“No matter how you sugar coat it, the reality for many women is that despite the experience and skill they have, it can be difficult to pick up the threads of their career when they return.” - Peter Costello, Treasurer, Australia. How… true.
But then society should do something about that, shouldn’t it?
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I have no doubt that comment is true in general, but in a field like information technology, it is (probably) not as hard for a woman to get back on the saddle, so to speak.
Demand and supply, maybe?
Comment by km — July 24, 2006 @ 5:52 pm
With the new set up, I am not able to check what I write. I am enclosing some URLs I collected a few days ago. The first needs a subscription and so I copied a bit from it. The rest are less specific and are about men-women differences. they see to suggest that both physically and mentally, there are differences. This has nothing to with equality; they are each better at different things. Now it seems that they may have to even design different medicines for the different sexes. Same deficiencies in genes give rise to different diseases depending on whether they come from mother or father. This is just an ongoing process of learning; I have no expertise in this matter.
From: http://www.newscientist.com/article/mg18424676.400.html
A study published in January by Catalyst, a New York-based advocacy group, shows just how much so-called “gender diversity” matters in business. Catalyst ranked all companies in the Fortune 500 list of the highest earning US firms from 1996 to 2000 according to the number of women in senior management positions, and compared their financial performance. The results were striking. The group of companies with most female executives had a 35 per cent higher return on stockholder investment, and a 34 per cent higher total return to shareholders compared with those with the fewest.
One of the biggest barriers to women getting ahead is having children. So it is no surprise that the NRC study found that women with children are less likely to be full professors than those with none. (The opposite was true for men.) The problem is compounded by the fact that the critical years for career progression often coincide with starting a family. There is a divergence between men and women’s careers when they reach their late 20s and early 30s, says Jong-On Hahm, director of the Committee on Women in Science and Engineering at the NRC. “You have to be working hard to get tenure, and that’s the time that many women have a family,” she says. “It all clashes at the same time, so it makes it very difficult. Some women do do it, but they’re the exception.”
From: http://www.newscientist.com/channel/sex/mg19125605.200-sex-differences-run-deeper-than-we-think.html
MEN and women often appear to be poles apart. Now it seems we really can blame our genes. In mice, at least, it appears that many thousands of genes are expressed differently in the two sexes, far more than suspected.
“More than half the genes are different between genders, an order of magnitude more than previously thought,” says Xia Yang, head of the team at the University of California, Los Angeles, that compared gene expression in four different tissues in male and female mice.
“The biggest implication is that the mechanisms underlying many common diseases may be different between males and females,” Yang says. The heart drug digitalis causes more deaths in women than in men, for example, while aspirin protects men better from heart disease. This was previously thought to be due to differences in drug metabolism in male and female livers, but Yang says his results suggest that the sex differences go way beyond this. He says this means that drug trials should be gender-specific.
http://www.gnxp.com/blog/2006/07/women-in-science-part-3595726061058.php
http://www.physorg.com/news72457969.html
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/07/060717105554.htm
http://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/2006/06/060621162228.htm
http://cwp.library.ucla.edu/
Comment by gaddeswarup — July 25, 2006 @ 3:58 am
km,
I would only partially agree. With a little understanding and a let-go attitude on the part of Men, I think women can really work themselves into mainstream career after a break.
I work in IT, and I know first-hand women who took a maternity break and came back and picked up where they left, ofcourse with a little extra effort. In every such case, their husband gave them complete support in every possible way.
I also know cases when women lost their way completely even when on smaller maternity breaks, thanks to their wonderful husbands who felt only men are entitled to a serious career.
I strongly feel, Men have to rise up and do bit of their part of support to their women. Only then women would find it relatively easier to pick up the thread.
Comment by Kishore — July 25, 2006 @ 4:52 am
Uma,
This sentence is quite true, but on a tangential note, I found the article faintly revolting - all that talk of immigrants upsetting the social fabric.
n!
Comment by neela — July 25, 2006 @ 9:09 pm