I have always prided myself on many things in my life, but there are two things that I hold very dear and have made me who I am today. 1) I am a woman, and 2) I am a scientist.
I have loved science since I was a small child. Everything from playing in streams, finding snakes in the woods, spending time on farms, and always showing the most interest in my science classes, I was thirsty for as much knowledge as science could provide to me. This love was severely tested in my high school years however. I attended an all girls catholic high school and their motto was, "Empowering young women".
And at the time it seemed a good motto. However, as I got older and spent more time with my family ad grandmother, I began to learn more domestic skills. I can now cook, bake, sew, knit, embroider, and do essentially everything involving babies and young children. I really started to question who I wanted to be. For a long time I had wanted to be a veterinarian, animals were the forefront of my scientific passion. But, my life experiences had started pushing me towards being a mom and having a family.
From this life choice, from wanting to be a vet to wanting to be a mom, I actually lost a lot of friends. My friends would ask, "Why do you want to be a mom? We are EMPOWERED women! We can be anything we want to be, like I'm gonna be a CEO, and you want to be stuck at home changing diapers? Lame!" Now I never was able to fully explain to my friends that I didn't want to give up an academic career, I just wanted to be able to continue learning science but still have a family, which seemed a foreign concept to many. Many people even today question my choices saying things such as, "oh well if you have a career, how will you spend time with your kids, they are going to grow up bad because they don't have a very present mom in their lives!" And most times I will just look at them like this:
Seriously! What on earth 1) gives you the right to question my life choices? and 2) why do I have to sacrifice one thing for another? And this is very much how a lot of people view women in science related fields. Even though it isn't the normal view point any more, a lot of people still think a woman's "place" is in the home, taking care of the children, and that women cannot balance a career and a family (even though it seems that men can). But there is a way that we can make the field of science more gender friendly, and it is through positive action.
And I will say this loud so everyone can hear me: It is NOT enough to have positive thoughts or feelings, they MUST be backed by positive ACTION!!! This means that it is all well and good to say we should have more women in science, but nothing is going to change unless we make some actual changes to how we view women in science by actually putting them in leadership positions to begin making those changes.