by, for, and about women in science, technology, engineering, & math

Theoretically, I will be graduating next spring with a PhD in Microbiology. I love research and teaching, but I also love not being in debt. I’m tens of thousands of dollars in debt from my undergraduate education, and while my student loans are deferred until I get my PhD, the interest on the private loans is still accruing and in order to make my payments, the recommended salary is nearly 20-40% more than a postdoc makes.

I attend virtually every career talk available on campus and ask seminar speakers about their career paths. Of course, most people have been in academia their whole lives. They went smoothly from PhD to postdoc to professor where they spend the rest of their career begging for money and lose the bench work. This sounds terrible to me. Not only do you have to deal with the depression of another grant being rejected (I watched my boss go through it for several years), but you only get to talk about the science, not do it.

I’ve found a postdoc fellowship that fits my interests exactly (research + teaching), but it’s doubtful that I can afford to live on a postdoc salary and pay off my loans.

I don’t know anyone who has ventured into consulting or the Biotech industry, and I’d be lying if I said that I didn’t find the whole transition as daunting. They do make good money though.

Anyone out there with some advice?

I just attended an EPA user’s conference for a solid waste management program called RCRA. The EPA has system called RCRAInfo, which is where states submit the pertinent data for consumption by a wide variety of individuals.

During one of the panel discussions I was struck by how many women there are working on the technical side of things for this application. There were fifteen individuals introduced as members of the team doing the actual work on the software. Ten of them were women (and, because women ARE good at math, I don’t need to tell you how many men that means there were, or what percentage each gender comprises of the whole). The lead programmer for the web application is a woman, though it does appear that many of the upper management roles are still older men.

It appeared to me that there was a more equal distribution among the actual program members who were attending the conference, but perhaps there were a few more women than men who constituted the users of this software.

Obviously I have no real hard statistics for this, it was more just a sense of things, and it pleased me to see so many women working on/with this software. It got me wondering, though, about why it might be there would be more women in proportion than the average across industries (or if it just happened to be this particular program, or solid waste management in particular).

I work in applications development. My boss has five people he supervises, and there is one intern that we sorta oversee (her pay comes from a specific department, but she’s doing web development work so she works with us). My boss is male. He has two colleagues at his management level, one male and one female. All three of them report to a make “Super IT Boss”. In my section (applications development) there are two females, three males, and a female intern. Our intern is an actual college student whose major is web applications development. My female coworker went to college in the 70s, and studied geology (that’s what her degree is). Two of my male coworkers have been to college and studied computers, one at the typical young age, one as a second career. I don’t know think the third has a degree in computers. I came into computers from being a super user, not through having any sort of degree in them.

In the section that is supervised by a female, there is one other female. She was inherited during a re-org that centralized IT for our agency. The female supervisor never hires females, she most assuredly works better with males. She sometimes appears to have the attitude that females (herself excepted) don’t make good IT professionals. Though really I think it comes down to her simply not working well with other females. Personally, I think this is a totally lame excuse and she shouldn’t be allowed to get away with this, but I’m not willing to rock the boat on this front at this time. I have no idea how many women have even applied for any of her vacancies, so I don’t know if she’s really being sexist about it. She supervises five employees in total.

In the section supervised by the other male (not my boss), there are only two other employees, both male. It’s a very specific field (GIS), and I don’t know how many women have experience in it who would apply for a state job doing it (the previous supervisor for that section was female, she moved on to a corporate job in the same field).

I can think of a lot of reasons why public service might attract more females in technical careers. We certainly have a fair number of female scientists in our agency (I don’t know specifically though).

Perhaps because the hours are better. Overtime is rare because there’s simply no funding for it. It’s more conducive to having family and being able to get away when you need to for your kids.

Perhaps because the benefits are good. Not great, and not cheap (at least here in Vermont) but certainly way better than a lot of my friends in private industry have.

Or because they work hard to get rid of sexism in the work place. If you’re a systems developer II, you make the same wage as every other systems developer II who has worked the same amount of time as you have. There are no salary adjustments or negotiations for salary. The only place for there to be discrimination, really, is in the hiring practices of individual supervisors (if they never hire a female systems developer, for instance, despite there being qualified applicants), or in whether or not promotions are granted when vacancies open up, but that’s often a case of seniority, and someone would have to argue pretty strongly against a female candidate with seniority to not be promoted to fill a particular vacancy if she’s capable and wants the position.

It used to be that job security was a strong reason for working in public service. However, the latest economic meltdown has shown that governors are not above panicking and firing people without any serious consideration to the harm this does to the services that the people of the state expect to be available. So while it’s still a pretty secure job, it’s not as secure as it was three years ago.

On the down side, the pay, in general, is not really comparable to what I’d be making if I were in private industry. Though sometimes I wonder if I’m adjusting enough for that. I mean, I’d have to maintain a very different wardrobe than I have now (probably). That’s money out of the bottom line. There’s also the question of overtime, and how overtime is, from what I’ve heard, usually expected. And without compensation for it. At least here, if I HAVE to do overtime, I get 1 for 1 comp time off in exchange for it. So I wonder if I’d actually be making more money in the end, taking into account that I’d be doing 60 or more hours a week, instead of the absolute 40 I can count on here.

I wonder if more women would be interested in tech careers if they were looking more closely at public service positions.

Anyway, these are just some rambling musings…