Women in Academia: Stars

RPM writes about a senior female scientist resigning a post over a failure to hire a female editor

Astronomy is one of the sciences with very low senior female presence, not the lowest, but way down there. The incident RPM relates brings to mind a case...

I was asked by a very senior colleague what I thought about offering a policy/administrative position to a female colleague that I knew well. A auxillary position, to be done in parallel with her professorial duties as "service", but with a high profile, politically important and extremely time consuming.

I thought she was a great choice, she is very smart, very hard working, takes such duties very seriously and it'd look good on her CV. She would have done the job well.

But, she is mid-career, working on some major research projects and has a life. She is productive, but if she took such a position it would necesssarily cut significantly into something, most likely research output. I also took stock and realised she was on every imaginable committe and doing a double load of service duty.

So... I added a caveat - I recommended her as a choice but asked they not push her on it; as I saw it, a lot of my female colleagues were being drowned in service duties, which they were having a hard time declining; and they were being asked because, quite frankly, it was good for the organizations, not because it was good for them.

There has to be some happy medium here, on the one hand in underrepresented fields you need top female scientists to take on major positions of authority and responsibility, on the other hand we mustn't make this such a burden that it drags down peoples' performance in their primary research duties. The temptation is there at every level, and in my anecdotal impressionary survey, in my limited subfield the senior female scientist are getting "service creep" of maybe double the normal level expected of the rest of us (not that service duties are uniformly spread among the male scientists, but that is a different and even more delicate rant).

It is a difficult situation: you don't want to not offer positions like that to good female scientists, but on the other hand you can't dump all this work on them either - the positions are respected in many cases because they are so burdensome to those holding them...

As for my friend, as I understand it, she was approached and declined promptly and they didn't push it. This time.