Eons and ages ago...

I applied for grad school.

This was way back when sexism was slightly more rampant, I guess.

I met with a chemistry professor (actually he was the chair of the department) while interviewing and the conversation went something like this:

Me: "What classes would I teach as a TA?"

Him: "Chem 101 and 102."

Me: "Would I ever teach upper division chemistry?"

Him: "No. We have found that women aren't generally well received as TA's for upper division classes."

I wanted to leave right then. I knew I wouldn't go there and my lunch with grad students (the male student interviewing got to lunch with professors) shed light that this was not an isolated incident and that sexism was "rampant" in the department.

I ran the other way.

A few years later I heard that professors name and cringed. A woman I knew was leaving our grad program to go work for him. I warned her. (She never graduated.)

The guy's name has popped up randomly over the nearly 20 years since I was checking out grad schools and each time I shudder.

The group I am working with is awesome now. No sexism at all. I think my company is average. It hasn't been absent in my career over the last 12 years, but it hasn't been "rampant" either.

A friend of mine a few years ago made the comment that she had noted a distinct lack of sexism and poor treatment from her male colleagues who had daughters. And she is right. That's not to say that men who don't have kids or aren't married with wives working outside the home are sexist at all - right now I work with a totally awesome guy who is in his late 50's, never married and no kids - and he has all the same expectations for me as anyone else in the group. And maybe more actually. But some of the most patient and best mentors I have had along the way are dads of daughters.

That icky professor popped, once again, back into my life a few weeks ago. My colleague (who has a college aged daughter) and I are hosting a Workshop this summer. It is truly an honor to be running this thing and to be hosting the accompanying roadmapping session for all the leading agencies on US research investment in mass spectrometry. One of my duties is to invite people to attend and to respond to our client's requests to send invites.

I got one a few weeks ago asking me to invite jackass sexist professor. I cringed and wiggled and made faces at my computer. Then I sent him the canned invitation and didn't even write on it, "you probably don't remember me, but you told me I wouldn't be well received as a female scientist teaching upper division chemistry. Not only did I teach it at the University I attended, but I received both department and University wide teaching awards. And I went to work here and am now have a very successful career where my teams have won a number of awards. Jackass."

I sent the normal template and set to waiting. Then when out for drinks with my male colleagues where after a few glasses of wine I confessed what brought puke to the back of my throat and made me steam a bit at my desk the other day. They weren't shocked. We had an interesting discussion about sexism in the workplace. One of my contractors told me about his good friend who is dean of sciences at a very well known California school who confessed to him the number of struggles she STILL HAS with the old school professors. He is probably 70 years old and just does not understand how this could still be the case.

Anyways.

I got a reply from jackass sexist pig professor.

"Thank you for the invitation Dr. Nuclear Mom. I am so sorry that I will not be able to attend as I will be on vacation during that time. My best wishes for your success in this roadmapping session. I hope you don't mind that I sent your invitation to my daughter who is a graduate student in chemistry at X university and have recommended that she attend the Workshop portion of the week. I think she would enjoy it. Thank you again."

WTF.

He has a daughter. In college. Studying chemistry.

I counted back. She was a baby or toddler when I sat in his office.

I don't have any answers. Still. But it set me back a little. Was it that she was a baby and he didn't see the possibilities? I am guessing he wouldn't tell his daughter not to expect a teaching appointment in upper division as she is a woman. Or would he? No. He wouldn't. Has he changed?

Do I care? Yes and No. And I can't really explain it. But maybe I have softened to him. This person I met once a long time ago who once said a really stupid thing that I couldn't let go.

And oh, his daughter did not decide to attend our Workshop. I kind of wanted to meet her. So I am slightly bummed.

Changes afoot

So a few weeks ago I delved into the work side and ended with the statement that things might be changing. I never want to count my chickens before they hatch and wasn't sure how things would go. I have seen others start down this path and have it end abruptly and I feared that.

I am happy with my job with the exception of one time a year - staff development reviews. They are hard. They are nearly never happy unless you are getting promoted (which is extremely rare) - but even then they find crap  you did wrong and harp on it. But especially the year after a promotion. Sucky. My SDR this year sucked. Ok, you talk to AB and he says, "that didn't read bad, it was fine". But I know better. I know those key words.

I was perplexed by a few statements "it is the job of the PM to maintain a cohesive team". Actually not really. That is, of course, a bonus. But the job of the PM is scope, schedule and budget and if one thinks I am not going to piss people off in that, well delusional. Cohesive team? It's a goal of course, but my job? Methinks one does not understand the role of the PM - and this was confirmed in my SDR when my management made the statement that they were still trying to understand the role of the PM.

One of the things that really bothered me was the statement that I was still - after a few years of a major blow up - having PI/PM issues. WTF? I believed it to be legacy. They denied it. I work the PI/PM model with only one other person on active projects presently and he and I get along amazingly well and I am constantly getting kudos from him. So he is either a complete liar or my management is making crap up.

An example was provided to skeptic me and it was VERY obvious which project they were referring to when they talked about an instance with one of my task leads. It's that project where *I* AM THE PI. So I would be having conflicts with my PM? Oh MYSELF! I just about imploded on the spot. This is "written in stone" in my record and to me is simply evidence that my management has no idea what I am doing and never read my contribution report to understand the roles on the 9 projects I am working.

Oh and going back to the cohesive team comment - the example was that a few of my presentations this year weren't as smooth as they could have been - you could tell that multiple people / team members had contributed to the presentation and they could have been smoothed a bit. Ok fine. I buy that. I have two task leaders with VERY different styles - one sends me quarterly slides with only pictures and five words (love him) and the other sends slides with no pictures, jam packed with words and hard to read tables (no love). I try to turn it into my own presentations without completely redoing their work. I know what they are talking about. But wait, wasn't this comment about cohesive teams in reference to my being a PM? Yes? Then why is the example from the project where *I* am the PI and [that other woman] is the PM. Shouldn't this be on HER SDR if this is a PM issue?

Silence.

"Well if you ever want to promote in this group you need to work on this."

Near implosion again.

I don't recall how we got on to the topic - maybe I mentioned that the group I am spending a lot of time working with was working on a turn around office for me. And then suddenly my management piped up, "have you thought about switching groups?"

Is this a trick question? What do I say? I admit truth, "yes, I have". I have for a few years. At first I thought about leaving my directorate in favor of another - but then their funding tanked and frankly I like my directorate a lot. Then I started working a lot with one of the sister groups.

We discussed some options - I stay in this group and have my office over there. I switch groups. They gave me the option of thinking about it and all I could think of was, "oh believe me, I have been thinking about this for a year". But I hadn't been ready to pull the trigger.

I pulled that dang trigger.

It was agreed that management would talk. I would speak with the other manager. She would talk to her staff and then our division director would provide a recommendation.

And the result of this few weeks of work came down yesterday. In the hallway, I ran into my current manager. Final in a day or so, I am leaving.

Hasta la vista!

Being a woman in science

I love reading stories about women in science and the unique hurdles they had to overcome to get to where they are today. The American Chemical Society posted a link to these articles from a Fairbanks, Alaska newspaper for Women in Science month.


I am now – amazingly – in that “mid-career” category. Not a newbie by any amount. I have been around the block once or twice. I am still young enough that I went into science in college thinking equality was in. Men had grown up or moved on. I was a professional product of the 90’s. YES, the 90’s. But still my stories aren’t too far off from the women who shared in these articles who have more experience than me.


Do I think things are changing? YES. I hosted a student last year who was a chemical engineer from Yale and one of my most memorable conversations with her was after one of our big team meetings for the Navy project. We left and I can’t remember how she put it, but she was surprised. “They are all guys,” she exclaimed. And went on to tell me that all her classes were at least 50-50.


My hallway at work is estrogen lane. There are 13 offices in my hallway and all but two are occupied by women.


My team lead? A woman. My manager? A woman. I love it!


Because in my daily activities? The projects I work on daily and the people I work with?


All men.


And that is how it has been since I started here. No joke. Now I am a physical scientist with a little more engineering and physics to my chemistry life, but that shouldn’t be an excuse. Where are the women?


I liked the questions posed to these women scientists in Alaska and figured I would take it upon myself to answer them. If you are a woman in science, answer them in the comments, e-mail your answers to me and I will post them here in my blog or post the answers on your blog and provide me the link, okay?


“Were there more hurdles for you to clear in science because you were a woman?” (Ok, poorly written question, “are” they ARE women, they aren’t men now…)


I don’t believe there were more hurdles to clear education-wise because I am a woman. I believe that I had every opportunity presented to me as an undergrad and grad student in the 90’s based on the path I chose. Now I did reject one school after I had a very disheartening visit. I visited on the same day as another male potential graduate student at Colorado State and professors took him out to lunch – at the same place that the female graduate student assigned to take me out, took me. Later when I asked the department head if I would have an opportunity to teach upper division chemistry, he told me that female TA’s were not well received by the student body. I ran the other way. Once I was settled in a great program I experienced little gender disconnect. In my first year, I was teaching an upper division lab class. I should note that I went to a school with a very young faculty and with (gasp) three female faculty members.


I believe that I had a few more hurdles in the workplace than I had in education as a women. When I signed on as a post-doc, my mentor made sure to get me a p-card immediately, so I could place the teams' orders and I worked editing their reports and pulling their presentations together. I was a glorified admin. When I was in the lab and the guys walked in they would say, “hi honey, I am home” and the like. The team I was hired into was very unfriendly to women and when I started asking around the other women nodded and one even said that the whole group was shocked when this team brought a woman post-doc on. In order to advance I had to pick myself up, meet others, prove myself to others and make a name for myself. The guys who came in the same time as me were being paraded around like princes while I was struggling to get someone to give me the time of day.


“Has public perception changed about women scientists?”


Yes, I had the student last summer who as a senior had never encountered anything less than 50% female student body. I never had anything close to 50% women in my classes at a very liberal college. But this is college, in the workplace I think there is a ways to go.


Today, I am working in project management and I recently had an incident with a coworker that was not happy with me. Some of the things he said, and the analogies he made to our managers lead me to sit and wonder if he would have said these things of a man sitting across the table from him. I am quite positive not. I think (large stereotype here) "older" men are not afraid to challenge a woman in the workplace more on her knowledge or leadership abilities. There seems to be a perception that you have to be a ball breaker to move up, act like a man, don’t bring your femininity, but these are the same things that are frowned upon when we look up to women who have made it. I work quite well with men in the same general age group as myself. My Gen-X counterparts get it. They are the ones pulling double duty with their wives in child rearing and who have heard their wives come home with tales like mine. I tend to think that they would never treat a woman in a way they wouldn’t want their wives treated. Older generations (complete generalization here) their wives didn’t work in technical fields and many never worked at all. They don't have that same thought process or female professors or mentors to draw upon that the Gen X'ers did.


“Have there been hurdles you have faced that a man would not have faced?”


Getting exposure. When I first started as a post-doc so often it was assumed I was an admin assistant. I will claim that it is all about who you know. There are men here that are afraid to know a woman. Many deals are brokered over lunch, but many men are afraid to go have lunch with a female colleague – at least outside of a group. It presents a Catch-22. I work with a woman who told me about asking a manager to have dinner with her one night. She was married, he was married. She had some technical questions she wanted to pose and suggested they grab a bite to eat. He was so taken aback that he actually mentioned to her “sexual harassment”. Would this happen with two guys? No, they would go grab a beer at the local sports bar.


Another aspect, I went through a spell there working for a manager whose wife had never worked out of the home. The realities I faced with being a working mom with a newborn were foreign to him and he pretty much chalked me up as a whiner and told me there was no reason I couldn’t pump in the bathroom. When I pointed out there were no outlets he told me to get a battery pack. While I was out on my first maternity leave I had my first proposal funded. He handed it off to a man in my group citing he, “didn’t know what I wanted to do when I came back from leave”. He also never asked.


“What would you tell a girl who is contemplating a career in science?”


To find a good mentor at every stage. And by mentor I don’t mean manager – they have their own interests at heart in what they want you to do. Find someone you can talk freely to about what you want to do with your career. I wish I would have had more mentors in my career. Bachelors and then Masters or PhD so often is the given in science, but a mentor will be able to make suggestions based off experience, what do you really need to get where you want? What is the reality of academic positions? What if you love science, but wonder if there are other opportunities than standing in the lab? I have learned in the last few years that I have a propensity for management and business development. There are times when, despite the fact that this is what I want to be doing, I wonder if I am wasting my Ph.D. as I interact with managers sporting MBAs? The closest thing I have to a mentor right now (I am getting a new one in May) has told me no way, that in his product line he values highly technical managers. But just maybe, had I had someone early on in deciding what my career was going to be like and what life I wanted, maybe someone would have pointed me another way?