February 17, 2008
Career Talk for Female Scientists Spreads in the Blogosphere
Boston — Female scientists are increasingly using blogs and electronic message boards to talk about their professional challenges and connect with female colleagues (see a related blog item), said speakers at a forum at the annual AAAS meeting here.
The audience received a quick tour of some favorite spots in cyberspace. FemaleScienceProfessor, for example, is written by an anonymous woman who is a full professor in the physical sciences at a research university. “Some undergraduates (and others) have trouble believing that I am a ‘real’ professor,” she writes. “I have the greatest job in the world, but this will not stop me from noting some of the more puzzling and stressful aspects of my career.”
A streak of exasperation also runs through Thus Spake Zuska, a blog written by Suzanne E. Franks, who earned a doctorate in biomedical engineering and did graduate work in women’s studies. She claims to offer “the Web’s most excellent and informative rants on the intransigent refusal of engineering and science to open their doors to anyone but white males.”
Blogs and boards are “a way of getting your work out there to the public and also to the attention of your colleagues,” said Annalee Newtiz, a freelance journalist, during the forum. They’re “kind of an end run around the citation system.”
Ms. Newtiz is editor of io9.com, a Web site devoted to science fiction, but she likes to work in posts about women and careers. One recent example, “Girl Scientists Aren’t Mannish at All,” described some magazine portrayals of women from the 1950s that grate on modern ears, like a 1956 interview by American Girl of a Ph.D. scientist, Mary Summerfield. Evidently trying to dispel a stereotype of women scientists as unfeminine spinsters, she was quoted as saying, “Cosmic rays and cake baking are both lots of fun.”
Blogs and boards provide a platform for expression, but their contributors should give some additional thought to ensuring that they are also useful to women professionally, said Jolene Kay Jesse, an official of the National Science Foundation, during the session. Ms. Jesse directs an NSF research program on gender in science and engineering that financed a website, FairerScience, which is affiliated with Wellesley College and challenges stereotypes about women in science.
“If we don’t sit down first and say, what do they want from a board,” Ms. Jesse said, “we’re going to build something that might not be what we want.”
Jeffrey Brainard | Posted on Sunday February 17, 2008 | Permalink
Previous: Social-Network Analysis Provides Insights About Women in Science
Next: The Little Country That Roared