优秀女科学家的主要障碍：组建家庭

    所有行业的女性都在努力寻找兼顾职业与家庭生活。对于从事研究的女科学家来说，要实现这种平衡更加困难。二十八九岁或30岁出头时，她们需要发表论文，落实研究经费来保持竞争力，根本顾不上生儿育女。

    作为一个婴儿的妈妈，劳伦•奥康奈尔曾亲身经历过这种紧张感。她说道：“一种观点认为，生儿育女和做女科学家是相互排斥的。”奥康奈尔目前是哈佛大学（Harvard University）博士后研究员，她的研究课题是，如何用有毒箭蛙皮肤上的化学物质生产止痛药、抗生素和心脏病药物。“作为科学家，读研究生和博士后的那几年应该是我们最富有成效的时期，但作为女性，这段时间又会与我们生孩子的时间重合，因此，我们很难同时处理好这两个方面。”

    有些大学已经开始提供带薪产假和哺乳室等福利。但尽管如此，有孩子的女性还是发现她们落后于男性同事。许多女科学家在自身能力即将达到鼎盛时期放弃了研究工作：在美国，女性取得了46%的理工科博士学位，但在获得终身职位的科学家中，仅有三分之一为女性。与之类似，只有不到四分之一的正教授是女性。

    奥康奈尔表示，职业支持的时机落后于这种趋势。她解释称，美国国家科学基金会（National Science Foundation）和美国国家卫生研究院（National Institutes of Health）正在努力培养更多女性，但它们资助的往往是那些已经从事多年科研工作的女科学家。可问题在于，许多女性在到达这个时点前，已经离开了科研领域。

    现在，私营公司已经开始为女性科学家提供尽可能早的帮助，比如在她们抚养孩子的艰难时刻。2003年，欧莱雅（L’Oreal）开始为年度女科学家(Woman in Science)颁发60,000美元奖金，以帮助卓越的女科学家度过这个关键阶段，奥康奈尔便是今年的获奖者之一。

    今年五分之四的获奖者都是初为人母的女性科学家，这并非巧合。以斯坦福大学（Stanford University）博士后科学家莉薇娅•艾波琳为例。她正在研究一种快速诊断癌症的新方法；她有一个六个月大的女儿。她注意到，许多男性同事在妻子刚刚生下小孩的时候，并未休假陪产。艾波琳说道：“女性则没得选。我并不是说自己不希望休假来陪伴我的宝贝，但这证明，女性很容易就会落后于男同事。”

    Women across industries struggle to navigate the competing demands of career and family. This balancing act is even trickier for research scientists. They have a small window in their late twenties and early thirties to stay competitive by publishing papers and landing research grants.

    As the mother of a toddler, Lauren O’Connell has experienced the tension first-hand. “There is a perception that raising a family and being a female scientist are mutually exclusive,” she says. O’Connell is currently a postdoctoral researcher at Harvard, where she’s studying how chemicals found on the skin of poisonous dart frogs can be used to create painkillers, antibiotics and heart medications. “As scientists, our graduate school and postdoctoral years are expected to be our most productive, but for women, they also coincide with our child-bearing years, so managing the two can be very difficult.”

    Universities have started offering benefits like paid maternity leave and lactation rooms. But despite these accommodations, women with children still find themselves falling behind their male colleagues. Many female scientists will abandon their research right when they are about to hit their stride: women receive 46% of science doctorates in the U.S., yet only a third of scientists employed in tenure-track positions are women and less than a quarter of full professors are women.

    O’Connell says that the timing of professional support is behind this trend. The National Science Foundation and the National Institutes of Health are trying to promote more women, she explains, but they tend to fund scientists who are further along in their careers—an issue, since many women have already left the field by that point.

    Private companies are now stepping up to give women scientists help earlier on, when they are in the thick of raising young children. Since 2003, L’Oreal has awarded an annual Women in Science grant of $60,000 to help exceptional female scientists through this critical stage of their careers—and O’Connell is among this year’s pool of recipients.

    It’s no coincidence that four out of five of this year’s winners are new mothers. Livia Eberlin, for instance, is a postdoctoral scientist at Stanford who is developing a new method of rapidly diagnosing cancer; she’s also the mother of a six-month old baby girl. She’s noticed that many of her male colleagues did not take advantage of paternity leave when their wives had babies. “For a woman, you just don’t have that option,” says Eberlin. “Not that I wouldn’t want to take that time off to bond with my newborn, but it just shows how easy it is for women to fall behind their male colleagues.”