You were 37 years old when you became a full professor at UC Berkeley at the same time you found out you were pregnant. Academia and other career fields such as law and medicine seem stacked against women because the childbearing years coincide with the time period in which you're expected to prove yourself by racking up achievements. How did you handle these two big events, and how have you made it all work out?
When I was doing this, there was much less awareness that you can be a serious scientist and have a family. I decided not to have a family for a while, but became pregnant and so the decision was made for me. I didn't realize it would be so hard to have a child and do my research; I didn't think it through.
Women are thinking of this nowadays. In institutions, there's recognition now that the clock will be stopped, there will be time for children, and that there'll be times in a woman's life that she won't be doing [work] alone. If you look at a trajectory of a few decades - the productive years of a woman's life - the time you'll need to spend intensively with the children occurs in batches throughout that period. Getting them into kindergarten is one significant period. Then again in high school attention has to be paid to them.
There are definitely some years where you're not going to be 100% focused on your work. But if you average this out over several decades, say 20-30 years of every productive life, you don't have to sacrifice your career just because you lose a little bit of time here and there.
Young women seem to see it as one or the other - the fork in the road. My recommendation is to think about the fact that family responsibilities come in waves and it does take time; but work also takes time, so you need to decide to be very focused on this. For my husband and I, our lives were work and family and that was it; everything else stopped for a time, and now we're resuming things like going out to dinner or the movies. It wasn't a sacrifice; we love both our family and our work.
Of course you need good support to do this. Use that good science mind, your good problem solving mind, to figure out how you are going to go about this. I learned from all sorts of women, from those who were young to those who - like me - had children later.
In my own field, the American Society of Cell Biology has a Women in Cell Biology group with web pages full of resources. They also have a wonderful pictorial display of women scientists with their families. Younger women scientists who view this gallery of women with their families see that it's being done successfully by others.
It's important to encourage them and demonstrate that this is not impossible to do. The best practical advice I can give is to use your problem solving skills to see what different kinds of solutions there are. It's hard work, but it's okay to have a challenging time.
I bumbled though it like everybody does. I don't think we went to a movie or traveled on vacations. I spent minimal time at conferences and hurried home to be with my family. Of course it's going to be work, and you do find yourself wishing you were in two places at once. Of course the kids do fine; the evidence doesn't bear out that they won't.
You aren't a terrible parent if you aren't there after work every day baking cookies. I baked cookies - not such good ones but I baked. I was helped by the fact that I was a full professor so I attended those child related events that I wanted to be at. People will respect you if you take the time to make time for your children.
We'll always have guilt and stay-at-home moms have it too, although it's a different kind of guilt. We just have to realize we're not doing our children a disservice when we're engaged in our jobs if we are also engaged in them . The media does tend to stereotype women with a one size fits all model , while real examples aren't well represented in the media.
