The NY Times is playing that typical sexist game where they can say they are supporting women because of running these stories but being sneaky about it by placing them in sections where the people in power won’t see them.

From my experience managers would rather have a failed project than enlist the help of a woman who will outperform the guys.

ComputerWorld Magazine had an article about this phenomenon several years ago. There was the usual argle-bargle about women being afraid of technology and, like Barbie, finding math hard which I found difficult to believe to be truer in 2006 than in 1981. One respondent summed up the problem more accurately when he described women in technology as the canaries in the coal mine: the ones who were leaving the field first because it’s such a crappy way to make a living.

Between the expectation that you will be available 24 by 7 by forever at a moment’s notice, the implied threat of losing your job to outsourcing and the constant pressure to get something (anything) out in the quickest possible time at the lowest possible price, who needs it? You work horrendous hours to produce junk so you don’t even get the personal satisfaction of creating good work. Entire mission-critical systems are held together with spit, baling wire and unpaid overtime.

I have dealt with blatant sexism in my career only a few times. The real difficulty is being a (single!) mom and having jobs expect me to work 16 hour days. For a long time I dealt with it by refusing to work as an employee and declaring my own hours and work space. For three years I left tech completely. At my current job, pre-employment negotiations involved a grueling process of settling exactly what my hours were and laying out that if they wanted over time out of me it was going to be at my house, not in their office.

If programming wasn’t the only skill I have that makes a living wage in this country (Israel) I would probably be doing something else.

or the past year or so, after I finally realized how having kids had impacted my chosen career path (I am a toxicologist) I began asking for essays about family and career written by other science moms – eventually gathering essays from 33 women, whose careers span the 1970s-through current graduate students – which fill the pages of Motherhood the Elephant in the Laboratory: women science speak out, released this month by Cornell University Press.

This is a topic that lurks in the background but which isn’t always discussed – at least not by those in the trenches, except to those they consider “safe” (friends acquaintances) – for fear of looking unprofessional or loosing credibility.

I’d asked contributors how they keep their science alive while tending to family needs. Many wrote about alternative yet very satisfying career paths through the sciences, including part-time and full-time jobs, while others wrote about sharing academic positions, or raising kids while attaining tenure.

If you’d like to learn more about the project and the book, please visit
http://sciencemoms.wordpress.com/ The more women who speak out, the more likely things are to change (I hope.)

This all led to a book, recently published by Cornell University Press, Motherhood the Elephant in the Laboratory: women scientists speak out.