A perennial favorite topic around here, you know.
First off, an unsurprising finding: the same resume with a male name is more likely to garner a job offer as an academic lab manager than if it has a female name AND the salary offered is $5000 higher.
On the bright side, the Royal Society is planning to do a bit to increase awareness of the contributions of women to science. They’re planning a Wikipedia editing campaign for October 19 to add or improve articles on female scientists. Good for them: these women deserve to be known.
(Note: In both cases, but especially the second, don’t read the comments. Discover attracts a better class of commenters than Yahoo, but there are still some aggravating things being said.)
Ada Lovelace Day is October 16 this year. I need to come up with someone to write about. In previous years I’ve covered Beatrix Potter, Elizabeth Blackwell and Maria Mitchell. Hm. Rachel Carson maybe?
Personally, I’m taking the day off from science. Yesterday was effectively the last day of the year for me and I made all my deadlines, but I need a break. I’d be playing Torchlight 2 if I could get it to run…
I would dearly love to see this study re-done in Industry. I have looked at my company structure versus the equivalent NIH structure, and we have far more female department heads than they do. The chief science officer for both my division and the company are black females. I didn’t see a single black female department head at NIH last time I looked, and many of the female heads were interim appointments.
Academia and government seem to be far more regressive in this regard than the bigger companies (I think Janiece has a much better experiecne in a company at the top of the Fortune 500 food chain than her previous employer who was at the very bottom). I think this is largely because regulators and lawyers see them as both more pure-hearted (hah!) and more poor, therefore not worth going after.