Arts as Astra

The "leaky pipeline" metaphor is explained in this article as:

In corporations, women tend to talk about a "glass ceiling." In academia, the more commonly used metaphor is the "leaky pipeline." The flood of women in graduate and professional schools gives way to a trickle at the highest levels in many fields.

And as with many articles on the subject, it cites having children and trying to balance career and family as one of the biggest obstacles to keeping women in science. And look, a way to tackle the problem!

Grant won a Claflin Award. It was only a modest prize -- $60,000 over two years, offered since 1997 to select Massachusetts General Hospital women trying to balance their medical research with young children. But, she says, it made an enormous difference: It not only paid for staff to help on her research, it gave her "the positive feedback you need when you're overworked and exhausted to kind of keep in the game."

I'm a huge fan of grants programs like this that give women scientists a hand up when they have children.

On the other hand, this item bring up an important point. Why is childcare always considered almost exclusively a woman's issue?

Most men in corporate, political, judicial and non-profit positions of power -- Democrats, Republicans, independents, apoliticals -- don't have childcare as a national problem anywhere on their radar screens. It's a "woman's issue." A special interest group concern. Their wives' problem. Despite the fact that, obviously, men have something to do with creating children.

And I totally agree. Which is why DH and I do our best to share childcare duties.

This begs the question, why not make the grants programs cited above open to both new mothers and new fathers? To which I say, fine, if the father is actually doing the bulk of the work tending to the children -- which is just not the case in most families. But that involves a huge cultural shift, as evidenced by the second article. And maybe if men in positions of power did pay attention, then special help for young mothers in academia would not be necessary. So until that happens, I'm fine with giving women an extra hand up.