I have a colleague who is probably about 5 years older, faculty, and had been working on a project that I'm supposed to take over. It took months to make email contact with her, she didn't really apologize for that, and then I concentrated on other projects because I found her long email response time (and associated traits) difficult to deal with. Plus she is beautiful and well-dressed with pictures of her beautiful, well-dressed kid all over her office, and assorted baby equipment.
And I find the project daunting in tedious ways (i.e., it's a time-consuming new trendy method, and it's not clear that all the time put into the method yields much better work than things I already know or other things I could learn).
But I came back to the project, though, because I like the PI and I wanted the PI to be happy with me.
This colleague is difficult in all the ways you can imagine. And yet I had an "after school special" type breakthrough with her when I noticed no pictures of a significant other in her office. Just lots of kid pictures. And no ring on her wedding ring finger, just a ring on the engagement finger that looks nothing like an engagement ring. Or wedding ring, for that matter.
So if she is difficult to deal with maybe that is part of why. And baby equipment in the office could be that she is a single mom without a backup in case the child is sick. Who knows.
Showing posts with label biological clock. Show all posts
Showing posts with label biological clock. Show all posts
Friday, April 24, 2009
Friday, June 20, 2008
Paths not taken
The guy I almost married's wedding is coming up soon. We had dated for 3-5 years, picked locations where we could both get good jobs and I helped him choose his internship, and we started to plan a wedding. He shopped for engagement rings and checked out books from the library on how to plan a wedding. We chose a date during the week of our anniversary. When our favorite vineyard closed (I'm not the kind of person to have a favorite vineyard, so it's that good), I bought a bottle of wine for when we got engaged. But then out of simultaneous sanity and insanity, I broke up with him.
(When it's over, it's over, so it doesn't much matter who broke up with whom. Except I feel the need to add that for what follows. In one of the few conversations I had with Michael recently, he expressed surprise that I was the one who broke up with the guy I almost married. Do I really seem so desperate?)
He got a permanent job exactly where we were going to be together and their wedding date is the day we had chosen, the week of our anniversary. After months and months of not thinking about him at all, now that I know he is getting married I keep thinking about him, especially given their wedding date. I suppose because it's a little bit like a death: we used to speak a few times a year, and now the expectation seems to be that I can't talk to him again after he was such a big part of my life. He has been dating this woman for 1.5-2 years, and asked me to get back together 6, 4, and 3 months before their engagement. He only told me difficult things about her, such as her fairly debilitating mental illness and the fact that he scared himself how angry he would get with her since she looked up to him so much. When I asked him if he loved her 4 months before their engagement, he hesitated and said how grateful he is to her for being so supportive. Of course he might be reticent to say good things about her to me, but it's so hard to hide being in love even if you try. I couldn't hide my feelings for the person I'm in love with.
The whole business concerned me and I'd been thinking about it more, so I called him up. I thought he could find a woman he could have a more equal relationship with. Our relationship had been imbalanced, and his relationship seemed imbalanced the other way. He proceeded to give a list of ways in which she was better than I was. Ouch. Though mostly they were things she was doing for him, which underlines the issue of equality. Not my problem. Not my problem. Not my problem.
Women who are less attached to their careers really do have an easier time finding relationships.
Part of me thinks that I gave up my only opportunity to have a solid relationship. Definitely I gave up my only chance to get married while young, and so it was that I ended up plunging back into the world of older dating, with all its inequalities and stereotype reinforcement.
I wish I could say that I didn't regret anything or that I couldn't have acted differently than I did, but the reality is that I could have.
I can say that breaking up with him allowed me to find a relationship of equals where there's palpable love and affection in even criticism, and somehow the things that would drive me up the wall with someone else just don't bother me, and I have a hard time staying angry with him, even when he made me furious, and we're secure in the other's love. Though we live a few time zones apart and he doesn't want kids and isn't even sure whether he wants to marry anyone, and he just broke up with me. He's still my best friend. And I'm his, though that's more by default.
I am very grateful: some people never find love in their whole lives, and I've found love several times. Rising expectations from near misses are still frustrating.
(When it's over, it's over, so it doesn't much matter who broke up with whom. Except I feel the need to add that for what follows. In one of the few conversations I had with Michael recently, he expressed surprise that I was the one who broke up with the guy I almost married. Do I really seem so desperate?)
He got a permanent job exactly where we were going to be together and their wedding date is the day we had chosen, the week of our anniversary. After months and months of not thinking about him at all, now that I know he is getting married I keep thinking about him, especially given their wedding date. I suppose because it's a little bit like a death: we used to speak a few times a year, and now the expectation seems to be that I can't talk to him again after he was such a big part of my life. He has been dating this woman for 1.5-2 years, and asked me to get back together 6, 4, and 3 months before their engagement. He only told me difficult things about her, such as her fairly debilitating mental illness and the fact that he scared himself how angry he would get with her since she looked up to him so much. When I asked him if he loved her 4 months before their engagement, he hesitated and said how grateful he is to her for being so supportive. Of course he might be reticent to say good things about her to me, but it's so hard to hide being in love even if you try. I couldn't hide my feelings for the person I'm in love with.
The whole business concerned me and I'd been thinking about it more, so I called him up. I thought he could find a woman he could have a more equal relationship with. Our relationship had been imbalanced, and his relationship seemed imbalanced the other way. He proceeded to give a list of ways in which she was better than I was. Ouch. Though mostly they were things she was doing for him, which underlines the issue of equality. Not my problem. Not my problem. Not my problem.
Women who are less attached to their careers really do have an easier time finding relationships.
Part of me thinks that I gave up my only opportunity to have a solid relationship. Definitely I gave up my only chance to get married while young, and so it was that I ended up plunging back into the world of older dating, with all its inequalities and stereotype reinforcement.
I wish I could say that I didn't regret anything or that I couldn't have acted differently than I did, but the reality is that I could have.
I can say that breaking up with him allowed me to find a relationship of equals where there's palpable love and affection in even criticism, and somehow the things that would drive me up the wall with someone else just don't bother me, and I have a hard time staying angry with him, even when he made me furious, and we're secure in the other's love. Though we live a few time zones apart and he doesn't want kids and isn't even sure whether he wants to marry anyone, and he just broke up with me. He's still my best friend. And I'm his, though that's more by default.
I am very grateful: some people never find love in their whole lives, and I've found love several times. Rising expectations from near misses are still frustrating.
Monday, April 21, 2008
Faculty job = decreased odds of children
This paper finds that doctors and lawyers have more kids than professors, and fast-track females are less likely to have kids than fast-track males.
Just reading the abstract scaled down my career ambitions by an order of magnitude. I'm tempted to turn down all my options and apply intensively to the non-faculty non-industry jobs in my field.
Just reading the abstract scaled down my career ambitions by an order of magnitude. I'm tempted to turn down all my options and apply intensively to the non-faculty non-industry jobs in my field.
Monday, February 4, 2008
The Murphy Brown alternative
One of my interviewers had had the postdoc several years before; immediately after, she got a faculty position there. She was the success story for the postdoc, and I was completely impressed. She had mentioned during an earlier meal together that she had recently become a parent, so I was even more impressed when she mentioned during her interview that she had gotten a prestigious multi-year federal junior faculty grant on the second try. During the interview I was hanging on her every word hoping to glean information about how she accomplished this amazing feat. I was a bit puzzled when she mentioned that she had applied for a job in her home state since it was not even close to as good as this school. Towards the end of the interview, while trying to sell me on the department being so family-friendly, she mentioned that she had given birth as a single parent.
I'm all for the Murphy Brown alternative, and it's something that I plan to do if I need to; I hope I won't. In fact, I find the prospect completely petrifying. To have children before having a husband means risking never finding a husband; few men have the patience to help raise someone else's children, even an anonymous donor's. To wait to have children until finding a husband means risking never having one's own biological children. I hope to God that I never face this choice between romantic love and biological children. Going by all the fertility statistics I've seen, though, I'll need to start thinking about this choice about 3-4 years from now.
It's always been a sad fact of academia that the successful women are more likely to be the unmarried ones. A study of women's success in academia found that after you control for having children, women were equally successful as men. As (I believe) Virginia Woolf said, "Everyone needs a wife," that is, someone to look after their life details.
After meeting this woman, I am starting to think that this price for success might just be too high. I now have no doubts in my competence that I could be a full professor with zillions of dollars of grants, publishing in the top journals and tackling the most important problems in the field. I know for sure that I don't care a rat's ass about the most important problems compared with having a biological family. It's not even something that I need to stop a moment to consider.
It's not news to me that it happens that women who wanted children aren't in the position to have them as they'd intended: the stories are legion. What's shocking to me (but maybe it shouldn't be) is the irony. She's academically a phenomenal role model to have gotten this prestigious grant. There's no free lunch, and every hour spent at work is an hour spent away from family and personal life. We, the academic hoi polloi, are often left to imagine the personal costs of luminaries' success, such as spouses and children left behind during conferences.
The personal costs of a role model's success --- and therefore my potential personal costs of optimizing my work decisions versus personal factors --- don't get any clearer. Worse, she may pay an additional price in her professional advancement: I guess that she's looking at the much less prestigious position in her home state because it's near her family, and she'd like the moral support.
I'm all for the Murphy Brown alternative, and it's something that I plan to do if I need to; I hope I won't. In fact, I find the prospect completely petrifying. To have children before having a husband means risking never finding a husband; few men have the patience to help raise someone else's children, even an anonymous donor's. To wait to have children until finding a husband means risking never having one's own biological children. I hope to God that I never face this choice between romantic love and biological children. Going by all the fertility statistics I've seen, though, I'll need to start thinking about this choice about 3-4 years from now.
It's always been a sad fact of academia that the successful women are more likely to be the unmarried ones. A study of women's success in academia found that after you control for having children, women were equally successful as men. As (I believe) Virginia Woolf said, "Everyone needs a wife," that is, someone to look after their life details.
After meeting this woman, I am starting to think that this price for success might just be too high. I now have no doubts in my competence that I could be a full professor with zillions of dollars of grants, publishing in the top journals and tackling the most important problems in the field. I know for sure that I don't care a rat's ass about the most important problems compared with having a biological family. It's not even something that I need to stop a moment to consider.
It's not news to me that it happens that women who wanted children aren't in the position to have them as they'd intended: the stories are legion. What's shocking to me (but maybe it shouldn't be) is the irony. She's academically a phenomenal role model to have gotten this prestigious grant. There's no free lunch, and every hour spent at work is an hour spent away from family and personal life. We, the academic hoi polloi, are often left to imagine the personal costs of luminaries' success, such as spouses and children left behind during conferences.
The personal costs of a role model's success --- and therefore my potential personal costs of optimizing my work decisions versus personal factors --- don't get any clearer. Worse, she may pay an additional price in her professional advancement: I guess that she's looking at the much less prestigious position in her home state because it's near her family, and she'd like the moral support.
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