In article <3.0.1.16.19980630194741.419f6cde at pop-server.bcc.ac.uk>,
Jan Henry <jan.henry at ucl.ac.uk> wrote:
>> My dad said something to me recently which rather shocked me: he said
> "Never, NEVER work for a woman if you can help it". My first reaction was
> as any reasonable feminist type would -- how can you make such a terrible
> generalisation -- but I think he may actually be right!
>> There are some women in science who are as nice as they are intelligent and
> hard-working, but in my experience (in getting now to the end of a PhD) a
> great number of the women in charge are nasty, vindictive, spiteful and
> seem to have chips on their shoulders, and their behaviour seems
> particularly directed towards other women! Men under their care seem to be
> treated as golden boys whilst the women are treated like naughty, lazy,
> sullen little girls.
I worked in a lab headed by a woman when I got my PhD. It was fairly
grueling, but I would be happy to say that most of the negative things about
the experience, and about our working relationship, stemmed from the fact
that I was her first student, we were working at a university that was very
unsupportive of junior faculty, and we were both critical, opinionated,
determined and intense (as are most research scientists). One of the best
things about working in this lab were the great relationships that I had with
the other students and post-docs. I know it is anecdotal, but I would
suggest that the men out there who are willing to work with a junior faculty
woman, are among the best guys to have as colleagues. My PhD supervisor
has continued to be supportive of me and my career, even though I have taken
a path outside academic research (I am now at a pharmaceutical company). She
was always interested in what I was doing as a post-doc, gave me good
suggestions on my projects, and was the most critical reader I had when I
asked her to edit a giant review article for me and my post-doc supervisor.
She was very hard on me and her other students while we worked for her, but
once we finished our degrees she has been nothing but supportive. If
you want cautions about who to work for, I would be far more apprehensive
about joining up with a small, marginally funded lab, headed by an untenured
junior faculty member. I think some of the problems people have with women
supervisors are that many of them are in this situation. Their futures are
not assured and they don't yet have the clout to get their research well
known. I don't know that many well-established women scientists with big,
well funded labs. The one I DO know, was my supervisors PhD supervisor, and
she is so well known for seeding the field with researchers that a photo of
her at her lab's reunion was in an issue of 'Science' a few years ago.
Neither of these women are especially easy to get on with, but both support
their people during and after their time in lab, which really counts in my
book. It is possible that my supervisor was harder on me than she was on
some of the men in lab, but I always got the feeling that it was because she
had high expectations. Marian B.
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