You might suggest to the author of that line introducing the project that there are scientists who are not faculty, and that the attrition between trainee and permanent position in those other areas is neither impressively lower nor for especially different reasons than in trainee -> faculty.

And when the comment itself is gender neutral, you might lay off the ‘dude’ nonsense. Leads one to think that the problem is the gender of the commenter (noting that Sheril did invite comments from men as well) rather than the content.

One observation is that for any fields near mine, the project is overly focused on academia. You at least mention ‘and beyond’. But irrespective of gender, over 2/3rds of the doctoral graduates in fields near mine do not wind up working in academia. This is one thing I’ve mentioned to my daughter.

Dude. I started where I startred because that’s who I know and that’s where the idea came from. How can it be “focused” when we’ve only had two letters? Did you see from her post that I’ve asked Sheril?

Dude.

The notion of letter to my daughter is not figurative. I have an actual daughter in college who has decided to pursue science. Both my nieces are thinking of science careers, though they’ve got quite a few more years to go before hitting the leaky parts of the pipeline. I also mentor a woman who is a doctoral candidate in science.

On another hand, my own ‘genealogy’ shows women pursuing science degrees and careers. That includes the grandmother who earned a science PhD, the great-grandmother who started in mathematics but changed to music because of the hostility to women in math then, and the raft of Real Teachers. I have to capitalize that to distinguish from what most people think of in thinking of teachers these days. Scientists are passionate about learning about the universe (and then sharing what they find), Real Teachers are passionate about sharing knowledge (and learning more to share). The distance is small. That includes at least 5 consecutive generations and both my sisters, one of whom is a science teacher.

Professionally, my post-doc advisor was a woman. Maybe I’ll send her a note about this project. After finishing that, my first center director was a woman.

Given my personal and professional genealogy, one thing I say to my daughters (literal and figurative) is: Things are enormously better. Second is: They still have to improve. But, because of the changes that have been occurring, comments like Pascale’s, based on experiences 1-2 generations back, have to be taken with some grains of salt. My daughter’s pursuit of physics degree has been vastly different (better!) at all stages than my friends’ from when I was pursuing my degree.