PhD's Notes

Okay, since my Twitter gets banned, it’s time to write on this blog again.

This is a topic that is quite popular among scientists.

“Woman Empowerment”

I don’t think I am going to write about this topic until my colleague opens my eyes and makes me speak up.

As we know, in this world the number of women who hold Ph.D status in Science and Engineering is not as much as the man. According to the UIS data, there are less than 30% of world researchers are women (combine their degrees, not only Ph.D). Yes, it means the gap is so big. The gender data is unbalanced, and it opens a big chance for women to get harassment when they tried to give more contribution to the male world.

“うるさい！ （urusai）” is one Japanese word that has been used in Japanese to express a noisy feeling and wish the one to be told to keep silent. One of my colleague scold me with this word. In the same time, other colleague told like this to me

” I am sorry until today he did not recognize your work”.

It is just a utopia if a woman researcher gets the same salary with man counterpart, even speaking up will be hard because some man researchers have a bad habit such as looking down on the woman researcher. Even Marie Currie dont own her lab, she must do her research under his husband lab. It’s easier for men to get a tenure position compared with women. I know some researchers who got tenure positions after their PhD viva, and I see a lot of women have to keep searching for a position for them to get tenure positions. We still have a lot of homework to reduce this bias toward gender in the science and engineering world.

Why do women have to struggle this much to open their idea to the research society in science and engineering? Do our job only hold the screwdrivers? giving the spanners? do some small things, when men can touch any engineering devices because of the expectation that they can do that.

Let me know how many tenure woman professsor ( in engineering and science) in this world? Even my role model, a.k.a my mom has working very very very very hard to her on going professor title. When her coworkers already get professors title, she still keep her associate professor title.

how about me? to be professor? May I dare to dream about that?

Women have to work harder to be seen and to be trusted in their work, at the same time, male just can do and speak up with anything that they can, where this condition is happening not even in professor level.

Maybe there is the reason why nature create me and set my sex cromosome without y .

Maybe there is the reason why I am having a career outside my country.

Maybe this is my destiny to be the representative of woman in science and engineering.

Maybe I need to reply that “うるさい！ ” to “だまれ！!”