キャリアニュース2019年10月17～22日

When the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) announces each year's winners of plum “high risk, high reward” (HRHR) awards, which go to about 100 scientists doing outside-the-box research, the paucity of female winners regularly raises eyebrows. Despite NIH's efforts to improve the picture, this year's winners, announced on 1 October, were no exception. Although women won three of the four types of HRHR awards in numbers that met or exceeded their representation in the applicant pool, that representation was meager: For all HRHR awards, 18% to 38% of applicants were women, although women have earned more than 50% of U.S. Ph.D.s in biological sciences since 2008. What's more, for the Early Independence Awards (EIAs)—which can boost women's careers at a crucial time by allowing new Ph.D.s to skip a postdoc and start an independent lab immediately—women constituted 38% of applicants, but only 25% of awardees. The EIA sample size is small: Among the 13 new awardees, three were women.

In Dr. Seuss's classic book Oh, the Places You'll Go! he warns us that sometimes in life we may “grind on for miles across weirdish wild space, headed, I fear, toward a most useless place. The Waiting Place.” Little did I know it, but after I emerged from the “weirdish wild space” of graduate school, The Waiting Place was exactly where I was headed. I had accepted a postdoc position to develop new skills while embarking on what I anticipated would be a quick, productive search for an industry job. Instead that search dragged on, filled with false hopes and disappointments. I often felt I was going nowhere. But now that I've passed the 1-year mark in my first position outside of academia, I can look back and say that I learned a valuable skill: the ability to wait actively. Here are three strategies I found most helpful. </br>![][1]</img> ILLUSTRATION: ROBERT NEUBECKER > “As a freshly minted Ph.D.…I wasn't sure how to pitch my skills to potential employers.” SEEK GUIDANCE. As a