charter of this newgroup

[Cassandra Smith]

Ladies and Gentlmen, 

The purpose of this discussion group is to promote networking among
professional women in the biological sciences. It seems that the
discussions are deteriorating to name callling which serves no useful
and may alienate many potentially useful listeners.

Perhaps this newgroup is so broad that it is difficult for those with
 mutually scientific interests to identify each other.The other
concern that I have is that there are not enough senior scientist
participating (and I assure most do not have the time to engage in or
listen to name calling incidents). 

I have two suggestion. First of all perhaps it might be a useful task
to identify those schools, programs and mentors who have been
particularly encouraging to women-whom or what would you recommend to
your sister or daughter? I suppose it would also be useful to identify
those that have not been supportive.  If there is enough interest I
will keep a tally.  Those interested could send this to the network or
to me and I will keep a tally. If you would like your comments
recorded anonymously please indicate that.

clsmith at darwin.bu.edu


My other suggestion is that we should focus on the science. Is there
some experimentor result that someone is really excited? Perhaps we
are getting in trouble here because this is too broad a group. In a
separate posting I will start this off with some recent molecular
results which reflect on human diversity.

Cassandra Smith