So how many papers does having a baby cost?

I think we've all read the correspondence piece in Nature yesterday on how we don't need to worry about gender bias, because it really all comes down to women having babies and therefore publishing less papers. Lukas Koube, the author, already wrote this as a comment last year, but apparently Nature still thought this piece was worthy of being put in the journal. I don't think I need to add anything to what Melissa WilsonSayres wrote about it yesterday. She already says that it really is possible to be a scientist AND a parent, and that babies are often made by more than one person, and that the other parent (often, but not always a man) can also pitch in. And as we established last week, science is about generating ideas (or not?) and I might as well generate a scientific idea while nursing, or while changing a diaper.

Okay maybe I do want to add something: Really, Nature? Did you think someone who has published zero scientific papers knows whether you can publish papers while pregnant or taking care of a baby? And Lukas Koube, do you really think that that is the only thing holding women in science back?!

But it is something that is on my mind often: how many papers would I have had during this post-doc if I wouldn't have had children? Would I have worked harder and/or longer? I can say that I've become a lot more efficient since having BlueEyes. Perhaps I'm not in the lab as long, but I am very productive while I'm there (and so is my husband I have to add). But let's be scientific and calculate this: When I leave here in two months I will have been a post-doc for four years, in which I have had 2 children. I have taken 3 and 4 months of leave*, so that adds up to 7 months of not doing experiments (although currently a tech is doing some of my experiments). Also, during my pregnancies I was less productive than during non-pregnant periods because of being nauseous and tired and foggy (although working also helped to keep my mind off of feeling crappy)**. And the 1+ year of sleep deprivation also didn't add to productivity (but that was divided mostly equal between my husband and me). So say that I missed somewhere between 6 months to a year in productivity out of four years. That's 12.5-25% of my post-doc. I think that's an overestimation, but that would mean that instead of 4 papers I would have 3. Or instead of one or more high impact factor papers I would have medium impact factor papers.

BUT there are so many more factors to this: could better mentoring have led to more productivity (YES!), are publications in high impact factor journals dependent on which field you work in (yes), whether your data are negative (yes), whether stuff works like it's supposed to (yes), etc etc.

So to conclude: assuming I make it through the "post-doc to faculty bottle neck", in the bigger scheme of my scientific career this is going to be peanuts. If I am a scientist for the next 35 years (until I'm 65), then that 6 months to a year is only 1-2% of the time. And not every woman has children. So any disproportion of female to male authors more than 1% is due to something else than having babies. There, Lukas Koube. I just used some science to calculate this WHILE AT HOME WITH A BABY!

The biggest problem right now: using my precious nap time to blog about this instead of work on a paper...

* I know that some people (are able to) take more leave, and I also realize that many female scientists (at least me) won't be able to sit at home for 3 months without thinking or doing any science.
** Here I should add that my pregnancies were pretty smooth sailing, and I know that for some it can be 9 months of total agony. And for some people the process of becoming pregnant takes a lot of mental, emotional and physical energy.

Where manuscripts go to die

The other day Dr24hours wrote about when you decide to abandon a paper because a bunch of journals do not want to publish it. Personally, I think that if you’ve come to the point of a completely written paper, I would never abandon it, but just send it anywhere (with perhaps a lower impact factor) instead of having it die in a drawer. However, what happens in this case if you’re not the senior author on a paper?

For example, I worked in a lab for 9 months during my master’s training (which in my homecountry is required before you can enroll in a PhD program). I did a lot of work in that lab and became 2^nd author on a paper that (at the time) was relatively novel and interesting (now, 10 years later, it’s not novel anymore at all). The grad student whose project I worked on was the first author and the PI was the last author. They submitted it to a pretty okay journal that rejected it. And then the grad student left science, and the PI assumed a position with a lot more administrative work and neither of them was interested in trying to publish the paper anymore. I’m still a little sad about the fact that my CV doesn’t show the work that I did (and that my H-index isn’t 1 point higher because of this…). However, in this situation I don’t think there is much I could have done.

But what if you’re a grad student or a post-doc and your PI is not interested in publishing your papers, because they are either not suitable for high impact factor journals and therefore the PI is not very eager to publish them (this happens, I’m sure) or because the PI is leaving academia? (this also happens) What if you have a finished manuscript but a very uninterested PI who does not care to look at the manuscript let alone submit it? (and I know some of you think that this will never happen, but trust me, it does). When I was afraid this might happen I decided that I needed at least a decent first author paper from my post-doc, so I took the following measures: 1) I got a collaborator involved who helped me a lot with writing the manuscript, and who was helpful in setting deadlines to get the paper out. 2) I sent it to a lower impact factor journal than I might have otherwise because I had an invitation for a special issue at that journal. This way I was pretty sure it would get reviewed and published relatively quickly and I wouldn’t end up with a manuscript with good review comments but no possibilities to address these comments.

So what else can you do when you’re feeling like you’re beating a dead horse trying to get a paper out that you need, but that the other authors don’t really seem to care about?

The importance of side projects

I’m in my fourth year as a post-doc (well technically I’mnot a post-doc anymore, but it does feel that way) and yesterday I submitted my first first-author paper as a post-doc. Is that a little late? Perhaps, but in my defense: I had to learn slice electrophysiology first, and then I got sucked into a bunch of collaborative projects (one can argue about how smart that is, but it did leave me with 2 published (2^nd author) papers and at least one (shared 1^st author) paper in the making). 

What I want to tell you about is how this paper came into the world. It started when the collaborator I consulted about my main project asked me to do a control experiment. That control experiment showed something interesting to me, and even though the collaborator was not super interested, I pursued this and got a bunch of rather interesting data. Then I got an invitation to submit a paper to an okay, but not very high-impact journal. I figured that this could be a fast and relatively easy way to get a first author paper out, where I could show the world the things that I can do. So I did some slice electrophysiology to make my side project a bit more interesting and when I sent this to the collaborator he was pretty enthusiastic about it. Without really realizing it (because, shame on me, I wasn’t aware enough of the literature) I had discovered something new and interesting! So something tiny, that no one was really enthusiastic about at first, turned into something cool!

And my main project? That turned out to be way too ambitious and technically challenging (read: impossible). And thanks to my mentor’s “hands-off” mentoring style and my own stubbornness, I realized this only this year… It was a good lesson in project design, that I hope I will be able to use in the future.

Poor timing

This morning I got the dreaded email telling me that I'm not invited for an interview for the important home country grant I applied to. You know, the one that would guarantee me a job and all that. However, there is no time to sit around, cry, shop online and do all that, because I have to give a talk at our annual retreat in about two hours and on top of that I have to rewrite the entire discussion for a manuscript TODAY (because it's an invited paper that needs to be submitted early next week and the collaborator who always gives me great feedback only has time tomorrow). So my day of being sad about this will have to happen some other day, because today I will have to pretend that science is great and lovely and awesome.
Thank God for waterproof mascara.

Dealing with disappointment

To me, one of the hardest things about being a scientist is dealing with the disappointment of rejected manuscripts, grant proposals and fellowship applications. Not to sound very annoying, but so far my life has been extremely smooth sailing. I was lucky enough to bicycle through high school (a literal translation of a Dutch expression meaning that it wasn’t too hard) and in the home country it’s also not hard to get into college when you’ve finished 6 years of high school. And the ‘prestigious’ Neuroscience Master’s program I went to had just started so you really only had to apply to get in that year (in the years that followed I might not have made the cut with my grades…). In conclusion, I did not have a lot of practice dealing with disappointment.

So the first time I applied for a fellowship at the beginning of my post-doc and it was rejected (without review comments) I cried,in the lab. I was heartbroken and felt really bad about it. Luckily my PI told me that he only got a grant on his fifth try and that made me feel a bit better. After that, 3 more grant/fellowship rejections followed (and a bunch of papers that got rejected). Every time I got a bit better in dealing with the disappointment. Now, I feel sad for a day, and then try to make my application better for the next time. I try to see the strong points that the reviewers point out as much as the weaknesses. Sometimes I let it sit for a couple more days and re-read the review comments.

However, what I still find really hard is anticipating disappointment. Right now, I’m about to hear whether I’m invited for an interview for my home country grant that will guarantee me a job in the home country. I would be ecstatic if I would get invited and heartbroken if I wouldn’t and I find it hard to just sit and wait until I get the email to tell me which it is.

So how do you deal with disappointment? By the way, heavy drinking is not an option when you’re pregnant and/or breastfeeding for most of the duration of your post-doc.

What’s in it for me?

My PI got me involved in a collaboration with people who want to do something that I know how to do (and my PI doesn’t really). So I’m helping them as much as I can. Not only do I give them advice, I also help them with practical work because that lab currently consists of only the PI and a technician who works hir ass off for the PI. The PI is pretty pushy and often only asks things at the last minute, so this collaboration has been a good exercise in trying to protect my personal boundaries (read: I’ve been annoyed to no end by all the last-minute requests). 

What I’m not really sure about in these kinds of situations is when you ask what’s in it for you? I asked my PI and he was like:” Yeah of course you’ll be a co-author on their paper.” But so far, we’re gathering preliminary data for a grant, and with the current size of this PI’s lab it might take a while before this turns into a paper.

So how does one go about this? Do you trust that this PI will remember that I helped hir when ze writes the paper years from now? Or do you just ask (or even email so that you have it in writing):”What’s in it for me?”

A post-doc by any other name...

Sometimes I see people on LinkedIn change their profession from Post-doc to Research Associate. That always makes me laugh a little and until recently led me to think that those people had been a post-doc for too long, and therefore just gave it a different name. But that is not true, as I have recently discovered that Research Associate is actually a thing. Because yours truly is becoming one, which not only allows me to change my profession on LinkedIn, but also allows me to receive a substantial increase in pay (which then causes me to lose the daycare fellowship that we have, so not much of a net increase, but still).

The reason I am becoming a Research Associate is because only then can I be a co-investigator (is that the correct term?) on my PIs next R01 renewal, for which I have a lot of ideas and preliminary data. I have also been involved in setting up a successful collaboration that has led to these preliminary data. The deal will be that if we get the grant and I leave, I will be able to take my chunk of this money (which is nice, because since I’m not a citizen I am not allowed to apply for a lot of US funding). 

So this is all really nice, but of course in the end I’m still a post-doc; doing experiments, panicking about writing papers and trying to find free cookies (that’s a pretty accurate job description, right?).