December Scientiae Carnival!

Hello, and welcome to the December Scientiae Carnival, where the theme is "transcending the debate." I wanted us to get to think about those places where we have moved beyond who is better at science, how or whether we should balance work and family, and ways we have changed in our time in the sciences. This month's submissions took up this challenge and then some! I offer you a number of excellent posts to peruse and enjoy.

Rather than write a separate submission myself, I wanted to briefly introduce why this topic is important to me. In addition to all the personal reasons -- I am a woman, a scientist, married to an academic, a feminist, and about to have a family -- I have been thinking a lot about the uselessness of dichotomous debates. There is a certain impotence to debates with two sides, a sense of increasing entrenchment, rather than movement in any particular direction. And I feel as though in academia, where we should know better, the fetishism of balance (to borrow a phrase I read recently in the context of the global warming debate) has made it so that we can't have honest conversations about what our lives look like and how we would like science research or education to look. It is with this premise that I wrote my mutability of biology post a little while ago. It is simply not useful to see biology as static, and thus attempt to find biological explanations for the discrepancy between men and women in science: our brains and behavior are too plastic, our environment too important to our development. Rather, if we spend some time focusing on the places where culture is too static, where it is the problem, I believe we can start moving towards positive change.

That said, here are our submissions on "transcending the debate."

Relationships and family

Mad Hatter writes about those spouses who are not helping women advance their careers in academia in The Feminists' Fairy Tale. These spouses are the ones we have all heard of, alas, who want women to come home from lab early so they can cook dinner, who encourage their spouses not to take academic jobs. Mad Hatter points a finger to those places where spouses are not allies as a place we should consider when trying to understand the gender inequity in science. I definitely think it's important for everyone in the life of female scientists to ask: how am I helping or hurting this woman, how am I enabling her to make decisions she can be proud of, and how can I be a consistently good ally?

ScienceWoman writes in I am a parent-blogger that there are men out there asking the same questions as women: can I balance work and family? How can I spend more time with my kids? Am I doing right by all the commitments in my life? She suggests we enlist these men as our allies, and I say right on.

Female Doc in Training at Kate's Casebook wrote a post entitled Women Scientist and Marital Status that is also an excellent read. She notices the places where women's marital status is included in colleagues' characterizations of them. Single women risk being heartless or lonely, and non-single women risk being viewed as valuing relationships over their work. It seems as though it would be useful to push back on this debate too!

Thinking ahead/back ten years

In transcending the debate, it seems important for us to take stock of our lives: where we've been, where we are, where we imagine ourselves to be. Has there been an upward trend, even if it has been masked by crummy coworkers, a sexist advisor, or a period of depression? Have you learned a lot from your time as a scientist? These writers have put their lives in perspective in wonderful ways.

In Transcending the Debate, Dr. Medusa notices how gender has become less important to her in her time as a scientist scholar. She has offered up some wonderful advice about how to let go of the debate -- I won't tell you so you'll read the post!

Propter Doc looks at her life through this lens in Plus or Minus Ten Years and offers some thoughts about how her expectations have shifted as she nears the end of her postdoc.

Amelie of Amelie's Welt also took up this challenge in her post 10 years. She wrote about the way time feels as it passes, how she became interested in science, and where she sees herself in ten years.

Transcending the debate in other ways

This is kind of like the miscellaneous bin, except that you'll find every offering to be excellent and insightful.

Cherish of Faraday's Cage is where you put Schroedinger's Cat wrote a post entitled When I grow up, I want to be like.... She discusses who her heroes are, but I think, also implicitly shows the ways in which she is a hero too.

Skookumchick, the goddess of Scientiae Carnival and blogger of Rants of a Feminist Engineer, wrote an uplifting post on recruiting more female engineers: Transcending the debate. Skookumchick thinks about the ways in which academic engineering can become a place that welcomes men and women, and becomes a great place for everyone to work because of the challenges and problems that are worth solving in that discipline.

In The You-Cann't-Do-It Factor, Jokerine shines a spotlight on those places where women have been pushed back: where we've been told we are less valuable, less capable, or less worthy. She suggests that those are the times we have an opportunity to push back and prove such naysayers wrong.

Twice notices those places where her son is admired for his masculine qualities, and her daughter for her feminine ones, though both children enjoy and excel at activities of the other gender. She manages to tell the story in a more nuanced, interesting way than I could in this blurb, so visit Transcending the Debate for more.

Mrs. Whatsit of I Love Science, Really tells us that she is Fine -- and it's true, she is! She is fine, and mindful, and interesting. She uses an amazing metaphor to describe being Okay or Not Okay as an academic that I am going to have to pass on to everyone I know.

And last but by no means least, Pat of Fairer Science offers this post for the carnival: So is this research design Republican or Democratic? In addition to including a link to an earlier post that addresses this carnival's particular prompt, she provides some useful thinking on where politics compromise good science -- a topic relevant to all of us.

Edited to add: There was one last late submission to Scientiae that I couldn't resist adding -- it's be ScienceMama and is entitled Woman Scientist. The post is about moving from being a female scientist to a scientist, and owning some of the places where she felt she could have played a role in moving beyond the sexism in her old lab.

Edited to add 2: Alien Ted has her own take on women in science in transcending the debate, and discusses why it was ultimately far better for her to leave science than continue being a scientist.

Edited to add 3: Acl! EcoGeoFemme also got left out. Check out her Transcending the gender debate post for more great insights.

NEXT MONTH: Next month's Scientiae Carnival will be hosted by the ever-wonderful Jokerine. Thanks for reading and I hope you enjoy the continued brilliance of the blogosphere!

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