I am totally regretting all the times I made fun of the Women in Science and Engineering (WISE) group at Calgary now.

Now that I'm a bit older, and (ostensibly) more mature, I can see that science and engineering are still definitely a man's game. I think my problem with the undergrad WISE group before was that I didn't see the big problems, and neither did they. The WISE group at Calgary was always doing things like taking trips to the zoo or bringing in guest speakers who would speak about science. It seemed a lot more geared towards recruiting and encouraging women to go into the sciences.

I think retention is a far bigger problem than recruiting. Getting into science was easy as pie; I certainly didn't encounter any male professors telling me I was too stupid because I was a woman, or I couldn't do it because I was a woman. Even if those attitudes persist, people know better nowadays than to actually say anything.

I've been thinking a lot about my future lately. Now that I'm farther along in academia, I see that it's not necessarily that women can't do it; it's that a lot of women don't want to. Some of us don't want to put in the hours required to become a leader on a certain project, to get that extra paper a year in, to work insanely long hours on some new theorem. We want to have outside lives. We want to go home to our husbands and children at night and maintain our sanity.

Some women do dedicate their lives to science, and there's nothing wrong with that. Hell, it's what most men do when they're pushing towards faculty jobs and research chairs. It's just that society's expectations that a woman get married, have children, and look after the house and kids can weigh heavily on many of us. There's nothing wrong with that either; some women (and I suspect I will be one of them one day) find real happiness in nurturing their children and taking care of their husband. There are very few women who successfully find the balance between pushing ahead as a scientist and also becoming mothers and wives, and that makes it difficult for us younger women to find role models.

I've been feeling a lot of frustration lately; it's the time when I definitely have to start thinking about my next career step. I'd been keeping things all bottled up (something I need to work on) until something in someone's blog set me off and I declared myself as a woman fleeing science.

I did a lot of thinking after that - and I came to the realization that I really love what do. I love seeing progress on my work, I love teaching, I being paid to do what I love. I can't think of anything I'd enjoy more than this. So I'm trying to figure out if it's even possible to achieve some balance; through career breaks or otherwise. All this soul-searching while working on grad school applications. Good times. I am so scared that either I will go ahead and find no good time for children, and never have them; or I will quit now and always wonder what would have happened. Or I will get my Ph.D., find the whole field foolish for working 80 hour weeks continually, and quit anyways.

I'm a little worried about posting this; it obviously shows my dedication to science isn't 110% and it could be found by potential supervisors if they googled me for some reason (no dedication! it says so right there on the internet!) But I think it's important to talk about these issues. Maybe some other young women will stumble on this blog and know she is not alone in her frustrations. Maybe a WISE activist will see it and it will give them inspiration to keep fighting for womens' places in science.

Maybe by talking myself through my worries, I'll become that activist.