open letter to aspiring women scientists

I think we also need to show young women about science jobs outside of academia - I can never understand why so many STEM events concentrate on these, and non academic careers aren't highlighted. Especially as these may be the more family friendly long term.

I'm a physicist, on my first degree there were 90 in my year, 7 women (3 physics with music, 3 medical physics, 1 astrophysics). To my knowledge 3 of those women carried on in physics, none in academia.

In my job now, I travel the world working on the development and implementation of new radiotherapy techniques. I love what I do, and I'm proud to be a physicist. Even if people still think you might be booth totty!

Unless girls are encouraged from a young age to be interested in science we are going to see a cycle that just continues

Agreed - if bright young women are aspiring to media type jobs something is going wrong!

Our last chief executive was a female scientist and we have had female board members. Other women are the greatest ambassadors and please please please can you find time to spread the word to young people.

DD has started Uni and is working towards her goal. She knows that she will probably be the only woman where ever she works as of 60 students only 2 are female including DD. We discussed this and agree that it is better that there is 1 woman fighting for recognition in her field than no one. All DDs' friends from school are doing things like media studies. Unless girls are encouraged from a young age to be interested in science we are going to see a cycle that just continues.

I will say that a simple telescope set up in the garden when DD was younger has probably been the key to her interest in science.

I work in IT not Science but this still applies. There still very few young women coming into the field. In fact the numbers seem to have declined since I started 30 years ago. In my department of 80 there are about 12 women. Of those, eight of us are over 40. And yet it's a great career for women as much as it is for men.

it is a good letter.

as an active female scientist, I'd add that my work environment (RG university) is making a massive effort to be supportive of women, with several women's social groups and ATHENA SWAN and other initiatives. So it is hard, but don't that put you (or your daughters) off this career path. I have friends in other careers with similar intellectual demands (law, finance etc) who have a much much harder time with being the only woman and not getting flexibility for childcare etc.

Surely there can't be many fields left where the only-woman-in-the-room thing still happens?

In my last job pre-DC, there were marginally more women in the lab than men, although the company's salaries being considerably less than industry standard might have been a factor in that...

I love this, thank you for posting the link.

(to be completely fair ... how shall I put it... the rate of procreation where I worked was quite low and there may have been reasons for that other than, shall we say, direct personal choice. )

To be completely fair-I used my science qualifications in a legal job. The problems she describes are probably actually more so in this field which is, or was, very male dominated and entirely incompatible with child care.

Kids were basically seen as an exotic hobby, where I worked (and without giving myself away by being too specific, it was somewhere that really SHOULD have been good for family friendly working). DP, who works in basically the same field, found it almost impossible to be taken seriously as a father. You might as well have said "my hamster's in trouble-I need a morning off" as "I need to come in an hour late as my daughter is sick.". .

Totally agree with all of this.

I graduated...oh god, quite a long time ago and things were tricky then. I'm sad that nothing much seems to have changed.

Thank you for sharing that.
DD is only 11 but loves science and maths. Luckily she hasn't met with much prejudice yet but we have already talked about some people's assumptions/pre-conceptions of women both in relation to science and maths and in relation to hair colour (she's blonde). Luckily she has a very strong sense of fairness and can get rather indignant if she feels something isn't right which I think she is going to need.

Have bookmarked the link to share with her later.

As a lapsed female scientist, I couldn't agree more.