Meeting today

Present:

Natalie, Alex, Rachel, Sarah, Hanne, Manuela, Marieke

We started off introducing ourselves and our expectations towards the meeting, but soon entered a general discussion about experiences, opinions and practical hints. All of us quite enjoyed the meeting and agreed that we have to meet again. We will hold hourly meetings around lunchtime on a monthly basis, and possibly arrange additional events (such as invited talks by senior female scientists).

Amongst the issues discussed:

• Confidence crisis:
  
• A well researched phenomenon with some scientific name. Everyone has it, but only women express it and allow it to impact on their work.
  
• We hypothesised that this syndrome is at least partially due to higher pressure from the environment
  
• Sarah recommended assertiveness training courses
• I argued that exaggerated confirmation is not a good response as it is unbelievable and increases pressure.
• Is there sexism in academia/CCNR?
• We concluded that the sexism in academia is much more subtle than the one encountered in technical environments as described by Sarah and Manuela
• We agreed that CCNR is pleasantly devoid of explicit sexist tendencies, which Rachel and Alex reported to be a rather recent development
  
• However, the "closed doors" mentality is probably due to the institution having very much grown to accomodate male working patterns and preferences.
  
• Hints on how to deal with individually expressed sexism or typically male bad behaviour
  
• Test your collaborators in small side-projects (Sarah)
  
• Make sure your need for democracy doesn't backfire! If you share your ideas make sure that your intellectual property is in some form secured from theft (e.g. put your name on grant proposal) (Sarah)
• If they are really rubbish, just walk off. You may face a non-solvable problem (Sarah)
• Build up a women's network (like ours) to bridge the time until a "critical mass" of women coworkers has built up to lead to a more natural environment for women to just get on and do their work (Natalie)
• Institutionalised discrimination:
• Natalie mentioned research on how women need a much stronger publication record to get a grant
• University and CCNR are focussed to accomodate typically male ways of proceeding (e.g. divide and conquer way problem solving, closed doors)
• Obviously, the demand to make your academic career the big thing in your life and still have a family is much easier to be met by men because they can pair up with someone who is happy to do the lion's share of the family bit.
• Speaker's we were thinking of:
• Maggie Boden
• Geraldine Fitzpatrick
• Liz Jones
• Natalie
• Madeleine

that's it, i think...

Formation

I really wasn't at the climax of my creativity today, calling the blog "CCNR women" but it doesn't matter, does it.

Why a blog?

I just thought, we could post things here like links, relevant events, keep track of changes, discuss or generally share information. I will start of writing a summary of the meeting today...