Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists , Ellen Daniell , Yale U. Press, New Haven, CT, 2006. $27.50 (268 pp.). ISBN 978-0-300-11323-5
Ellen Daniell's Every Other Thursday: Stories and Strategies from Successful Women Scientists is unusual—part autobiography, mostly self-help. It provides an overview of the author's 20 years of participation in a support group centered in the San Francisco Bay area. Daniell, who has worked in academics as an assistant professor of molecular biology at the University of California, Berkeley, and in the biotechnology industry, is now a writer and consultant. Although not originally designed this way, “Group,” which is how the members refer to themselves collectively, is currently composed of only women associated with education and the life sciences. Its members have made presentations about Group objectives and methods at scientific conferences. An appendix presents biographies of the members. Daniell's narrative offers many personal revelations. For example, readers may (or may not) be surprised to learn that the salary of Judith Klinman, who became the first female chair of the chemistry department at Berkeley in 2000, was for a time lower than that of many of her male faculty colleagues.
As a self-help book, Every Other Thursday has much more substance than most. The sound advice is based on the author's written records of two decades of discussions by this accomplished and perceptive group of women. The suggestions are densely pacscodeked and arranged in chapters by topic, such as “Off Balance and Out of Control: Managing Time and Establishing Equilibrium”; “Life Is a Limited Resource: Taking Care of Ourselves”; and “Boss, Mother, Friend, Role Model: Working with Students and Employees.”
Several pages of thoughtful consideration are offered in “Putting It Out There: Writing and Giving Talks.” One Group member describes giving a professional talk as “trying to be the leading lady in a play you wrote yourself” (page 158). These successful women advise their female colleagues to make their talks “about doing justice to the science, not about selling yourself” (page 159).
In the chapter “Nobody Taught Us This in School: Institutional Politics and Strategy,” the author suggests that women “discourage the tendency to assume a victim role” (page 162). In a discussion that encourages women scientists to advocate their own well-being, Daniell admonishes women scientists to “treat ourselves with compassion” (page 218). The definitions of problems and the advice offered struck me as valid overall, and I only regret the apparent omission by Group to consider scientific creativity and the creative process.
I found reading the book straight through to be overwhelming because of the breadth and depth of the discussions and the intensity of advice offered for professional careers and lives. However, from time to time I expect to find great value in consulting the book for specific issues. The problems, ideas, and insights in the book are most pertinent to women scientists, but there are certainly sound suggestions for all women who pursue professional careers in large institutions. Group's formation, discussed in chapter 16, “Pigs, Contracts, and Strokes: Group Process and History,” was inspired by the concepts of radical psychiatry. A certain amount of jargon is used throughout the book, which is finally defined in this chapter.
Overall, the book is Daniell's story of her career and the major, supportive role that Group has played in her life. Several chapters are devoted entirely to the author's personal experiences. It is easy to sympathize with Daniell's disappointment and anger at not receiving tenure as the first woman in the molecular biology department at Berkeley; however, it will be less easy for many of us to identify with her as she agonizes, some years later, over whether to retire from a scientific career at age 50. Nonetheless, that personal element helps to maintain readers' interest, and it provides part of the unique character of the book.
One of the author's stated objectives in writing Every Other Thursday is to encourage other professional women to form support groups. Although I am not certain how well Group's exceptional Californian experience can be replicated in other places or in other times, the main ideas certainly merit broader implementation. In 1998 the Camille and Henry Dreyfus Foundation Inc provided seed money to a coalition of women chemists to form COACh groups. The Committee On the Advancement of Women Chemists (see http://coach.uoregon.edu) is dedicated to discussing the problems women face in academia in the chemical sciences and to developing and implementing programs to alleviate those problems. It will be interesting to read a follow-up on COACh at the end of two decades to see how it has spoken to a new generation of women scientists facing equally difficult challenges.
