“It would probably also be beneficial to find one or two male biologists to work with.” is what Fiona Ingleby and Megan Head were told by a reviewer from the journal PLoS One (Baitz, 2015). This is merely one of the many things that women that pursue careers in science hear everyday. They are a minority, and they are often not taken seriously and discouraged. According to Hango (2013), in 2011, only 39% of graduates in science, technology, engineering and math (STEM) were women, with as little as 23% in engineering. Meanwhile, women accounted for 66% of graduates in non-STEM programs. There are many reasons why there is such discrepancy between the number of women and men in the STEM field, like gender stereotypes, organizational culture and
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Although fatherhood seldom impacts the career of a man, motherhood has a huge one in a woman’s professional life, some even happily quit their careers altogether. Women are frequently “complimented” about how they have successful careers, are married and, when they get home, still take care of the kids, it does not matter in which field. Whereas people do not say the same to their male peers. As a consequence to this idea, great female scientists have their legacy understating their professional endeavors. In 2013, the first paragraph on The New York Times obituary of the brilliant Yvone Brills was “She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children” (as cited in Tabor, 2015). In response to this article, journalist Christine Aschwander created the “Finkbeiner test” for writing about female scientists, in which “to pass the Finkbeiner test, the story cannot mention the fact that she’s a woman, her husband’s job, her child care arrangements, how she nurtures her underlings, how she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field, how she’s a role model for other women and how she’s the ‘first woman to…’” (Aschwander, 2013, para. 10). Christine urges authors to take what they were about to write and think if they would write the same if the subject was a man. If it sounds absurd, it should not be part of the
Although fatherhood seldom impacts the career of a man, motherhood has a huge one in a woman’s professional life, some even happily quit their careers altogether. Women are frequently “complimented” about how they have successful careers, are married and, when they get home, still take care of the kids, it does not matter in which field. Whereas people do not say the same to their male peers. As a consequence to this idea, great female scientists have their legacy understating their professional endeavors. In 2013, the first paragraph on The New York Times obituary of the brilliant Yvone Brills was “She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children” (as cited in Tabor, 2015). In response to this article, journalist Christine Aschwander created the “Finkbeiner test” for writing about female scientists, in which “to pass the Finkbeiner test, the story cannot mention the fact that she’s a woman, her husband’s job, her child care arrangements, how she nurtures her underlings, how she was taken aback by the competitiveness in her field, how she’s a role model for other women and how she’s the ‘first woman to…’” (Aschwander, 2013, para. 10). Christine urges authors to take what they were about to write and think if they would write the same if the subject was a man. If it sounds absurd, it should not be part of the