What's Out There

• Nature Communications

  Potentially Long-Lasting Effects of the Pandemic on Scientists

  Two surveys of principal investigators conducted between April 2020 and January 2021 reveal that while the COVID-19 pandemic’s initial impacts on scientists’ research time seem alleviated, there has been a decline in the rate of initiating new projects. This dimension of impact disproportionately affects female scientists and those with young children and appears to be homogeneous across fields. These findings may have implications for understanding the long-term effects of the pandemic on scientific research. Read More

• The New York Times

  This Is How Everyday Sexism Could Stop You From Getting That Promotion

  When the computer scientist and mathematician Lenore Blum announced her resignation from Carnegie Mellon University in 2018, the community was jolted. A distinguished professor, she’d helped found the Association for Women in Mathematics, and made seminal contributions to the field. But she said she found herself steadily marginalized from a center she’d help create — blocked from important decisions, dismissed and ignored. She explained at the time: “Subtle biases and microaggressions pile up, few of which on their own rise to the level of ‘let’s take action,’ but are insidious nonetheless.” Read More

• National Institutes of Health

  Parenting in a Time of COVID

  Next week marks the one-year anniversary of NIH shifting to maximum telework in response to the COVID-19 pandemic. Like employers and employees across the country, overnight we needed to adapt our entire enterprise and reinvent our jobs in the virtual workplace. Coincidentally, next week is also when with a deep breath and a big hug, I send my six year old back to school in person, masked up and excited to meet his 1st grade teacher in person for the first time. So it seems like a good time to reflect on what the past year has been like, juggling the demands of serving in the leadership of a government agency square in the middle of COVID response with the needs of two young children during this nationwide experiment in virtual schooling. Read More

• The Atlantic

  The Coronavirus Is a Disaster for Feminism

  Enough already. When people try to be cheerful about social distancing and working from home, noting that William Shakespeare and Isaac Newton did some of their best work while England was ravaged by the plague, there is an obvious response: Neither of them had child-care responsibilities. Working from home in a white-collar job is easier; employees with salaries and benefits will be better protected; self-isolation is less taxing in a spacious house than a cramped apartment. But one of the most striking effects of the coronavirus will be to send many couples back to the 1950s. Across the world, women’s independence will be a silent victim of the pandemic. Read More

• The Guardian

  Women's domestic burden just got heavier with the coronavirus

  The bulk of household chores in heterosexual couples is already borne by women – a situation exacerbated by the huge dislocations of the pandemic. Study after study has shown that even as women have stepped forward in the workforce, in married heterosexual couples women still shoulder the bulk of household chores. That means when kids come home from school, sick or otherwise – as they are and will be around the country in the coming days and weeks – the answer to the question of who takes care of them is gendered. Read More

• Harper's Bazaar

  Everyone Is Home Right Now, But Who’s Doing All the “Home” Work?

  Imagine a giant social experiment where all the undervalued and underpaid women required to get through your day went missing—teachers, housekeepers, babysitters, grandmothers, nannies, home-care aids, you name it—and you and your partner are left to figure it out. Except that ‘experiment’ is reality now. Read More

• Bloomberg

  Women Are Bearing the Brunt of Coronavirus Disruption

  In strictly medical terms, the new coronavirus seems to hit men harder than women. In an analysis of nearly 45,000 cases in China, the death rate was 2.8% for men, compared with 1.7% for women. And men made up a slight majority of the infected, at 51%. One theory is that men, particularly in China, are more likely to smoke cigarettes, so have weaker lungs. Cardiovascular disease, which is highly correlated with coronavirus fatalities, is also more prevalent in men. But as the virus spreads globally, it appears women are bearing the brunt of the social and economic disruption. The vast majority of nurses, flight attendants, teachers and service industry workers are female, and their jobs put them on the front lines of the outbreak. Read More

• Slate

  We Dug Into Data to Disprove a Myth About Women in STEM

  The argument used to be that women were simply biologically less capable. Now it’s that they’re less interested. Both are wrong. In 2018, a man-bites-dog claim appeared in the journal Psychological Science: In countries with less gender equality, like Algeria and United Arab Emirates, women were more likely to get higher education degrees in science, technology, engineering, and math than they were in more gender-equal countries like Norway and Finland. The authors, psychologists Gijsbert Stoet and David Geary, called this the “gender-equality paradox” in STEM. The counterintuitive finding brought headlines like the Atlantic’s dreary “The More Gender Equality, the Fewer Women in STEM.” Read More

• The Scientist

  When Two Scientists Fall in Love

  Catherine and Wolf Fridman met more than 40 years ago when they were research trainees at the Saint Louis Hospital in Paris. “Wolf is a very articulate person and I was impressed by his medical knowledge,” says Catherine, now an immunologist at the University Paris-Descartes. Wolf, an immunologist at the same institute, was similarly impressed with Catherine, who he found “very smart.” It would be another six years—and a marriage and divorce for each of them—but the two researchers eventually started dating, and got married. The Fridmans are one of many couples whose romance was catalyzed by science. Read More

• University at Albany

  Hearing Women's Voices

  A diverse group of approximately 50 female stakeholders from across all three campuses convened in the Campus Center Boardroom last week to provide University leadership with feedback and discuss the challenges and opportunities associated with the one thing they all have in common: being a woman at the University at Albany.

• Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

  NIH funding longevity by gender

  Diversity of the biomedical workforce is essential to the scientific enterprise, yet women remain underrepresented in academic positions in biomedical sciences and compose less than one-third of National Institutes of Health (NIH) research grantees.  We explored NIH grant support as a proxy for participation in acedemic research.  We found that women had similar funding longevity as men after they received their first major NIH grants, contradicting the common assumption that across all career....

• genomeweb

  Science Sisters Are Doing it for Themselves

  Sexism in science is nothing new. Several studies have shown in recent years that women are still underrepresented in science faculties. 
  
  And when women do climb the ladder in science, a BBC News report says, they may find they're the only women in rooms full of men.

• The New York Times

  What Happens When Women Legislate

  Cheaper tampons. Office breaks to pump breast milk. No copay on birth control.
  
  These are not the talking points of a ladies’ happy hour. They are among the State Senate and Assembly bills being considered in the Nevada Legislature. Not only were the bills designed solely with women in mind, they each were sponsored by a female lawmaker.

• Times Higher Education

  ‘Publishing While Female’

  Female economists write papers that are more readable than those produced by their male counterparts but take significantly longer to get published, a new study has found.
  Research presented at the Royal Economic Society’s annual conference said that female-authored papers were between 1 and 6 percent better written than male peers’ efforts, according to common readability tests. The gap was largest in published texts rather than in earlier drafts, with the difference principally generated during the peer-review process.

• iBiology

  Joanne Kamens: Not Networking 101: Building Relationships for Success

  Networking is one of the most important career building activities a person can undertake. Many people think networking involves formal events, however in her iBiology talk, Joanne Kamens discusses how this is often not the case. There are opportunities to build connections everywhere you go, and Kamens gives strategies and advice on how to build and maintain relationships in a variety of ways. This seminar was co-sponsored by the American Society for Cell Biology Committee for Postdocs and Students.

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  The Economist

  Women in research - Science remains male-dominated

  MARCH 8th was International Women’s Day. That seemed to Elsevier, an academic publisher, a good occasion to publish a report looking at the numbers and performance of female scientists around the world. The report, “Gender in the Global Research Landscape”, analysed the authorship of more than 62m peer-reviewed papers published in 27 subject areas over the past 20 years, in 11 mostly rich countries and in the European Union as a whole. The papers and their citations are indexed in Scopus, a database that is run by Elsevier.

• 
  new york times

  C. Megan Urry, Peering Into Universe, Spots Bias on the Ground

  C. Megan Urry is a former president of the American Astronomical Society and the first woman to head the physics department at Yale University. Recently inducted to the National Academy of Sciences, she has published pioneering studies on the role of black holes in the formation of galaxies.

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  sciencemag.org

  Family-friendly science

  A little more than a decade ago, as an aspiring scientist working toward my Ph.D., I spent an unfortunate number of hours debating with myself and discussing with my peers whether it was possible to have kids and be a successful scientist.

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  sciencemag.org

  In bold new step, Dutch science academy holds women-only elections

  AMSTERDAM—Sorry guys—this time it’s women only. That’s the message the Royal Netherlands Academy of Arts and Sciences (KNAW) here has for male researchers during two special elections. In order to reduce its perpetual gender imbalance—87% of its 556 members are men—the academy seeks to recruit 10 new members in 2017 and six more in 2018, all female.

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  national academy of sciences

  Celebrating Women in Science

  Published since 1877, Biographical Memoirs provide the life histories and selected bibliographies of deceased National Academy of Sciences members. Colleagues familiar with the subject's work write these memoirs and as such, the series provides a biographical history of science in America. This special collection features memoirs of women who shaped American science.

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  medium

  Having It All Kinda Sucks

  Only women would sign up for this much crap.

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  ny times

  When Teamwork Doesn’t Work for Women

  Economics remains a stubbornly male-dominated profession, a fact that members of the profession have struggled to understand.

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  thinkprogress

  Even With Hard Evidence Of Gender Bias In STEM Fields, Men Don’t Believe It’s Real

  The first step to solving the problem of bias against women in STEM is admitting it exists.

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  CNN

  Why one activist thinks we need a men's movement

  About a year ago, I began a quiet one-year residency at a prestigious American university, invited because there were endless allegations by female students about rape and other forms of sexual assault by fraternity members and male athletes on campus. School administrators were red-faced and eager for outside help.

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  inside higher ed

  Eye of the Beholder

  More and more research suggests gender bias in the sciences. But do men and women similarly trust evidence demonstrating such bias? A new paper argues that men and women interpret this kind of evidence -- however scientific -- differently, and that that has implications for the field as a whole.

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  ny times

  What Really Keeps Women Out of Tech

  Technology companies know they have a gender and diversity problem in their work force, and they are finally taking steps to try to fix it. But where are those new employees going to come from if women and minority students aren’t opting to study computer science or engineering?

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  ny times

  A Toxic Work World

  For many Americans, life has become all competition all the time. Workers across the socioeconomic spectrum, from hotel housekeepers to surgeons, have stories about toiling 12- to 16-hour days (often without overtime pay) and experiencing anxiety attacks and exhaustion.

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  boston globe

  Eric Betzig’s Life Over the Microscope

  A stark gender gap persists at Boston’s big biomedical research institutions, where young male scientists receive more than twice as much in funding to support their work as female colleagues, according to a study.

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  inside higher ed

  Ending All-Male Panels

  "There aren't enough women." "A quota system would be needed." "Change will take a generation." Those are some of the answers that have been given by organizers of scholarly meetings for having relatively few women on panels at annual meetings, and for having plenty of panels with no women at all.

• 
  CNN

  The Myth About Women in Science

  The prevailing wisdom is that sexist hiring in academic science roadblocks women's careers before they even start. The American Association of University Professors and blue-ribbon commissions attest to this.

• 
  nature international weekly journal of science

  Leading Scientists Favour Women in Tenure-Track Hiring Test

  US science and engineering professors preferred female job candidates by two to one.

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  reuters

  Grants Help Level the Playing Field for Young Moms in Science

  Thanks to a generous benefactor, young mothers doing laboratory research at the Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston can receive major grants to keep them from falling behind while they raise their children.

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  gulf times

  The Legend of Beatrice

  Beatrice de Cardi, who celebrates her one hundredth birthday today, is the world’s oldest working archaeologist. She has become a legend in her time.

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  new york times

  Is the Professor Bossy or Brilliant? Much Depends on Gender

  Male professors are brilliant, awesome and knowledgeable. Women are bossy and annoying, and beautiful or ugly.

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  new york times

  Madam C.E.O., Get Me a Coffee

  Women help more but benefit less from it. In keeping with deeply held gender stereotypes, we expect men to be ambitious and results-oriented, and women to be nurturing and communal.

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  American institute of physics

  Double Jeopardy? Gender Bias Against Women of Color in Science

  The paucity of women in science has been documented over and over again. A 2012 Report from the President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology reported that a deficit of one million engineers and scientists will result in the United States if current rates of training in science, technology, math, and engineering (STEM) persist (President’s Council of Advisors on Science and Technology, 2012).

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  aaas advancing science. serving society.

  Opinions About Raw Talent May Steer Women Toward Certain Academic Fields

  Stereotypes that suggest men have certain natural talents that most women do not might be partly responsible for the distribution of gender across various fields of academia, researchers say in a new study.