About half of the undergraduate and roughly 40 percent of graduate degree recipients in science and engineering are women. As increasing numbers of these women pursue research careers in science, many who choose to have children discover the unique difficulties of balancing a professional life in these highly competitive (and often male-dominated) fields with the demands of motherhood. Although this issue directly affects the career advancement of women scientists, it is rarely discussed as a professional concern, leaving individuals to face the dilemma on their own. To address this obvious but unacknowledged crisis—the elephant in the laboratory, according to one scientist—Emily Monosson, an independent toxicologist, has brought together 34 women scientists from overlapping generations and several fields of research—including physics, chemistry, geography, paleontology, and ecology, among others—to share their experiences. From women who began their careers in the 1970s and brought their newborns to work, breastfeeding them under ponchos, to graduate students today, the authors of the candid essays written for this groundbreaking volume reveal a range of career choices: the authors work part-time and full-time; they opt out and then opt back in; they become entrepreneurs and job share; they teach high school and have achieved tenure. The personal stories that comprise Motherhood, the Elephant in the Laboratory not only show the many ways in which women can successfully combine motherhood and a career in science but also address and redefine what it means to be a successful scientist. These valuable narratives encourage institutions of higher education and scientific research to accommodate the needs of scientists who decide to have children.
... , Personal and Professional, as a Mother in Science.” Motherhood, The Elephant in the Laboratory. Ed. E. Monosson. Ithica: Cornell University Press, 2008. 135-139. 19. Being and Thinking Between Second and Third Wave Feminisms.
... motherhood and academic life, ed E. Evans and C. Grant, Rutgers University Press, Piscataway, NJ, 2018, pp 49–54. 34. E. Evans and C. Grant, Mama PhD: Women write about motherhood ... elephant in the laboratory: Women scientists speak out, ed ...
With a combination of personal essays and think-pieces, journal entries captured in real time, reflections and anecdotes, this is the motherload!
Even though the ideology of pronatalism and motherhood reinforce reproductive technology and vice versa, the care work of mothering suffers political neglect and economic devaluation.
... motherhood in all of its configurations, including the Motherhood Initiative for Research and Community Involvement ... Elephant in the Laboratory (Monosson 2008), Mama Ph.D. (Evans and Grant 2009), and other such books in the past five ...
... stigma for women, or simply leads to the men who have stay-at-home wives gaining an extra semester to write up their research, or the decision of both male and female faculty to avoid the stigma by not having children. At MIT, female ...
The book illuminates the narratives of prominent mother-scholars in the discipline of education who are determined to (re)imagine a different educational space not only for their own children, but for all children.
This edited collection deals with intersecting axes of power and privilege in order to advance conversation on motherhood across disciplines.
Creative writing, and specifically analytical autoethnodrama, can potentially detail human experiences and locate them within a definite time and place while simultaneously providing the analysis and rigor to make this meaningful in ...
... Strategies for Resisting Sexism in the Academy: Higher Education, Gender and Intersectionality, Cham: Palgrave Macmillan. Daniell, E. (2006), Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists, New Haven: Yale ...