The women that stay

The Grace Hopper Celebration was established in 1994 to provide support to women in the computer sciences. Over the last 14 years the Conference has grown to include engineering and in 2009 it will include Bio Tech. The conference's impact survey results shows that women who attend come back re-energized and with increased enthusiasm about their profession. Why does it work?

The Grace Hopper Celebration is a technical conference that also has at its core the mission to help women network and provide each other professional support. This year's Recession proofing your career segment included a 400 attendee speed networking session. In addition the conference staff works to make sure that every woman attending is able to maximize her networking time with numerous breaks, a career fair with leading technology companies and onsite fully funded child care. Numerous women attendees have told us that without the onsite free child care they would never have been able to attend. GHC also offers scholarships for attendees from around the world.

I encourage everyone to check out the Conference at www.gracehopper.org to see how a technical conference can make a difference in women's careers.

I?m not sure how many women leave science in their 30?s, when they usually begin having kids, but what helped me stay in science during that period (end of Postdoc and beginning of faculty career) was having day care ON CAMPUS. The day care was in the next building and I could walk over and nurse my baby or spend time with her during any break in my research (incubations, hybridizations?). This helped tremendously when I was feeling guilty about handing a 3 month old over to a day care worker each morning! Any free time I had during the day I could spend interacting with her, even if it was only sitting with her while she slept and I read some scientific papers. If you have to go out to the parking lot, get in your car and drive 15 minutes to the day care center, you are not going to have much time with your new born baby. Having your child right there at work with you is huge! I know many ?hard-core? women scientists who were very career driven until they had babies. Then all of a sudden there is a war between your two greatest desires (career and your children), and one of them wins?usually your child. It helps so much to be able to spend so much time with your baby during the day and not jeopardize your career. By the time they are old enough that they don?t need you as much, your career is shot and a come-back is not possible.

The NSF-funded ADVANCE: Institutional Transformation program has had four "rounds" of participating institutions to date (colleges and universities). Each of the programs tailored interventions to the structural conditions at their own university/college in order to increase the recruitment, retention and advancement of women in science and engineering. The collective ADVANCE investigators and social scientists have busily been publishing findings as they move along with many helpful suggestions about how best to keep women in science and engineering. The best way to get a bird's-eye view of the program is to go to the ADVANCE portal site, which is maintained by the Virginia Tech ADVANCE Program: http;//advance-portal.net

L. Frehill

Today, I look around and have to ask myself why anyone would stay in science and how we can improve it. The level of fraud, chicanery, borderline behavior, etcetera, has increased so much in many of the best universities that I look at it and wonder why anyone would want to be involved with that. And yes, some of my female peers are as nasty, unprincipled and grasping as the worst of my male peers. Oh, congratulations all of us!

I would advocate programs for keeping the best people in science, period, without regard to sex, color, or anything else. The question is, how to administer them. Do we start in grad school with GPA and weight from there? Do we weight it for creativity? I think we must make strenuous efforts to make sure that every graduate student and post-doc gets treated fairly to start. I think that we must make efforts to deliberatly cull graduate students and post-docs who are lousy as well.

Seriously, how do we do this? How do we fix what is more and more broken in science?

Check out one of Florida's best "women in science" programs at New College, Sarasota, FL under the direction of Dr. Margaret (Meg) Lowman. See her website at LINK

Investigate and do a story on her program.

D.M. Jarzen