March 25, 2003
A: FROM MENTOR JUDY MOORE IN NM
I forwarded this to one of our biotech women in our labs. So this was her
reply:

It depends on what you define as a "top career". There are multiple
career tracks a person can choose between in bio tech: industry, academia
and government. There are also generally two different focus areas -
research and management.

Academia offers the greatest freedom in research, and you tend to more
easily gain recognition for the research you do because you are free to
publish. Until you get to the higher tiers in academia (after tenure),
however, generally the pay isn't competitive with industry or the
government labs. Running a lab in academia requires a mix of research and
management skills. A top career in academia is to be a full professor at
a well-respected university.

Industry pays the highest salaries, but offers the lowest degree of
flexibility in research. It's much harder to gain external
recognition for the research you do, because companies usually don't
publish their results. In industry, the top careers are not in research,
but rather in management. A top career would be to become an executive
(CEO, VP, CSO, etc.) of a large biotech company.

The national labs sit somewhere between industry and academia. You have
more research and publishing freedom than industry, without the teaching
requirements of academia. The national labs have two tracks - a technical
track and a management track. The top career on the technical track is
the Senior Scientist. The top career on the management track is to be an
executive (President, VP, etc.).

How difficult is it for a woman to achieve a top career in the field of Bio Technology?

There are many talented women in biotechnology today. It's much easier
for a woman to be successful now than even 10 years ago. However, there
are still not that many women represented at the highest ranks in bio
tech. I have not encountered a "glass ceiling" and I don't think there is
an "old boys network" trying to hold women back. The demands of being a
research scientist are pretty high - you can expect to work long hours and
lots of travel. Often these requirements conflict with the extra
time needed to start a family. I've seen many women self-select out of
the research rat-race to have children, and the job isn't set up to easily
allow women to work part-time or to stop working for a couple of years.
There *are* women who have succeeded at science while having families, so
it's not impossible, but it's a definite challenge.