality difference could be measured effectively, and she doesn't know of any big study by NSF of the subject. I'm still looking!
cheers,
Laura

One paper from Physics and Chemistry that women grad students in those disciplines deliberately chose a female advisor--https://www.narst.org/annualconference/postconference10/Geoff_Potvin.pdf
I don't think that is representative of what happens in other sciences like biology. And do the men avoid female advisors? The NIH and NSF keep track of the advisors/genders for training grant students which would arguably be the "best" students in individual programs. I wonder if someone there has ever run those numbers? And what weight would you put in the fact that there are so few female professors compared to the male ones? How have things changed in the past 20 years as everyone has "evolved" including the men as regards the impact of gender on their decisions?

A couple of people have emailed me about the issue Phoebe at AWIS raised and don't even want to comment anonymously. They felt strongly that women faculty at research universities lose the best students and postdocs to competing men, for some of the reasons that hmcbride mentioned in her post. They also felt that factor makes women less competitive. I am networking with various groups in search of any study that may have been done on this issue. As a liberal arts college faculty member, I have never noticed such a trend. Has anyone else at a college as opposed to a university? I suppose in picking a graduate or postdoctoral advisor, one is chosing a career long mentor, so if they think women lack connections and influence, then choice of a male mentor makes some sense. I just wanted to choose a problem of interest and to work with a faculty member who was well-regarded by his group; the idea of influence never occurred to me. Not so smart, perhaps.
cheers,
Laura

I'll weigh in on a couple of points: #1 I believe that women value cooperative environments for the simple reason that they don't like open competition. I've seen labs where the environment was awful that were run by women. Everything was covert, not overt however, so unless you worked in it for a while it all looked like sugar frosting on top. The Tijan lab at Berkeley was one of those open competition labs Laura mentioned. Brutal, yes? But obvious when you interviewed that that's what you were getting into. And Bob never pitted students against one another, only postdocs. So students were still attracted to working with someone so complex and brilliant.
#2 Do women have a hard time recruiting? Yes, because word gets around and no one wants to work for someone who is unlikely to have the sway to help and protect them from the tough characters out there in the rest of the science world. The worst environment I ever worked in was for a woman who felt that since she received no help, there was no way she was going to help a young woman (70s PhD). And then there was the one (PhD 80s) who wanted to be my "pal" and overshared everything about her cloistered "nun's" life who was bitter about being single and on the tenure track. Hopefully things have improved since then, but you don't get ahead in science by having someone be "nice" to the competition. You're students will get scooped in the end and sabotaged in a heartbeat.

Well, in a period of silence on the subject raised by Phoebe at AWIS, I'll throw in the pot this observation: When I was last at Caltech on sabbatical, I saw women who had a lot of trouble getting any students or postdocs and others who did not. It seemed to me a function of the size and kind of grants the women had, the 'hotness' of their topics of research, and something about the personalities of the women involved. Times have changed, and I suspect it may be easier for some women to attract co-workers to work on cellular neuroscience, for example, than it used to be. The personality issues came out in average length of time a student/postdoc spent in that person's lab (shorter being better), how nicely the mentor treated those about to leave and helped them to achieve their goals, and how competitive things were inside the lab itself.
cheers,
Laura

I would love to hear responses to Laura's question about women being at a disadvantage in recruiting great students/postdocs. I cannot find any research on the subject, perhaps because it is not easy to define the good ones. But I did do a casual survey at one major institution (just looking at quantity, not quality) and found that, in the biomedical sciences, the average number of grad students working with women assistant professors was less than half the number working with male assistant professors. In my own 40 year career I had a total of 2 students who got PhDs with me (in spite of continuously having at least 1 and often 3 R01s). And Mildred Cohn, one of our most eminent biochemists and Presidential Medal of Science winner who died last year at the age of 95, often noted that she had a total of 7 grad students.

Ahh, the issue of recruiting was also raised by Phoebe at AWIS. Do any of you other women in science feel that being a woman has been a disadvantage in recruiting great students/postdocs to work with you? Do you tend to get more women than men in your lab?
Interesting to think about!
cheers,
Laura

I mean better fit, not bitter fit. Sorry, my typing skills are not what they could be. I guess the computer only sees it as wrong if it's not a word! Cheers, Laura

I"m back from the Microbiology meetings and ready to discuss again. I pick B because that's the hypothesis that I'm thinking over, but I could be completely wrong. I'm very interested, Phoebe, in what you say about early choices. It could very well be that women overall feel more constrained early, looking to keep from transgressing the invisible lines that mark out acceptable behavior in science. It also may be that those women who see the choices this way are, in the end, a bitter fit for the field and thus more successful.

Personally, I pick C. I went into science, which by itself felt like a risk to me. But then, I wanted to choose the project I found most compelling, not one my advisor was most keen to pursue that was all layed out with bells and whistles determined in advance. I'm not sure that the need to choose something outside the main stream is necessarily risk-taking, and if it is, maybe men and women both do it.
FBP

When I was starting my research career (long, long, ago) I made a deliberate decision that I could not afford a high risk project - because as a woman I could not recruit the really good grad students and post-docs needed to compete with the big guys. My choice was therefore to work on something nobody else was doing. Would I make the same decision 40 years later? No, because as a senior faculty member it is not such a disaster to get scooped, and it is a lot more fun to do pioneering work. But if I were starting my research career now I might be as cautious as I was back then. The truth is that young women in science who must recruit a research team are still at a disadvantage because they don't have the prestige of their male peers.