Thursday, January 20, 2011

Website of the Day


Women in Science, moderated by Laura Hoopes and hosted by SciTable, an education arm (free!) of Nature.

About once a week, Hoopes describes some event / problem / experience, and follows it up with a question -- for the community to discuss. See, for example, this week's discussion which builds on a key insight -- why science must adapt to women -- in a 2002 interview of Elizabeth Blackburn:

"The argument has been that the pipeline will take care of this," Blackburn says, referring to the idea that if enough women are encouraged to enter science early, the gender gap, over time, will disappear. "But the pipeline has been good for a number of years, and it hasn't taken care of it. In biology it's especially insidious because 50 percent of grad students are female. This has been the case for quite some time. Yet when I was chair of my department, I was the only woman chair in the entire medical school. We are putting a lot of our students off continuing—both men and women, but more women. They vote with their feet."

0 Comments: