Arts as Astra

The abstract deadline for the winter AAS Meeting is Wednesday. Childcare grants for attendees are due November 15.

Which brings me to this item which I caught on the radio the other day. The crux of which is that annual meetings of the American Dental Association have drop-in, on-premises daycare available for parents who attend the meeting.

Having brought the family to at least one AAS meeting with me, I know what a godsend this can be. This bit from the article summarizes it nicely:

ACCENT president Diane Lyons founded her company in 1991. Before that, she was an event planner. She says she hated leaving her kids in hotel rooms with unfamiliar baby sitters on business trips.

LYONS: People didn't want to know you brought your children. They wanted your kids somewhere else, so you could be focused -- when really, it helps a parent to focus if you know your child is being well taken care of, and they're entertained.

Then again, the AAS is a lot smaller than the ADA. And I'm willing to bet that the AAS has a smaller percentage of women, who (rightly or wrongly) are more often in charge of overseeing childcare than men. So if that $50,000 figure doesn't scale well with demand, it might be hard to convince the AAS to subsidize childcare. Still, I wonder if this sort of thing might work out economically for the AAS. You could raise conference fees or apply for an outside grant or find a corporate sponsor.

Still, it is heartening to see that accomodations for childcare is becoming more commonplace.

I'm a bit late to this news tidbit, but there's this study that's been recently published about how working mothers fare in the job market. It seems that you can draw up the perfect resume for a woman, but if you insert a single line in it, about being a PTA officer, suddenly you don't land the interview or get the job or earn as much money as you would have otherwise. (see also.)

Relatedly, having children can be a real liability for women hoping to get tenure, whereas it seem to be an advantage for men.

Consider, also, that astronomy is small enough a field that pretty much anywhere I apply, there will be at least one person who can say, "Dr. Nomer? Yeah, I hear she has two kids." So really, there's no sense in hiding the fact that I'm a mother, even if it doesn't show up on my resume. I also wonder how much of that factors into my big, fat, and growing pile of rejection letters.

I wish I could change these things. You know, shake some people up and make them aware of their unconscious biases, maybe slap them around if they're conscious (the biases, I mean). But at the same time, I don't want to create bad feelings, because it really is such a small field and my position in it is precarious enough as it is. Raising a ruckus will probably just grant me a "shrill feminist" label, and who wants one of those in their department, spoiling the good-old-boy atmosphere? I guess I'll just have to be a quiet, bitter feminist until I get tenure, then all hell can break loose.

EDIT: You can find the study by Correll et al. here (p. 1297), but I don't have permissions to see it.