leaky pipeline

Spring, 2004. I was in the second year of my post-doc, with kids ages 4 and 2. Because I was no longer a student, the full brunt of my student loan payments had hit me, which were collectively almost double the cost of my mortgage. To put it generously, money was tight. Truthfully, we were broke as fuck and struggling each month to stay above water. I'm from a blue-collar background. My dad was a factory worker for 40 years. My mom had a teaching degree, but "paused" her career to have me (followed by my sister and brother), and was then diagnosed with multiple sclerosis shortly after my…

In recent days, there have been discussions of conditions for postdoctoral fellows, and about the ways that these conditions might make it challenging to tackle the problem of the "leaky pipeline" for women in science. For example, in comments at DrugMonkey's blog, bsci opines: Most people start a postdoc between the age of 25 and 30. Even in the academic world, a substantial portion of people are married by that age and a smaller, but non-trivial, proportion have children. How these people are supported on post-doc stipends is definitely an issue even in the first years of postdochood. When…