scientiae-carnival
I started off this post thinking that in the coming year I’d like to see a cultural change in the labs here – I’d like the male managers stop demanding that our (female) manager find their metaphorical socks for them.
As I was mulling over this fragment of wishful thinking it occurred to me that all of the women who do the picking up and buying tasks for the labs are rather young.
And they are under the only female manager in our part of the company (there are seven others), who is also younger than I am.
And all of the women in the labs (with only 2 or 3 exceptions) are younger than me.
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I am a training person in the development arm of a pharmaceutical company – not massive, but pretty big. I see a lot of the ‘ordinary’ analyst staff, and spend a deal of time with their managers, and a bit of time with their managers.
We have seven sections in our department, eight if you count the office administration staff as a group of their own.
I am part of Infrastructure – we are a diverse group including ordering, inventory management, documentation, instrument support, instrument validation and training; often referred to as ‘housekeeping’(yes, we have a lot of women in our group).
We have over 90 people in Development. Eight of them are managers. Another fifteen are team leaders (or equivalent); there are 3 office staff; the other 60-ish are analysts or equivalents. .
What’s the breakdown – how many women are there?
• Fifty in total
• One manager
• Nine team leaders
• All the office staff (three)
• 37 analyst/equivalents
Women are over-represented at analyst and team-leader level, and under-represented at the next level. OK. No real news there, this stuff has been going on in labs for many years. True, I am very disappointed to see the effects that I first observed in hospital labs in the mid-80’s have carried forward a quarter of a century, but I can’t seriously say that I’m surprised.
What does surprise me is the lack of older (ie, 50+) women.
I’m in my mid-40’s and I have grown children. Most of the women who are here are my age or younger and the majority of them have children in lower-secondary school or younger. Where are the women who graduated before me in sciences? In our entire department there is not a single woman in the labs over 50. There are several men who fall into that age group, but no women. Is it truly possible that there aren’t any?
Are those of us who are late-40-ish really the oldest working women in our field? I find it scary to be one of the oldest women here – there are very few older than me. And, for the record – I AM NOT OLD (yet). Where did they go? I’m sure women were completing Chemistry degrees in the late 1970’s – but I can’t see them. Being an analyst seems to be a young person’s job – even the men are predominately under 35, but older men ARE represented, and we can see men all over the company hierarchy. We know where they went.
So, are you out there? Female Analytical Chemists who worked their way up through the pharmaceutical hierarchy, have successfully managed children, relationships and work, are now 50+ and can help those of us who are struggling to work out how to do all of this? Or are we truly alone out here, making it up as we go along?
