welcome
by Neil Caudle

few months ago, three young women came to us because they wanted to write about science. All three were working as researchers here at Carolina. Two were postdoctoral fellows, and one was a Ph.D. candidate. All of them were doing good science. And all of them were thinking of giving it up.

When we asked them why, they began to describe the life of a woman in academic research — the long hours, the struggle for tenure, the difficulty of having both a family and a career, and the dread of working as outsiders in fields dominated by men. Yes, these three women loved doing research. But as a career? Maybe they would rather write about science, instead.

The more they talked, the more we heard the makings of a story. Look into it, we said. They were skeptical. Would the university really publish a story that talked about its problems rather than its successes? Yes, we said. It would. One of the women, a postdoctoral fellow, found a full-time writing job and left the university. But the other two took us up on the dare. Tiffany Heady and Marla Vacek spent several weeks talking to women scientists, asking them about their work and their lives.

.: From our cover : physicist Laurie McNeil. :.

es, they found women scientists who would tell, off the record, stories of old-boy networks shutting women out, or of men who ignored their ideas. But some of the answers surprised them. They found, for example, that the women scientists they interviewed generally were skeptical about the notion that women do science differently from men. The playing field may be different, one of them said, but the science is the same.

The trouble with this kind of story is that it tends to present its sources as members of a minority group — women in science — rather than as psychologists or physicists or immunologists. But the women quoted in this story are successful as scientists, period. On the strength of her research alone, we could put Laurie McNeil on the cover of this magazine. So we are grateful that she and several others agreed to talk about an issue they would rather put behind them — and get back to their work.

Neil Caudle is the editor of Endeavors magazine.
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