Life at Fermilab in 15 minutes

July 14, 2005

Today there was a symposium (read:  afternoon full of talks) in honor of the outgoing director of Fermilab, and I was asked to give a talk about "Life at Fermilab".  When I was first asked to give this talk I was mortified--what kind of talk was that?  Then once I saw the agenda for the symposium, I was even more peeved--why is it that of the 8 talks, the one talk given by a woman was not on physics? 

But I accepted to give the talk anyway, because I figured I could at least stand up on whatever soapbox I felt like standing on for 15 minutes in front of the symposium-going segment of the lab community (whoever that is).  Regardless of who else might attend the talk, the new director was on the agenda right after me so I figured he would certainly be there.  The only question is:  what soapbox would I pick?

So in putting together this talk I realized that I could only organize it the way I organize physics talks, and that the easiest way to talk about life to an audience of physicists was to put it in terms they were used to hearing:  in terms of a physics experiment.  Luckily, as far as picking a soapbox was concerned, I had it easy: the outgoing director adopted an infant 6 months after starting as director, so in fact I know him almost equally as "Lily's father" and as "the Director of Fermilab".   My best joke (thanks to my friend Jim) was this:  "Everyone in this field worries that when they have kids it will affect the development of their carreer.  Some wait until they have their PhD.  Some wait until they get tenure.  It takes a cautious person to wait until he is director of a national lab". 

But anyway, I got my chance to remind the lab how many of us are part of 2-carreer couples, and how many of us have kids, and as a result, how many of us depend on instutions' support of these facts:  by being aware of the two-body problem and by providing good day care.  I summarized my talk by saying "Fermilab should be an example to the rest of the world on these issues.  We're not there yet but thanks to our director, these issues are on the front page".  What I was really thinking was "we'll know that Fermilab is really on top of these issues when men are standing up at symposia like this talking about 'life' and the women are up here talking about the physics". But hey, this is a start. 

P.S. If you're curious about the slides I did show, Download Life.pdf (all 3MB of it...)

P.P.S. If you have even more time on your hands you can see the streaming video of the talk (and all the others) at the Fermilab Streaming Video Web Site for this event. 

 

Comments

[Aaron F.]

*Sigh*... with all the progress we've made on gender issues in science, it's good to be reminded how far we still have to go. :(

On the bright side, it looks like two of the seven talks weren't about physics, which means P = 0.29... so maybe we can give the symposium organizers the benefit of the doubt. ;)

Hope the director enjoyed the send-off!

[Sandra]

I saw your slides. This kind of talks is more difficult than giving a talk about physics! I liked very much how you organized it.
Sandra