Positively Motivating Speakers - from Lori
Hi Everyone,If we have discussions on balancing career & family, is there any way to make it less doom & gloom? Can we focus on women who have maybe used innovative choices to make their careers and families flourish? For example, Dr. Varadan suggested hiring household help, which is frowned upon in some sectors of American culture. Some WiSE women may have never considered how much a housekeeper could be helpful to their success.
Also, I'm a little worried about speakers who seem to support the feeling that it's nearly impossible to have a family and an academic career.I've found those talks to be highly discouraging.
In addition, it seems we never know what a speaker's story will be until they're speaking at a WiSE event. For example, one year, WiSE invited a prestigious speaker who was supposed to speak on balancing career withfamily. Instead, she told us that her career had been due to a seriesof mistakes, starting with her doctoral advisor confusing her with another student when he wrote her recommendation letter for her first position.Maybe she was being self-effacing and didn't want to take all the credit for her accomplishments. Nonetheless, it taught me little about how I could succeed on my own merit, while balancing a career with family. In the end, I found her observations to be discouraging because her career appeared largely dependent on luck.
Is it possible for us to know what our speakers will be presenting before they are standing before the WiSE group? Also, is it possible to have multiple lunches on different aspects of career & family?
Lori
posted by Tong @ 9:11 PM
2 Comments:
I wholeheartedly agree!!!
And, I know that other women that I have talked to feel the same way. My one female officemate and I often talk about how discouraging it is, even when women talk about having managed getting tenure and everything. It seems so hard, like even still you have to make a choice: career, family, or 7 years of living hell. :) At least, that is often the feeling that I come out of those talks with!
So, anyway, I totally agree with Lori--let's try something more positive, and at the same time, more constructive.
What, Lori, you don't like the element of surprise? :) I agree, it would be good to have an outline, at least, although I'm not sure we can get an outline before we ask people to speak, and at that point, it's sort of too late.
Heidi H.
Another vote of agreement here. I was discussing this with a friend of mine at UNC (she's doing environmental science there), and we agree that the statistics are very depressing and defeating.
Have any of you ever read a book by Mary Catherine Bateson called "Composing a Life"? I thought of this book when I saw the theme of advantages of being a woman in science. Bateson writes, among other things, about the advantages of having many different facets to life, including career and family -- she feels that each has made the other stronger in her life. She's a writer and cultural anthropologist. In the book she profiles several of her friends, including a woman who worked with her husband to start an engineering company. Bateson confronts the challenges and doesn't dismiss them, but she argues for a different perspective, both from the individual and from the institution -- the perspective that a balanced life actually leads to *better* work, and that it should therefore be encouraged rather than grudgingly granted as a special favor.
I really recommend that book for a more positive, constructive perspective on the question of career and family, one that I find sorely lacking in most other treatments of the subject that I've found.
Bateson also has a blog at http://mcatherinebateson.blogspot.com/, which she doesn't update very often but what's there is great. You all might be interested in this entry, http://mcatherinebateson.blogspot.com/2003/09/changing-shape-of-womens-lives.html , for a taste of her perspective -- it's not directly on the career/family question, but related.
Carrie
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