Doubts and interruptions
/There is a dull buzz in my head today. Its name is Anxiety. I am trying to tune it out and make it go away. I have work to do, but it keeps interrupting, whispering lies about me.
Read MoreThoughts on chemistry, general science, and whatever else is banging around in my mind.
About that STEM shortage
/
A week or so ago, somebody on Twitter shared this post at the US Census Bureau blog on employment in STEM fields. It includes a chart showing the trends in the fields as a fraction of total STEM employment. It doesn't tell you about would-be STEM workers who are unemployed, nor does it tell you about unfilled positions in these areas. Still, I think you can get a rough idea of the relative demand for workers in each field. If there are many people currently employed in a field, it implies a large demand for that field. Said another way, if there weren't demand for that work, why would those people still have jobs?
I was not surprised to see that T and E are bigger slices of the STEM pie. What did surprise me was how much bigger they are. So here, for your viewing pleasure, is a little graphic. The colored bars are proportional to each field's contribution to total STEM employment in 2011.
Read MoreI love Science because
/A fun read by Hope Jahren:
I love Science because it lets me be a teenager, to rebel and defy the university and demand to borrow its car keys on the same day.
I love science for many of these same reasons too.
This time it’s going to be different
/Lately I’ve read about rather different things that keep bumping into each other in my mind. The more I consider them, the more they seem connected.
- The return of Bora Zivkovic to Twitter and the blogosphere
- Mike Krahulik’s New Year resolution
- Ways in which the graduate school system is broken
Happy New Year
/2013 ended on a high note for me: great visits with family, laughs shared with my husband, good news on the writing front, and fun plans with friends.
Looking ahead, 2014 is a little daunting. I don't know where we'll be living come September, nor do I know who we'll be working for, or what we'll be doing. But I know we have excellent friends and welcoming family, and that the unknown can be as exciting as it is scary. We don't have to have the answers at the outset; there's plenty to discover as we go.
So here's to a year of discovery. Best wishes for 2014.
Don't blame the children
/The main explanation I've heard from readers for why women had higher rates of job seeking than men is that those women are mothers. I'm not really convinced. "Parenting" isn't a choice in the postgraduation status question, so I suspect it would be lumped into "Other." But let's assume for a moment that motherhood is the major factor in the higher frequency of job-seeking among women vs. men in fields like Chemistry. Why might that be? I can think of two possibilities.
Read More